Mastodawn

Tenuously Jacobite: the thread about the Naval Reserves in Leith and Granton

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

Here is a photo of HMS Killiecrankie alongside at Leith docks in 1963. She was the training tender for the Leith & Edinburgh Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) station at HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/126268375@N08/14803466805/

The Killiecrankie was built in 1952 as the Ton-class minesweeper Bickington, over 100 such ships were built in the 1950s in response to Cold War paranoia that the Soviets would mine inshore waters. They were all given names ending in –ton, but in the event far too many were produced and so there was a surplus. These were given different roles and were renamed. Bickington for instance was commissioned as HMS Curzon as the tender to the Suffolk RNR. When she moved to the Firth of Forth again she took up a new name. She served this station from 1962 – 1676, before renaming to her originally intended HMS Bickington and being transferred to the Fishery Protection Squadron

HMS Claverhouse was a shore base and it is Royal Navy practice to name shore bases as if they were ships. But how did this particular name with its strong connotations in Scottish history become associated with Edinburgh and Leith, which it otherwise has a brief connection with? (And if you don’t know the connotations, all will become apparent in a few paragraphs).

HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square. Built as the Granton Hotel in 1838 to serve the passenger steamers leaving from that pier. CC-BY-SA Kim Traynor

The first Claverhouse was a war-surplus coastal monitor; a sort of small, slow, relatively unseaworthy ship for carrying around a few big guns to shoot at things ashore with. She was originally called the M23 and in 1922 had been sent to Dundee as RNVR (Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve) drill ship and renamed Claverhouse . I suppose someone had a sense of humour to name her after John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. This man was variously Bonnie Dundee to his supporters or Bluidy Clavers to his opponents, given the divisive (and ultimately fatal for himself) part he played in leading the Jacobite uprising of 1689.

The RNVR was distinct from the RNR; the latter organisation was a reserve force of professional civilian seamen, the former were civilian volunteers from non-seafaring occupations.

The officers and men of HMS Claverhouse in 1924 at Dundee. The ship on the right HMS Claverhouse herself. Picture from THELMA

The Claverhouse took her ships crest and motto directly from the Viscount Dundee, a phoenix rising out of the flames and “Gang Forrit” (which either is literally to “go for it”, or a euphemism for to take communion).

Ship’s crest of HMS “Claverhouse” as an RNR establishment

With war clouds on the horizon in the 1930s and a need to rapidly train up volunteers and reserves to man a wartime navy, HMS Claverhouse was shifted to a permanent shore base on Granton Square, in the requisitioned Granton Hotel. The new HMS Claverhouse took on the crest and motto of the ship from Dundee, which it also inherited as a drill vessel. At Granton merchant seamen were given training in defensive techniques (i.e. how to fire guns!) and the station was also used as an HQ for the local coastal defence forces. When war ended, Claverhouse was not returned to civilian life but was kept on as the HQ for the newly formed Forth Division of the RNVR. Again, the motto and the crest was that inherited from Viscount Dundee. Tay Division of the RNVR was based on the old wooden frigate HMS Unicorn in Dundee, so it took as a crest a white unicorn.

Crest of Forth Division of the RNVR

The old monitor was still going and stayed on at Granton as the Claverhouse drill ship until 1958 when she was sent for scrap. But given the post-war naval reserves had a primary focus with inshore minesweeping, she was joined in 1948 by a small war-surplus motor minesweeper called MMS.1089.

The first post-war Killiecrankie. The only picture I can find is this one from an ebay listing.

MMS.1089 took the name HMS Forth, but was soon renamed Killecrankie. Again someone had a sense of humour as, if you don’t already know, it was at the Battle of Killecrankie in 1689 where Viscount Dundee met a very pyrrhic end when a musket ball went through him in the moment of victory; finishing both him and ultimately the Jacobite rising.

A romanticised and view of the Highland charge at the Battle of Killecrankie

The little Killiecrankie was too small and obsolete for the realities of the Cold War so she was sold in 1957 and replaced with the newer and bigger HMS Bickington/ Curzon, which inherited her name. This ship carried a generic ship’s crest that had been assigned to all of her type. In 1976 Killiecrankie was returned to being plain old Bickington and was replaced by her sister Kedleston, but the latter kept her own name.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/153873640@N02/41105299245/

In 1986, Kedleston was in turn replaced by a new River-class minesweeper as the Forth RNR training ship, somewhat confusingly their new vessel was called HMS Spey. She lasted at Leith until 1993 when a defence review withdrew the entire RNR fleet and moved it to other purposes. Spey spent here next 4 years in Northern Ireland before being sold to Brazil.

HMS Orwell, sister ship to Spey. CC-BY-SA 3.0 BlackKnight2010

As part of the 1993 economy measures, in 1994 the Forth Division of HMS Claverhouse and the Tay Division of HMS Camperdown were merged as HMS Scotia and relocated to Rosyth. Another volunteer unit at Granton, the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service (RNXS), was also disbanded at this time. The RNXS was a uniformed, non-combatant volunteer service whose role was to assist in the operations of ports and anchorages in times of conflict.

RNXS personnel passing out of HMS Claverhouse at Granton Square or near their disbandment in 1994.

Rosyth as it turned out wasn’t that smart an economy measure; although it looked good on paper, shifting your volunteer base away from the centre of population it draws from doesn’t help with recruitment. The RNR therefore re-established separate Forth and Tay divisions in 2000. The new Forth Division only lasted until 2004 before being wound down as yet another economy measure. The old HMS Claverhouse on Granton Square is now the Claverhouse Training Centre for various cadets and other reserves units.

So anyway, that’s the long version of how some rather geographically and historically unusual (you might even say inappropriate) names came to be used for naval establishments in Edinburgh and Leith.

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