It’s hard to explain how odd it is to find out that you will never have the chance Continue reading
Tag Archives: Campbelltown
Campbeltown bids a 6 day last farewell to HMS Campbeltown
HMS Campbeltown is a Type 22 Frigate, built at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead, launched Continue reading
Invitation to Argyll
For Argyll has just published a series of articles to do with the powerful This Is Who We Are photographic exhibition, exploring life in places in Canada and Scotland linked by similar names.
The creators of the exhibition, Graeme Murdoch and Harry McGrath have now issued an invitation to all Argyll communities whose names are echoed in places in Canada – we have already mentioned a Rothesay, a Campbelltown (yes, two ls), a Lismore,, an Iona, a Calgary … and there are many others.
The invitation is to take your own photographs in and of your place – photographs which tell abut the life you lead. What happens in your place? Where does its heart beat? What are its special places? What are its important occasions? Who’s around?
Graeme and Harry want your own individual views – literally – of where you live and what it’s like to be there.
This project has the capacity to build living and productive links between Argyll places and, initially, places in Canada with whom they share a name. The project is intended to move on to other parts of the world where there are Scottish connections of all kinds. These guys will literally trail the presence of Scotland across the globe. The mutual advantages in this are endless and as much profound as practical.
Practically, the project will provide names of people to talk to and places to go and see for people travelling in both directions. Above all things, this stops anyone feeling a stranger in the other’s place..
More profoundly, it will develop a modern belonging – in both directions. We tend to think of people elsewhere belonging here – but they inhabit another Scotland – many other Scotlands – we can discover and belong to.
All it takes is to open communications – share information and images. So get clicking now while the idea’s hot and email your photographs to Graeme at: graeme@culturalconnectscotland.com
The photograph above is of Grame (centre front, kilt) and Harry (dark sweatshirt, behind Graeme) at a Lil’wat First Nation powwow at Mount Currie on their recent travels on this project. Our feature article on This Is Who We Are looks at the curious fact that the surname Wallace is one of the major Lil’wat names.
This Is Who We Are – photographs from the journeys to find out
For Argyll has published a feature article – This Is Who We Are – on the exhibition of that name, the most inspirational of the main Homecoming Scotland 2009 commissions. Its creators are Graeme Murdoch, a photographer and former art director for a series of national newspapers and Harry McGrath, an academic and Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (pictured left, with Harry on the left and Graeme on the right).
The exhibition brings together images from a selection of Scottish diaspora communities in Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia.
The journey described in the feature – from Vancouver to Calgary, Airdrie, Canmore, Banff, Craigellachie, Coldstream, Mont Currie and back to Vancouver – was one of several the two men made in putting this exhibition together.
What follows here is a series of photographs taken on these journeys by Graeme Murdoch and captioned by him. Together they catch something of the flavour of the rich variety of experiences the two men encountered as they tracked the seeds planted by the Scots in Canada.
THE ROAD EAST: after a long flight from Edinburgh we headed east from Vancouver. Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
CALGARY, ALBERTA: the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. The day after we hit town we appeared on CTV live noon news. ‘I had no idea that Calgary was named after a place in Scotland’, said Ian White, CTV anchor man. Our story was launched. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
AIRDRIE: the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. (Photo: Kori Sych)
BEAR CUB: we were eager to see bears, and did in British Columbia, but our friend Pam Doyle, the writer/photographer on the Canmore Leader sent us this picture of a bear cub making a dash for the woods. (Photo by Pam Doyle)
IONA: East Bay, near Iona. This was the first major Scottish Settlement on Cape Breton Island (Photo by Derek Campbell)
CAPE BRETON CHURCH: snowy kirkyard in Inverness County, Cape Breton. (Photo: Derek Campbell)
SIGNS: Scotland is everywhere in Canada. This is the north shore road in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. One name not on the sign is Knoydart which is a small hamlet near Lismore. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
LISMORE, NOVA SCOTIA: The sun lit church cemetery of ST Mary’s RC church. Two lines from a poem on a panel by the church state:
“A narrow creed drove Scotmen o’er the sea,
Their hearts were Mary’s and they would be free.”
by Rev. A. A. MacKinnon
Lismore was once called Bailey’s Brook after John Baillie, a disbanded soldier from the 82nd Regiment, who settled at the mouth of the brook. It is a settlement of Highland Catholics beginning in 1788. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
PICTOU: It is 5.30am and I wake to the first clear sky since we arrived in Nova Scotia. This is the graveyard on the point outside town where many of the descendants of the settlers who arrived on the Hector in 1773 are buried. The names on the headstones are testimony to Pictou’s motto: “The Birthplace of New Scotland”. There are Grants, Frasers, MacDonalds, Mackintoshes laid to rest here. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
Copy right on all the photographs above resides with the named photogrtaphers and are reproduced here with permission.
This Is Who We Are
We’re about to describe a journey so start seeing it in your head. The first step is a drive east to Calgary, then north to Airdrie, back south to Calgary, then north west to Banff and south west through Craigellachie to Coldstream.
Much of this is familiar but something’s not quite right. If you drove east to Calgary you’d be starting in the Atlantic. If you went north from Calgary looking for Airdrie you’d be hard put to find it – and if you struck north west from Calgary to Banff you’d land on Barra first.
We’re not in Scotland, of course. We’re in Canada, travelling with two inventive and creative Scots. One is photographer and former national newspaper art director, Graeme Murdoch, who has worked with some of the world’s leading photographers and ‘done time at The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday’. His colleague is academic, Harry McGrath, who has lived in Canada for 25 years and has been Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University – a name known to every piper in the world and whose pipe band is the current Grade 1 World Champions.
Graeme and Harry are here in pursuit of the most exciting and productive of the inspirations to be stimulated by the Homecoming Scotland 2009 initiative. They’re exploring the other Scotland, out west – and finding out who we are, whichever of the Scotlands we live in just now.
The route travelled on the journey above, one of many on this odyssey, says everything about what the two men are doing. They are taking a set of what we receive as familiar places, then throwing them into an entirely different relationship to each other and to us – and the result is disturbing and oddly exciting. They then reveal ‘the other’, something we know and do not know at the same time.
All of this starts to put a picture together, to show us who we are. As Graeme says, you don’t have to be a native Scot to be of Scotland. An article in Hidden Europe said of Argyll, ‘Argyll is a state of mind’. This is as equally true of Scotland as it is of any place that matters to anyone.
The top photograph is of the Bay at the original Calgary in the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull. (Photo:Scottish Viewpoint) The lower photograph is of Calgary, Alberta - the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
One place and another
Look at what happens if you superimpose the two maps.
Vancouver looks east to Canada’s Calgary and further east to the first Calgary on the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull – looking chronologically from the newer development to its source. It’s a reverse experience of standing at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, looking up the Champs Elysees through the Arc de Triomph and out to La Defense where the modern Grande Arche – the imperative of the future, dominates the horizon.
And talking of reversals, this is a world where Knoydart is a hamlet near Lismore.
Scotland’s first Airdrie can put itself in the position of its newer namesake (the photograph above shows the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. Photo: Kori Sych ) and feel the pull of the mighty Calgary to its south.
All of this drives you to interrogate your orientation and to explore the impact of different relationships. There’s nothing so liberating as ‘What if…’.
Harry and Graeme put their journey plans together and then took off. Graeme describes them both as ‘media tarts’ so when they hit each place on their route, they make for the TV and radio stations and the local papers. It doesn’t take long for the old arterial connections they are after to start running free again.
On one occasion they were on CTV’s noon news bulletin in Calgary after what Graeme describes as: ‘… a 14 hour flight from Edinburgh via Amsterdam to Vancouver, then a 480 mile drive across the Rockies and looking like we’d been up all night, which was not far from the truth’. During the five minute interview, Ian White the anchorman, admitted he hadn’t known that Canada’s great oil and gas metropolis was named after a tiny settlement on the west coast of Mull. He does now – and so do his viewers.
This Is Who We Are
Graeme Murdoch says of the photo below: Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
In each community in their tours of Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia – the two initiate a photography project among the local people. What they produce will eventually link back to the places in Scotland with the same names and is gradually creating a digital archive of images of the Scottish diaspora.
Graeme and Harry are shaping an exhibition from all of this. It will never be finished because there are so many Scotlands across the world to be connected with each other. But it already has a strong identity. This Is Who We Are is the title of their initial exhibition. It was launched by then Environment now Culture Minister, Michael Russell, at Dumfries on Burns Night and will complete its current cycle in an exhibition at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood on St Andrews Day.
There can be no stronger statement about the perceived value of this work than that it has opened and will close Homecoming Scotland 2009. It is and will be the gatekeeper, the junction, the exchange of experiences, the melting pot, the new Scottish alchemy. It makes it possible for Scots everywhere to see backwards and forwards in a single gaze.
What it has already done is extraordinary. These two men have flown, driven and walked the line between Scotlands. They have been a physical and present link between them. You could legitimately use the word ‘ambassadorial’ but that word summons something more self important than life enhancing. This work articulates the incoherent heart of Homecoming Scotland, giving it meaning, dignity – freeing it to soar.
Discoveries
The men have entered the maelstrom of the diaspora and emerged clutching treasures from the deep past.
One of these was the discovery that many of the Lil’wat First Nation community in Mount Currie, near Whistler – host to the 2010 Winter Olympics – carry the surname Wallace. One of the Lil’wat Wallaces, now a friend, Stan Wallace, told how he thought they had come to have the name.
He believes that Government Indian agents went through the valley to register native people and ‘either couldn’t spell our Indian names or didn’t want to and so assigned us random names’. It seems likely that one of these agents was a Scot who used the iconic Wallace name as one of the ‘random’ names to be chosen.
Harry points out: ‘Renaming First Nation people was common practice and part of a form of cultural denigration that included banning of cultural practices like potlach and longhouses and eventually the taking away of children and placing them in residential schools far from their community. The latter happened to Stan who was taken as a child by the Oblate Fathers and put in residential school three hundred miles away near Prince George’.
Stan’s wife, Shawn Wallace who is the main continuing contact for Harry and Graeme, has her own more direct Scottish connection. Her Great Great Grandfather came from Orkney and was called Bruce – so in her life she has been both Bruce and Wallace.
Harry also says that the youth soccer team from Mount Currie has been to Scotland to play, brought here by Jim Easton who was a professional with Hibs in the 1960s and now lives in Vancouver. The most recent connection with Mount Currie is the This Is Who We Are project.
The photograph above shows Frank Wallace, a Lil’wat traditional dancer (Photo by ShawnWallace, wife of Stan Wallce whose theory about the origins of the Wallace name in the Lil’wat First Nation is above.)
Art for life’s sake
This article reflects only a fragment of the interconnections Graeme (on the right in this photograph) and Harry (on the left) have unearthed and reinvigorated and it makes you impatient and hungry for more.
The exhibition in not the sort of art that any Duke of Sutherland will ever sell to the nation for £50million for passive viewing.
This is an art that we are a part of making, that encompasses us, that shows us to ourselves in new ways, that opens doors to possibilities of all kinds. It is a fluid and living art, responsive to its circumstances, never complete. It deals in the territory between the moment and the infinite. It is not a fixed and unchanging art that draws its audiences to its own certainties.
As he opened the exhibition at its launch, Culture Minister Michael Russell said: ‘This exhibition brings us closer to the real idea of homecoming: it presents the link that is made by people who are like us but who have faced different challenges. It is an exhibition that is not only visually exciting but also one that stirs emotions and thoughts’.
Jim Mather, Enterprise, Energy and Tourism Minister and Argyll’s MSP, said of the project: ‘This is a truly magical project that uses the power of photography to connect and lift the spirits of people in Scotland and Canada. For many of us on this side of the Atlantic we now have the evidence that not just hearts are Highland and Scottish but so too is the warmth of many modern photographed Canadians. Equally, these photographs confirm the great affinity between our peoples whether there are genetic links or not. The photos also show we share values and attitudes and my wish is that long may they continue to bind us together’.
It would be a privilege for Argyll to have the opportunity to be a part of this most galvanic of the Homecoming Scotland events and to engage in this conversation between Scotlands. It has to be possible and it has to be made possible.
The photograph above shows Harry McGrath on the left and Graeme Murdoch on the right.
Footnotes:
See and read the companion story to this feature under Homecoming Argyll in the top menu of this site – This Is Who We Are: photographs from the journeys to find out - a piece of photo-journalism by Graeme Murdoch on the his and Harry McGrath’s journeys and experiences across Canada, treading in the footsteps of those whose forefathers footsteps had once imprinted on the hills and glens of Scotland.
See and read too the articles below, from the media in the UK, Canada and Scotland, describing and reflecting on This Is Who We Are. There is little duplication. Each of these adds to what you see and discover about this adventure in Scottish conversations.
- Scots Canadians tell mither country who they are (Times Online)
- Photo project unites Scotland with Canada (Canmore Leader)
- The Scots in Canada (Video news onThis Is Who We Are: The Herald on Sunday)
- Scots connect the dots via Photos (Canada.com)
- Photo project connects with Scotland (The Advocate – Nova Scotia)
Copyright on all photographs above resides with the named photographer and are reprodced here with permission.
So why did Argyll refuse the This Is Who We Are exhibition?
There is another side to ‘who we are’: unmotivated, uninventive, unenthused, unambitious, perhaps demoralised. This negative tendency just booted into touch a proposal that the This Is Who We Are exhibition might come here. (Sorry for the metaphor but it has been a big rugby weekend.)
Argyll was offered this exhibition and the brief reply received from Argyll and Bute Council’s arts department at Eaglesham House in Rothesay was simply that there are no exhibition spaces in Argyll and Bute.
When this was brought to For Argyll’s attention yesterday (28th February and not, we would want to make clear, by the curators themselves whom we had not known before) we were infuriated, despairing and challenged in equal part.
It is infuriating to have evidence that indicates a lack of imagination, red corpuscles and simple get-up-and-go in the only formal point of access to the arts in Argyll. Who could not be enlivened by the generative excitement of this work? Who would not bend walls to make it happen here?
It is despairing to wonder how many other exciting experiences have been offered to Argyll over God knows how many years and have been similarly stifled at birth. This is unlikely to have been the only such incident.
Argyll cannot afford to be seen by the creative industries as an inactive sump. Along with renewable energy, outdoor activity resources and wildlife access, cultural energy will breed a major part of the social and economic development Argyll badly needs.
Yes, it may be that good people are in the wrong jobs. It may be that the appointing criteria are wrong – that the added value that specific ‘charged’ individuals can bring to a job is not prioritised. It may also be that the jobs are wrong, that they don’t offer room for creative and policy input. It may be all of these things. Neither Argyll nor Scotland will grow if we do not engage with these issues and take responsibility for change.
And we can do this
Calgary is a major link between Canada and Argyll. So is Campbeltown. So is Rothesay. So is Lismore . So is Iona. And there are others. This work speaks to and for Argyll. It has to be seen here.
For Argyll was immediately challenged by the immediate nonsense of the alleged lack of any suitable spaces for this exhibition in Argyll. You have only to read the links to media responses to the exhibition in the UK, Canada and Scotland – given here below and supplied to Argyll and Bute Council arts department – to understand the flexible and informal nature of the work. Its heart is conversational and interactive. It does not need Tate Modern to materialise in Mid Argyll.
The exhibition, as it is formed – and it can be reformed – consists of 4 wall-hung panels measuring 1.6 metres wide and two free-standing displays which are 2.6 metres wide by 2 metres high. These use both sides. There is also an iMovie video. Graeme and Harry have made it clear that they will also do a talk and slideshow in venues too small even for such a physically undemanding show.
So the Corran Halls in Oban could not host such an exhibition? And An Tobar on Tobermory, next door to Calgary, is incapable of this as well, even though exhibitions are part of its normal programme? Aqualibrium in Campeltown has no exhibition space and would have no interest in this opportunity? We’ve phoned Aqualibrium and the answer is a positive yes on both counts. What about the magnificent Craignish Hall or the almost mystical Crear? What about Islay’s Ionad Chaluim Chille Ile – and the new Port Mor Centre? And what about the Here We Are centre at Cairndow – a perfect foil to ‘This is who we are’?
What’s not possible?
- Scots Canadians tell mither country who they are (Times Online)
- Photo project unites Scotland with Canada (Canmore Leader)
- The Scots in Canada (Video news onThis Is Who We Are: The Herald on Sunday)
The photographs above are, top, of the This Is Who We Are exhibition at Mid Steeple, Dumfries; and of a road sign in Nova Scotia. Graeme says of this one: ‘Scotland is everywhere in Canada. This is the north shore road in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. One name not on the sign is Knoydart which is a small hamlet near Lismore. (Both photos: Graeme Murdoch)
HMS Campbeltown, her illustrious predecessor and a Homecoming Argyll link to Campbelltown Pennsylvania
The current HMS Campbeltown is the second of that name in the Royal Navy. Today’s ship (pictured) is a Royal Navy frigate – F86 -a Type 22 built by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. She was one of the third batch of Type 22s, significantly bigger than their predecessors and incorporating the more advanced weaponry seen as necessary from the sharp lessons learned in the Falklands War.
Between 2007 and 2008, HMS Campbeltown was in the Persian Gulf, operating in support of Operation Telic – a standing name for all British operations from the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and afterwards, including the ongoing conflict in that theatre of war. In September 2008 she went in for a refit.
Her ship’s bell is the key to two matters of historical interest. One is a heroic World War II naval raid. The other is one of Scotland’s many rich cultural links from the diaspora and celebrated during our Homecoming Argyll series.
The first HMS Campbeltown was a destroyer given to the Royal Navy by the US Navy as part of the 1940 ‘lend lease’ Destroyers for Bases Agreement (and it’s worth following this link and reading the details of the agreement). Prior to her handing over the the Royal navy under this agreement, Campbeltown had been the USS Buchanan (pictured in Panama in 1936).
This earlier HMS Campbeltown is famous for her role in the St. Nazaire Raid and, since at the time of that raid in 1942, she was described as ‘obsolete’, it would suggest that the British bases were a pretty good exchange for the elderly destroyers the Americans handed over when the UK was on her knees. The Destroyers for Bases arrangement was agreed in September 2, 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies over England.
The successful British seaborne raid on the heavily defended dock at St Nazaire in German-occupied France in World War II – also known as Operation Chariot – has been called ‘the greatest raid of all’.
This operation was carried out by commandos from Royal Navy and Army units working under Louis Mountbatten‘s Combined Operations. This itself is an additional link to Argyll – host to the first British military experiments in getting the UK’s various armed services – and sometimes involving units and battalions from allied forces - to work together under the banner of Combined Operations. Some of this is outlined in an earlier For Argyll article and we will be returning to this interesting historical subject.
St. Nazaire was a target because its dry dock allowed any large German warship to come in for repairs safely on the Atlantic coast rather than have to make for home waters. The British were concerned about the destructive capacity as a surface raider of the Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck. The need to restrict Tirpitz’s potential operations was the key driver of the St Nazaire raid.
As things fell out, Tirpitz never opened fire on a British or allied ship but her presence as a potential threat tied up a significant amount of resources and time in keeping an eye on her in her various hiding places. Latterly she took refuge in the Norwegian fjords and suffered a series of attempts to sink her. (Tirpitz is pictured here, camouflaged, in Fættenfjord.)
While some damage was done to her in these attempts, none managed to sink her until she was bombed by RAF Lancaster bombers and capsized on 12 November 1944. She sank to the west of Tromsø, in the bay of Håkøybotn, within minutes of this attack. 1,000 of her crew of 1,700 died.
The raid on the dock at St Nazaire, triggered by British fear of the Tirpitz, was designed to take the advantage of surprise. It included sixteen shallow-draft motor launches, a Motor Gun Boat to direct the elderly flotilla leader, HMS Campbeltown, to her target and a Motor Torpedo Boat to embark surviving commandos for the return journey. Campbeltown was packed with explosives and cosmetically altered to look, only at a cursory glance, like a German Mowe class destroyer. She was under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Stephen Halden (Sam) Beattie with a reduced crew 0f 75.
The flotilla timed its arrival at St Nazaire to run under cover of darkness and took a route to the targeted Normandie Dock by crossing shallows, risking grounding but avoiding the heaviest gun emplacements. Legitimately, under the terms of such engagements, Campbeltown flew the flag of the Kriegsmarine and used a German morse call sign.
These moves delayed serious discovery for a critical 12 minutes, confusing the German defences who fired sporadically before opening fire in earnest. At that point Campbeltown lowered the Kriegsmarine fag and hoisted the White Ensign.
She rammed the southern caisson at the dock at 01.34 on 28th March 1942 and at a speed of 20 knots. She thrust deep into the caisson and crumpled forty feet of her hull under the impact.
Her explosives were timed to go off at 09.00 but the pencil detonators used were affected by temperature so she did not in fact explode until 10.35, after a German search party had failed to detect the devices. When Campbeltown went up, the explosion destroyed the caisson and killed around 250 German soldiers and civilians in the vicinity.
Her sacrifice successfully put a stop to the use of the dock which did not return to service until 1947.
Commandos landed on the dock sides, destroying other structures before trying to fight their way out. Many of the shallow motor launches were sunk with a casualty rate often as high as 80%, survivors being caught in the burning fuel that spread across the water. This was a bloody and confused engagement.
The attrition rate was very high, costing the lives of 168 sailors and commandos from the original complement of 622 and leading to the award of no fewer than 5 Victoria Crosses.
The St Nazaire Association was formed by those who survived. They erected a memorial to their lost comrades on Fish Strand Quay at Falmouth which was moved to the Prince of Wales Quay and unveiled in its new position by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall on 11th July 2008.
There is also a memorial at St Nazaire itself, with the names of those who lost their lives in the raid and beside a 12 pounder gun taken from HMS Campbeltown. These are situated at the Place du Commando at the eastern end of Boulevard President Wilson.
The raid on St Nazaire has been the subect of films, documentaries and even, in 2005, of a computer game. In 2007 Jeremy Clarkson (now busy with apologies for insulting Gordon Brown) wrote and presented a one-hour TV-documentary on Operation Chariot called Jeremy Clarkson: The Greatest Raid of All Time.
Today’s HMS Campbeltown carries the Ship’s Bell from her predecessor whose heroism was at the centre of this raid. It has been loaned from Campbelltown, Pennsylvania to the current ship for the duration of her Royal Navy service. The bell was given to the town of Campbelltown, Pennsylvania, as a gesture of appreciation for America’s lend-lease programme. The town lent it to the current HMS Campbeltown upon her commissioning in 1989.
Clicking on this link to Campbelltown Pennsylvania and the different link above will reveal the sort of cultural links For Argyll is interested in recovering and celebrating during Homecoming Scotland 2009. As part opf For Argyll’s Hoemcoming Argyll initiative, we have now opened an Argyll Worldwide category in our Links directory and started it with Campbelltown Pennsylvania.
The photographs accompanying ing this article are all reproduced under the Creative Commons licence.
- At the top is the Type 22 destroyer, HMS Campbeltown, berthed in Campbeltown Lochnd photographed by Malcolm MacFadyen.
- Next is USS Buchanan pictures at Panama in 1936 bdeore she was handed to Britain as part of the 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement
- Then there is the German battleship Tirpitz camouflaged in the Fættenfjord, part of the Åsenfjord, Norway, during World War II.
- Finally there is the image of the Victoria Cross, here with ribbon and bar. Five were awarded to personnel engaged on this operation, some posthumously.