SCAPA FLOW

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27989, 8 June 1956, Page 11

SCAPA FLOW

British Base To Be Scrapped

(Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, June 7. Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands, a famed British naval base in two world wars, is to be closed as an unjustifiable expense, an Admiralty spokesman said in London last night. The spokesman said that only an oi] depot and the services necessary to maintain it would remain in this remote base north of the Scottish mainland.

The Admiralty could no longer foresee sufficient use for the installations at Scapa Flow, either in peace or war, to justify the expense of their retention. the spokesman said. Scapa Flow was the principal base of the British Grand Fleet in the First World War and of the Home Fleet in the Second World War. The surrendered German Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow in 1918, and most of it was scuttled there in June. 1919.

In October. 1939. a German U-boat penetrated the anti-submarine defences there and sank the British battleship Royal Oak.

Earl Attlee’s Career As Poet

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) (Rec 7.30 p.m.) LONDON, June 6. Forty years ago Earl Attlee wrote an ode to fried fish. He confessed this at a luncheon given him after he had received the Freedom of Aberdeen

“It was an old lapse of mine while I was an Army major at Gallipoli.” he said. The ode went like this:— Surely a lucky man whose eye may rove O'er Lemnos, Samothrace and Helles Strait, Who smells sweet thyme-scented breezes: nay How willingly 1 would all these exchange. To see the buses pass through Mile End Gate, And smell the fried fish shops down Limehouse way.