The loss of the Hampshire - On this day in Scottish Military History - 1916

Ninety five years ago today the most famous soldier in the British Empire drowned when the ship carrying him on a mission to Russia sunk off Marwick Head, Orkney.

HMS 'Hampshire' was struggling in a gale not unlike the ones we've seen recently in Scotland when she hit a mine and foundered within a matter of minutes. The party for Russia and 643 sailors perished. Hampshire's destroyer escorts had turned for home in the force nine gale earlier so there was no-one nearby to help. The local lifeboat crew who knew the ship had gone down were ordered by the Royal Navy not to help. Civilians on shore were ordered by soldiers not to go near the wreck of the ship to help either.

The Hampshire, her crew and her guests were left to their fate. The fact she was heading to Russia and had Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum on board has led to wild speculation and conspiracy theories.

The man who encouraged young men to join up in 1914 had been enoying the hospitality of Jellicoe, the recent victor of Jutland, at Scapa Flow, just hours before his death. His sudden loss stunned the nation. On 13th June 1916 a memorial service was held in St Paul's in London for Kitchener and all the others who went down with the 'Hampshire'

The people of Orkney erected a memorial to the great man near to the spot he died on duty. You can see photographs of the memorial tower on Marwick Head on the Scottish War Memorials Project

The Victors of Jutland return to base - On this day in Scottish Military History - 1916

It may not have been clear to them at the time but the Royal Navy ships which limped back to their home ports in Scotland on this day ninety five years ago had just won the greatest naval battle of the First World War. The Germans may have inflicted more damage at Jutland but they were the ones who ran away. The Royal Navy ruled the waves once again.

It had been a terrible day for the Royal Navy. They had lost fourteen ships and thousands of men were killed and wounded. When they returned to port the injured men were taken to naval hospitals and the dead were buried.

The Battlecruiser squadrons from Rosyth shipped their casualties to the pier at Port Edgar in South Queensferry and then were taken the short distance to Butlaw Naval Hospital (The Queen Mary and Princess Christian Emergency Naval Hospital). The dead were buried in South Queensferry's Dalmeny and South Queensferry Cemetery.

Others lost in the battle were buried at Cromarty Cemetery on the Black Isle and Lyness Naval Cemetery at Hoy in Orkney.

Two of the ships erected crosses over the mass graves of the sailors who had died. HMS Barham and HMS Malaya at Hoy.

The last Jacobite town falls - On this day in Scottish Military History - 1746

On 15th April 1746 the Jacobite forces in the Far North under the Earl of Cromartie were routed at Golspie. On 16th April The Duke of Cumberland decisively beat the Jacobites on Drumossie Moor at the Battle of Culloden. On 18th April the Highland Army disbanded at Ruthven Barracks and Fort Augustus, and Bonnie Prince Charlie went on the run.

It was all over for the Jacobites in the British Isles. Except for one isolated spot. In Kirkwall in Orkney the Jacobites were still in control.

The British Government and Royal Navy were busy in late April and early May stamping out the Jacobites on the mainland but by late May it was time to remove them from Orkney.

On this day two hundred and sixty five years ago, and six weeks after Culloden, the last Jacobite occupied territory was retaken. A party of Royal Marines under local man Benjamin Moodie of Melsetter was landed by Royal Navy ships and without much of a fight retook the islands in the name of King George.

Rule Britannia.

Last serviceman to witness Scapa Flow scuttle passes away

The last serviceman to witness the surrender of the German Grand Fleet in the Firth of Forth in 1918 and then its scuttling at Scapa Flow in Orkney in 1919, passed away in Australia yesterday at the age of 110.

British-born Claude Choules had joined the Royal Navy at the age of 15, lying about his age, and saw action in the North Sea on the Rosyth based HMS ‘Revenge’. Now nearly 93 years after the guns fell silent, the final combat veteran of the First World War has passed away.

As historians we should perhaps be used to events slipping from living memory, but the First World War carries such a large footprint, not only in the subject we devote time to, but in our everyday lives, that the passing of the final veteran should feel somehow different and deserves to be marked in some way.

As the oft-repeated words say: We Will Remember Them

John Mackenzie, Count of Cromarty - Who’s Who in Scottish Military History.

Today’s Who’s Who is about one of several Scots who fought for the Jacobites during the ’45 Rebellion and ended their military career in the British Army.

John Mackenzie, Lord MacLeod was the eldest son of the 3rd Earl of Cromartie. He was born in the family seat of Castle Leod near Strathpeffer in 1727. At the age of four he was first styled Lord Macleod and that was how he was best known for the rest of his life.

For the next fourteen years he had an uneventful life; then in 1745 his life changed forever. In December 1745 his father came out for the Jacobite cause and raised a Clan Regiment for Prince Charles’s army.

By the time they mustered the Jacobites had turned back at Derby and were now marching north. Cromartie and his son took their men south to meet and join the army.

Cromartie’s regiment joined the Jacobite host outside Stirling and it was near there at the Battle of Falkirk where Lord Macleod fought in his first battle. After the Jacobite’s reached Inverness Cromartie and his men were included in the Duke of Perth’s force which routed Loudon from Sutherland March 1746. Cromartie moved into Dunrobin Castle and sent his son further north in his first independent command.

He was only eighteen but Lord Macleod was given 300 men to go to Caithness and Orkney to find Jacobite recruits and plunder Hanoverian sympathisers’ lands for supplies and arms.

After three weeks without much success he returned to Dunrobin and was captured there on the day before the battle of Culloden by Highlanders loyal to the government.

He was taken to London with other Jacobite officers to be tried before the Commissioners. He pleaded guilty to high treason, but his youth and the limited part he played in the Rebellion may have counted in his favour. He was spared, death or slavery and pardoned. A condition of his pardon was the forfeiture of his title and he was sent into exile, but at least by 1748 he was alive and free.

He ended up under the wing of one of many Scots serving in European armies. Field Marshal James Keith. In 1750 Keith arranged MacLeod’s commission into the Swedish Army through the wife of the Swedish King – who also happened to be the sister of the Prussian King who was a friend of Keith.

Pomerania is in North Germany and Poland, opposite Sweden, and in the 1750s part of it was Swedish territory. Sweden coveted the parts of Pomerania they had ceded to Prussia in 1720 and the spread of the Seven Years War across Europe gave Sweden an excuse to attack Prussia in 1757. For the next five years Sweden and Prussia were at war over Pomerania and Macleod was involved in the fighting.

In 1762 Sweden ended the war after it had recovered no territory for the cost of 40,000 lives and vast sums of money it couldn’t afford to spend. Improbably Macleod then joined the army of his former enemy, Prussia, and fought alongside them against Russia.

Prussia and Russia ended their war in 1763 and Macleod returned to Swedish service. For the next few years he gave loyal service to Sweden; becoming an ADC to King Adolf Frederick and a earning a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. Amongst his honours he was given the Order of the Sword of Sweden and was made a Swedish count. The title he took was Count of Cromarty.

In 1777 he returned to Scotland. The War against the American States was draining the resources of the army and at the same time trouble was brewing in India. New regiments were needed for both theatres of war. Many former Jacobites or their families saw this as a way to help pave the way for the restoration of their lands and titles if they raised or served as soldiers in the British Army. In all eleven regular battalions were raised in Scotland in 1777 and 1778.

Macleod set to work immediately. In the 1770s there was no set recruiting areas in Scotland and any new regiment could send out recruiting parties across the country. The reputation of Lord MacLeod preceded him and he had no difficulty finding recruits. 840 men from the Highlands and 236 from the Lowlands. He had so much success at recruiting that a second battalion of the 73rd was authorised and that started recruiting as well shortly after the first had reached its establishment. The 2nd Bn 73rd was commanded by the Honourable George Mackenzie, Lord Macleod’s brother.

In late 1777 the 1/73rd (Highland) Regiment of Foot (MacLeod's Highlanders) first mustered at Elgin under their colonel, John Mackenzie, Lord Macleod. A year later George II recognised Macleod’s Swedish title and the Count of Cromarty led his regiment to embark for India a month later in January 1779. (In the peerage a count and an earl are the same rank so in effect, though not in name and lands, he was the fourth Earl of Cromartie).

The regiment stopped off in West Africa for a short time and didn’t arrive in India until a year after it had left the UK. It landed in Madras in January 1780.

In September 1780 several companies were despatched to join a British force under the Scot Major General Sir Hector Munro, which was fighting the Indian army of Hyder Ali. The Companies were soon lost in an action against the Mysore Army at the Battle of Pollilur and the captured troops imprisoned at Seringapatam. They included a young officer called David Baird who would later lead a British force back to Seringapatam nearly twenty years later to take revenge on his former captors.

By this time McLeod had been promoted to Major General. He soon made it clear to Munro he was unhappy with the way his detached troops from the 73rd had been used. They were the same rank and about the same age but Munro had been in the British Army for many years and had served in India for most of that time and there may have been a clash of personalities.

By this time Macleod was over fifty and after many years service in Scandinavia he may not have taken to the tropical heat of Southern India. Whatever the reasons: age, temperature or arguments with his superiors; the old soldier left his regiment to return home before he had a chance to lead them into action.

He retired from army life on half pay and in 1782 he was promoted to Major General. In the mean time he decided on a political path and entered parliament as the MP for Ross-shire.

A final act of rehabilitation took place in 1784 when he purchased his family estate for £19,000 on the back of an Act of Parliament. The Count of Cromarty gave up his constituency and became a laird (His replacement at Westminster would later raise the 78th Highlanders).

He moved into a home at Tarbet on the Black Isle and stayed there for the next five years, spending his time rebuilding and improving his estate.

He was in Edinburgh in 1789 when he died; and probably fitting for a man who was in exile for so many years, he was buried in the kirkyard in the Canongate rather than his family lands in Ross-shire.

Macleod had returned from India in 1780 but remained the Colonel of his regiment until his death. Before he died he saw his regiment survive a reduction of the army and its renumbering as the 71st (Highland) Regiment of Foot (MacLeod's Highlanders). As the 71st it would later achieve more fame as the Highland Light Infantry.

The Jacobites Capture Kirkwall - On this day in Scottish Military History – 1746

On the same day Lord Reay and the captured Jacobite gold took shelter in Stromness in Orkney, a small detachment of Jacobites landed nearby in Kirkwall to support the local Jacobite sympathisers.

After the Earl of Loudon’s rout from Dornoch the Duke of Perth returned to Inverness with 300 men leaving the Earl of Cromartie in charge of 1,500 men to secure the Far North of Scotland for the Jacobites.

Cromartie split his force into three. He kept 500 men at hand to pacify East Sutherland; Coll Ban MacDonald of Barrisdale took 400 men off to find Lord Reay. (This was more little more than a clan feud since no love was lost between the MacDonalds of Assynt and the Mackays of Reay); and Cromartie’s son Lord MacLeod took 300 men north to secure Caithness and Orkney.

When MacLeod reached Caithness he detached a company of about 100 men under Mackenzie of Ardloch to sail to Kirkwall at the invitation of local Jacobites. On this day 265 years ago Kirkwall became the northernmost town captured by the Jacobites.

P.S Ardloch and his men only stayed a week. The Orcadians didn’t flock to the Jacobite cause as hoped.