Words to ponder

“Recently I read David Turner’s account of the sinking of the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow on the night of October 14 1939,” writes Barbara Kennedy of Forfar.

“Mr Turner’s uncle was Lieutenant R. Lennox Woodrow-Clark, a senior officer on board the ship. There were 833 lives lost comprising men and boys from the age of 15, which at that time was allowed. Today this seems quite shocking, but was normal back then.

“Some did survive, thanks to a local fishing boat, but 17 officers and crew went down to the seabed where the ship still lies, a well-respected war grave, marked by a special buoy.

“Some words in this wonderfully written account left me with the question ‘what have we learned?’: ‘When the tragedy of the sinking of HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow in the Second World War finally passes out of direct human memory, we as a nation will say farewell to a generation of people who, for all their human failings, gave and lost so much in the pursuit of a war, the effects of which we still feel today, some lessons still not learned.’”