Twentieth Century
The islands cluster round the huge deep-water anchorage of Scapa Flow like a protecting hand, and in both World War I and World War II, the Royal Navy had a major base there, enabling them to challenge any attempt by German warships to emerge into the ocean through the Norwegian Sea. After the Armistice in 1918, the German High Seas Fleet was transferred in its entirety to Scapa Flow while a decision was to be made on its future; however, the German sailors opened their sea-cocks and scuttled all the ships. Most ships were salvaged, but the remaining wrecks are now a favoured haunt of recreational divers.
One month into World War II, the Royal Navy battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a German U-boat in Scapa Flow. As a result barriers were built to close most of the access channels; these had the additional advantage of creating causeways whereby travellers can go from island to island by road instead of being obliged to rely on boats. In the course of the Second World War Italian prisoners of war were kept on Orkney Mainland; they improvised a chapel with elaborate architecture out of corrugated iron and other base materials, which is now a tourist attraction. The Scapa Flow base was closed in 1956.
In the 1960s and 1970s there were reports about the potential for uranium mining between Stromness and Yesnaby. Margaret Thatcher's plans to open such a mine were halted in 1980 after local campaigning, which included production of The Yellow Cake Revue by composer and conductor Peter Maxwell Davies, who lived on the neighbouring island of Hoy. The title refers to yellowcake, the powder produced in an early stage of the processing of uranium ore.
Read more about this topic: History Of Orkney
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)