The odd-looking hut outside a small history museum on Shetland Mainland really needs the sign that’s posted next to it; otherwise almost no one would recognize it for what it is, and the story that’s attached to it. It’s actually most of a lifeboat from the doomed White Star liner Oceanic, which sank off a neighboring island in 1914.
The ship, once the world’s largest, had been converted for use as an armed cruiser during World War I; on its first patrol of the waters off Shetland, bad navigation and a dispute between its naval and civilian captains ran it aground off Foula. All hands were brought ashore, but by the next morning, the ship had sunk, and there it remains.
A Wikipedia article points out that “The disaster was hushed up at the time, since it was felt that it would have been embarrassing to make public how a world-famous liner had run aground in friendly waters in good weather within a fortnight of beginning its service as a naval vessel. The revelation of such gross incompetence at this early stage of the war would have done nothing for national morale.”
In 2008, it was given to the local history group at Cunningsburgh by a nearby landowner who had used it as a hut for many years, but wanted it gone so he could sell the property, which had given its name, Quee, to the remains of the boat.
The museum’s other major outdoor exhibit also has to do with war and disaster; it’s a model of a de Havilland Mosquito bomber that crashed nearby on the night of Nov. 22, 1944. The two pilots, who died, were out of fuel and flying in fog on their return trip from bombing a German U-boat base in Norway.
