A taste of Italy, 80 years and counting

A small Italian deli and restaurant in Elm Row holds a special place in many Edinburgh folks' hearts. Valvona & Crolla has weathered many a storm during eight decades - and it was a real treat to meet the hugely entertaining and passionate husband and wife owners.

THERE is opera - Italian, of course - playing softly in the background. Behind a heaving counter stuffed with cold meats and cheese, plump olives and sweet cakes, are shelves crammed with bottles, packets, tins and jars.

Hanging from the ceiling are massive bunches of dried chillies, cooking pots and legs of ham, to the side are jars of artisan honey sourced from a Tuscan hillside with labels lovingly created by the beekeeper's daughter, dried pasta, bottles of olive oil, jars of peppers, boxes of biscuits and countless bottles of wine.

Top to bottom, every inch of space inside Valvona & Crolla's Elm Row delicatessen is occupied, in what appears to be a supreme feat of controlled chaos.

Rewind time to the picture managing director Philip Crolla is holding in his hand. Black and white, it has captured his father, Carlo, behind the deli counter nearly half a century ago. He's jotting something down, while in front of him stand customers no doubt frantically trying to absorb the array of exotic products around them, above their heads dangle clusters of Italian sausages, bunches of garlic and string bags containing little pots of Italian deliciousness.

The years have passed but little - not even the wooden shutters that protected the front of the shop as a wartime mob turned on the innocent Italian community - seems to have changed.

Upstairs Philip and wife Mary Contini are in a room that once housed another Italian family of immigrants, recalling the incredible highs and lows of a family business that not only survived the past 80 years but has flourished.

On the walls around them is another charming sign of how little has changed on the premises - slightly faded pale green heavily patterned wallpaper from another age with rolling hills, white walled houses with terracotta tiled roofs, wooden gates and white turtle doves.

"The family that lived here must have missed home," smiles Philip, whose grandfather, Alfonso Crolla, came to Edinburgh from rural Lazio in 1906 and ended up co-founding the business 80 years ago with fellow immigrant Raffaele Valvona.

"And when you think about it, they would have come from the sun and countryside to a city that was grimy and smoky and dark. It would have been a huge change for them."

They certainly brought a refreshing change for Edinburgh folk, who found their tastebuds and linguistic skills challenged as they got their hungry tongues around spaghetti and linguine, tortellini and macaroni, cappuccino, prosciutto and gelato.

Many made the Elm Row delicatessen their favourite shop. And now, as the family business prepares to celebrate its 80th anniversary, a call has gone out to anyone with memories and photographs of the way it once was to share them.

"This is a special place for many customers," explains Mary, whose grandparents also came to Scotland from the Lazio region at the start of last century. "Their parents came here, or they came as students to buy wine. It's a place that triggers a lot of emotion for a lot of people.

"Food related memories are often very powerful."

Philip and Mary, who as well as company director is an acclaimed food writer, want to gather those memories and add them to their own in a bid to create a diverse portrait of a business that for many is much more than simply a place to shop for Italian food.

For as well as treating tastebuds, the shop introduced many visitors to sights, smells and sounds that transported them straight to a bustling and sometimes bizarre corner of Italy, right in the heart of the city.

Philip, 60, who joined the business aged 17 in 1971, recalls the frantic sight that greeted many as soon as they stepped over the door: "At the front door were two pieces of equipment, a very small Belling oven with five shelves for small pizza trays and a big coffee roaster.

"My father, Carlo, cooked the pizzas, roasted the coffee and served the customers, all at once.

"The pizza at the top of the oven would cook first, so he'd have to rotate them. If he forgot, smoke would pour out and the pizza would be burned.

"At the same time the coffee would be roasting. Roasting coffee was a great skill because you had a five-second window for the perfect roast. It was like the sign a new Pope had been elected: two puffs of smoke meant perfect, three puffs, it was burned.

"So there's a shop full of people at lunchtime who are hungry, and my dad Carlo, who had diabetes and needed to eat, is serving and trying to get the pizzas out and watching the coffee, and suddenly there'd be all this smoke and we'd yell Carlo!'," he laughs.

"The customers loved it. He'd shout, Burned pizza, half price burned pizza!'."

The action behind the counter was just as fascinating as the exotic products on sale, making shopping at Valvona & Crolla a complete sensory assault.

And for the staff, working there was never dull, especially when the coffee roasting system went on fire as oil from the process ignited, prompting them to rush to the scene armed with Fairy Liquid bottles filled with water.

It's almost a wonder that the much-loved deli actually survived for 80 years - especially as its darkest spell during the Second World War almost closed the shutters for good.

"Many Italians who had been born here or had come to start business were arrested," explains Mary, 57.

"It was just after Dunkirk, it was a tense time. The windows of the shop were shattered and the board at the front of the shop is the original one put up in June 1940 to protect the shop. There was a lot of confusion."

Shares in the business that had been forged by Newhaven cafe owner Alfonso and neighbour Raffaele, who ran a continental food warehouse, were temporarily passed out of family hands and the business run by a stranger.

And later, with the family reeling from tragedy and trauma, it fell to Philip's Uncle Victor's shrewd foresight and determination to rebuild the business, first selling shop equipment to fellow Italians whose shops had been damaged in the backlash to later running perhaps the strangest mobile shop imaginable, created from a tall-sided removals van.

"It was like the inside of the shop, but on wheels," laughs Philip. "It had huge shelves that were stacked full of Italian wine and food and it would head off to Fife with my Uncle Dominic driving.

"Unfortunately he quite often came back, having sold stock but without having been paid for it because he felt sorry for some of the less well-off customers."

For Mary, the abiding memory is the cacophony of laughter mixed with lively Italian chat as the family unwittingly turned the deli into a unique shopping experience for their customers.

"Some of the family was at the front counter serving and others in the back slicing the Parma ham, and all these in-jokes were going back and forwards," she smiles. "It was just a great big carry on."

But while the family pauses to reflect on eight decades, they are also looking forward.

For just as Alfonso introduced 1930s Edinburgh to pasta and pizza, and son Victor stunned the city in the Sixties by ditching corks in the family firm's wine bottles in favour of unheard of screw tops, the next generation ensured the Valvona & Crolla name lives on, strengthening ties with small niche Italian producers, developing a new Scottish-themed gift range and broadening their internet shopping service.

And eventually the next generation, Philip and Mary's daughter, Francesca, will take over the reins.

Before then, however, the family is keen to compile a comprehensive tapestry of living memories.

"It's a special place for so many people who shopped here, people bought their gallons of wine here for their student parties and many worked here," adds Mary. "There's a lot of attachment to the place, and we really want to hear about it."

 

How the Second World War tore family apart

GENEROUSLY rotund, thanks to a love for his native Italian food and in his sixties, Alfonso Crolla, below, couldn't have posed much of a threat to British security. But as the Second World War raged and Mussolini declared war, the hard-working Italian was soon caught up in the nightmare of hostilities.

Italy's declaration of war in June 1940 prompted a Cabinet meeting in London to discuss just what to do about the thousands of Italians who had made Britain their home.

Churchill's response would send shockwaves through towns and cities across the country: "Collar the lot."

Alfonso, who had arrived in Scotland in 1906, and his son, Victor, who was born here, were among those treated as "enemy aliens" to be torn from their families and put behind lock and key. For Victor - a kind-hearted soul who Mary recalls telling her during her first stint behind the deli counter to simply charge customers what she thought they could afford - there was a spell in Saughton Prison and then at a camp in the Isle of Man for five years.

Alfonso was sent there too. But he and Mary's grandfather, Cresidio Di Ciacca, were chosen to board the ill-fated SS Arandora Star to be transported to Canadian internment camps. The vessel was torpedoed by a German U-Boat. An estimated 700 people died among them Alfonso and Cresidio.

 

Appeared Edinburgh Evening News 7 March 2014

www.edinburghnews.com

Author's DNA journey of discovery

MERGING history with a dollop of mystery, bestselling Scottish author Sara Sheridan's novels delve into the past and often end with a spectacular twist in the tale.

But when it came to real life, the Edinburgh-born writer was fairly sure that her own family story was rooted quite clearly: Russian Jew on her mum's side, Irish Catholic on her dad's.

Now, though, a simple DNA test has blown apart fact from fiction. And the unexpected results of her own life story have left her with an even bigger mystery to solve - of exactly who she is and, more perplexing, how on earth she ended up here.

"I didn't anticipate the outcome at all," admits the author, whose DNA findings have just revealed she is actually an Oriental genetic rarity most probably descended from a captured slave from a tribe so unusual that finding them had left scientists scratching their heads for months.

The irony of being at the centre of a historical conundrum created by her own DNA is not lost on the writer. "My job as a historical novelist is usually to embellish facts like crazy to make a story," she smiles, "and now I'm finding myself having to strip everything back to try to get to the facts."

Her mother's family's Jewish faith led her to assume their origins were somewhere in the Middle East. Results from ScotlandsDNA, a research project which is compiling a genetic map of the nation, instead revealed she is one of a "vanishingly rare" female line that developed 17,000 years ago in the area around Sakhalin, Japan's most northerly island, and were eventually taken as slaves.

Incredibly, this new found real-life background has faint echoes of a story from one of her own novels, Secrets of the Sands, which tells how a young Abyssinian woman is forced into slavery.

The findings were revealed after 11 painstaking months of research which, according to Alistair Moffat, managing director of ScotlandsDNA, had scientists scratching their heads. "It's incredibly rare to see this," he says. "There is an amazing amount of diversity in Scotland's population and Sara's findings have just made it even more diverse. It really is surprising."

Her DNA revealed her distant ancestors were almost certainly part of the rare Ainu tribe, indigenous people who were primarily hunter gatherers with their own language, rituals and customs and who followed a form of religion based around nature.

Eventually trade with other countries led to the introduction of disease, claiming many of the tribe. Ainu women were captured and taken into slavery as the island fell into Russian control, while centuries of intermarriage and movement means the precise number of true Ainu is unknown. In the mid-19th century, there were only around 17,000 Ainu people left.

Sara was unaware of the ancient tribe when she took the DNA test last year. "My husband organised it as a birthday present last June, he'd heard about work to map Scotland's genetic heritage and how people were finding out how much of their background was Viking or Pictish. All that was right up my street," she explains.

She provided a saliva sample and expected to hear within a few weeks. "After three months when I chased my sample I was told that I was 'unusual' and that geneticists and historians were working on my case. My husband was joking with me, saying they'd discovered I was really a sea creature or a hobbit. I even thought that as it was taking so long I should ask for my money back."

In fact, scientists had hit a wall as they scoured the globe in a bid to match information contained in her mitochondrial DNA - the strand passed from mothers to their children.

"We get six billion letters of DNA - three billion from our mother, and three billion from our father," explains Alistair, whose organisation has now mapped more than 7000 different DNA samples. "Sara's DNA had what we called a Sakhalin marker, after the island where it's most commonly found."

Sara's search for more detail led her to online images of Ainu women and she was immediately struck by the physical similarities she shares. "One particular tribe was famed for physical features that endure in my family today - very thick hair and wide cheekbones. Somewhere along the slave route that runs along the southern border of Russia one of my female ancestors - likely a slave - whose mother and grandmother and great-grandmother might well have been raped and abused by men on the route - of many genetic persuasions - must have met a Jewish bloke.

"This history may not be that distant," she adds. "Russia abolished slavery in 1723 but serfdom continued until the 1860s, the decade incidentally when my own great-grandmother was born."

The DNA discovery has made the author keen to unravel her father's side of the family - a test that will have to be undertaken by a male member of her family. "I always thought that bagels and lox was my soul food but it turns out it's sushi. I had envisaged ancestors who had survived slavery in Egypt, not on the Steppes. It's made me realise how insubstantial are many of the stories we create about ourselves. It turns out that I not only write fiction but I am fiction too. My identity is more complex than I'd imagined."

Discover your DNA story. Visit www.scotlandsdna.com

 

'Immigrant' genetic make-up in every Scot

WE all carry six billion DNA letters, three billion from our mother, three billion from our father.

Fathers pass on Y chromosome DNA to their sons and mothers pass on mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, to their sons and daughters. But mtDNA dies with men and it survives only in the female line.

It means researchers can read two ancestral stories in men's DNA, one for their Y chromosome lineage and one for their mtDNA lineage. In women they can only read only their mtDNA story.

Tiny blips known as markers can appear which reveal fascinating detail about precisely where a person's ancestors came from and pinpoint when they lived there.

Unravelling the information means scouring DNA databases around the globe.

Britain has a rich and diverse genetic make-up drawn from across Europe, Asia and even Africa. Unpopulated until 11,000 years ago, it means every Scot has some kind of "immigrant" make-up.

 

Tom Conti has link to Napoleon Boneparte

AUTHOR Sara Sheridan has discovered her roots lie far away in the east, however DNA research among Scottish men has revealed ten per cent are directly descended from the Picts.

Researchers at Melrose-based ScotlandsDNA found a Y chromosome marker suggesting a large number of descendants of northern tribes known by the Romans as "picti" meaning "painted ones".

The fatherline marker, labelled R1b-s530, was found to be ten times more common in those tested who had Scottish grandfathers than those with English grandfathers.

The project has tested more than 7000 people, some from as far away as New Zealand and Australia, since it began 18 months ago.

The hope is to eventually draw up a "map" of Scotland's genetic make-up.

"Every result is interesting," says managing director Alistair Moffat.

"We are already finding that Scotland is incredibly diverse with more than 100 lineages already found.

"It turns out we are all very, very different.

"Because we are on the edge of beyond, people tended to move westwards and this was as far as they could go.

"We have found a lot of men descended from Berber and Tuareg tribesmen from the Sahara.

"But that just tends to throw up even more questions than it answers about how that has happened.

"We simply don't know.

"There is also a substantial group of women in Scotland originally from central Siberia."

More than one per cent of all Scottish men are descendents of the Maeatae, a Scots tribe whose historic homelands were near modern-day Stirling.

And Alistair's own DNA marker from his Hawick-born mother's side revealed Pakistan connections and English roots on his father's side.

When ScotlandsDNA tested Scots-Italian actor Tom Conti, the findings revealed the astonishing link with a relative of Napoleon Bonaparte, while an ancient ancestor of Scots radio presenter Fred MacAulay is thought to have been sold as a slave in Dublin in the ninth century and then brought over to the Hebrides.

The DNA of the Duke of Buccleuch was found to be an exact match of a descendant of Charles Stewart, who fought at the Battle of Culloden, with both men descended from a Breton aristocrat, whose family came to Britain in 1066 with William the Conqueror.

DNA research costs from £170, and the results are added to the genetic map of Scotland.

The test process involves a small saliva sample which is posted to ScotlandsDNA headquarters and then analysed.

 

Appeared Edinburgh Evening News May 2013

(c) 2013 Johnston Publishing Limited

Arctic Convoys: through hell and high water to victory.

THE waves crashed around them, 60ft high, and the men of the Arctic Convoys, frozen to the bone and in terror of the German bombs, pressed on in what Sir Winston Churchill once called "the worst journey in the world".

Of course, he might well have thought that. Those hardy souls on board the merchant ships and the navy vessels charged with protecting them knew better. They knew it was much, much worse than that.

A freezing hell spent dodging Hitler's deadly U-boats and vicious Junkers 88s, sleepless nights and terror ridden days, when the journey around Norway in Arctic seas towards Archangel and Murmansk took them past hundreds of hidden inlets and coves - perfect hiding places for enemy attack.

Conditions were horrific enough. Then there were the sights, the heart-stopping moments when men could only watch helplessly as comrades plunged to their deaths from frozen decks into ice cold water, where within just three minutes they would perish.

Jim Simpson was there, fresh faced, just out of his teens. Today he is in his 91st year, ramrod straight, medals pinned over his heart glittering; the Arctic Emblem - a white polar star with a red Russian dot in its centre, pinned proudly upon his immaculate jacket, his brand new Arctic Star medal shining the brightest.

He sits in a plush armchair in his Barnton Avenue home, a model of a ship on a table nearby, some naval type prints on the wall clues to a remarkable war service that, 70 years on, is as painfully vivid as ever.

Not that he's one for talking too much about it. He hands over some notes a relative has made with help from his wife, Sybil, which detail how he joined HMS Devonshire and headed off on an ocean voyage from which more than 3000 men would never return. The notes are factual and detailed enough yet there is little in the pages to hint at what it was really like for a young Edinburgh lad on one of the most hellish journeys imaginable.

Gently ask him to share some of the emotional turmoil of four years spent bobbing on Arctic waters like a plastic duck in a fairground shooting game, and he looks down at well polished shoes at something suddenly fascinating and totally absorbing.

"I can't really explain it," he says quietly. "When you're being attacked with Junkers and bombers and U-boats on your tail at the same time, wherever you went there was a U-boat behind you.

"Then look around and you can see a wall of water 60 feet high chasing you. We had a lot of near misses. We lost a corvette one night," he adds, and in his mind's eye it's almost certain he can still see a small but hardy little boat, specially built to serve with honour in the convoys, broken by a U-boat torpedo.

"He's never really spoken about it until recently," chips in Sybil, who has heard more about her husband's Arctic Convoys experiences in the last few years than in all their 65 years as a married couple.

She is not the only wife who is only now learning of how spectacular and humbling a job their husbands did during the war. For just what it was really like for the thousands of brave sailors has only recently started trickling out, voices finally found as a campaign aimed at recognising their contribution in the form of a special medal gained momentum, led by, among others, Jock Dempster from Dunbar. Jock, of course, died just weeks after receiving his longed for Arctic Star and before he had the chance to wear it at a public ceremony.

Jim's Arctic Star shares space on his jacket with the 1939-45 Star, the Atlantic medal, the War Medal and a special Russian Convoy Medal awarded by a grateful Russia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the convoys. His wife keeps the ribbons bright and fresh by scrubbing at them using a toothbrush smeared with a little gentle soap.

They were on his chest again yesterday as he stood in the War Museum at Edinburgh Castle, VIP guest at a new exhibition which tells the remarkable story of the Arctic Convoys through striking images, first-hand testimony and poignant, personal objects.

Among the items on display are an aged telegram delivering the worst news possible to a wife back home of her lost husband, alongside a packing case covered in beautifully coloured labels including one that says simply "with thanks to the British convoys", well-worn uniforms, grainy photographs, and the bell of HMS Edinburgh, sunk by the Germans with her cargo of gold on board, payment from grateful Russians for American help.

Jim was 19 years old when he left home to work in Skara Brae in the Orkneys, building camps for the army and Royal Air Force. After six months he was back in Edinburgh to answer his call-up papers.

Waiting for him after brief training at Devonport was HMS Devonshire, newly refurbished with hi-tech radar designed to help detect U-boats - radar that, along with a brilliant captain, would save the crew's lives time after time.

Her role was to provide cover for air operations by planes launched from aircraft carriers - a death-defying task in itself - from the guns of German battleship Tirpitz, lying in Altenfjord in occupied Norway. The Tirpitz was just one enemy vessel facing the 50 or so ships in the convoys taking vital supplies to Russia, danger came also in frequent fire from Nazi planes and U-boats firing torpedoes night and day.

"We hardly slept," remembers Jim, whose job was "damage control", closing off the bulkheads to prevent the ship taking in water in the event of a direct hit.

"We were never in our hammocks when at sea, if we slept it was usually on the main deck - we could be at 'action stations' for hours.

"Our job was to keep her [Tirpitz] in harbour while the aircraft carriers sent off their planes to bomb her.

"Some of the planes didn't make it back. Sadly quite a few men were lost," he adds. "There was no time to rescue them, there were other planes coming in. It was horrendous for all concerned."

Men went days without sleep, he remembers, warming now to the idea of talking about it. Clothes went unchanged - it was minus 50, the idea of stripping off was unthinkable.

"Conditions were unbelievably bad, the seas were rough, it was freezing cold," he says. "The deck would often freeze - so did the moisture in our noses and our moustaches."

And all the time enemy spotter planes buzzed the convoys, followed by the Junkers 88s in wave after terrifying wave of attack.

"The Junkers dropped their torpedoes mainly at dusk," adds Jim, "it was difficult to see where they were. We opened fire, gunners were shooting all day long. We had to be alert at all times, U-boats were all around. We fired off depth charges from the stern of the ship when they were too close for comfort.

"We didn't think too much about the Germans," he adds. "I suppose they were lads just like us. But it was them, or us."

Jim was eventually demobbed in November 1946 - having left the Arctic he joined HMS Jamaica for service in Indian waters. Life with Sybil from then on involved the much less dramatic task of working in construction and raising their family. Today, they have five grandchildren.

Telling his story now, says Sybil, is mostly for them and their children's sake, so the vital chapter in British war history won't be forgotten.

"He didn't speak about it until there was an Arctic Convoys veterans reunion recently. Since then he's been telling more stories," she adds.

"We want the grandchildren to hear his story before it's too late."

constant threat of attack from air or U-boats

The Arctic Convoys sailed from Britain from August 1941 until May 1945, delivering urgently needed supplies to the Soviet Union including tanks, vehicles, weapons and raw materials.

Their route took them through incredibly harsh environmental conditions in dense fog and turbulent seas, with freezing temperatures causing ice to form on the ships to the extent that it could cause vessels to capsize if it were not removed immediately.

As if the appalling conditions were not enough, there was the constant threat of German attack from the air or from U-boats based in Nazi-occupied Norway. Churchill, right, privately admitted that he would have been happy if even half of the Convoys got through. In fact, the success rate was rather higher, with 707 of the 811 merchant ships to sail arriving safely. However, over 3000 sailors were lost.

One of the most poignant stories in the exhibition is that of convoy PQ17. It was passing the west coast of Nazi-held Norway when incorrect intelligence suggested that the Germans were going to launch a concerted attack. The convoy was ordered to scatter, leaving ships wide open to attack.

Twenty-four of the 35 merchant ships in the convoy were lost.

A frantic rescue operation ensued, featuring vessels including the SS Rathlin which was credited with rescuing 634 crew from 13 sinkings.

One of the personal stories in the display is of James K Thompson, a boatswain on the SS Rathlin. In January 1943, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his role in shooting down two enemy aircraft in defence of convoy PQ17.

The Russian connection is brought up to date with the loan of objects by Timofey Kunitskiy, who works in the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Edinburgh. His grandfather was a senior officer in the Russian navy and was involved in many air reconnaissance operations. Objects on loan include winter-weight fur gloves used in air reconnaissance and various navigational instruments

 

Appeared Edinburgh Evening News May 2013

2013 Johnston Publishing Limited

 

Secrets of the Forth stir memories for war child Joan

10 September 2010

IT must have been exciting for the young table maid as she made her way north from her home in Devon to Scotland, bound for work in the fine Murrayfield mansion of a local well-to-do family.
It was a Saturday in 1926, and 25-year-old Mary Gooding had paid a whole £1 for her one-way, second-class cruise on board the SS Royal Fusilier, a 2.1 tonne steamship berthed in Wapping in preparation for the voyage to Leith.

On board this fine vessel - which was described at the time as a "miniature liner", with her grand fittings and impressive fixtures - was chief engineer Archie "Nobby" Clark.

Ten years older than Mary, he'd already seen the world as a merchant seaman. Now 35, his thoughts had turned to settling down, the London-Leith "commute" less challenging than the Atlantic routes he was used to sailing.

As the Royal Fusilier steamed northwards, somewhere between the Thames and the Forth, the chief engineer and the table maid met.

Their destiny was sealed.

Love may have bloomed on the Royal Fusilier, but there would be no romantic end for this fine vessel. Today she lies embedded in the mud, 46m below the surface of the Forth.

According to those divers determined to endure the chill of the estuary waters, she is tipped on to her port side, brass portholes still shimmering slightly in the murky water, her surface well preserved and home to colonies of marine growth.

A few miles away lies the broken remains of her almost identical "sister" ship, the SS Royal Archer, scattered across the sea bed some 15 miles west of May Island.

Stablemates in the London and Edinburgh Shipping Company, war with Germany transformed them into Merchant Navy workhorses, ferrying cargo between Scotland and England's capital cities, gum and paste for manufacturing, paper and that most crucial wartime commodity, food.

To be on board one when it was sunk by a Nazi attack would be bad enough.

Yet Archie, with his unsuspecting wife Mary and their daughter Joan waiting at home in Leith, ended up fighting for his life on both.

Incredibly the loss of the vessels just months apart did not even merit a mention in newspapers at the time.


Understandably, though, they dominated the childhood memories of Archie's daughter Joan Woodburn, now 79.

Now thanks to another quirk of fate, her vivid recollections of the Fusilier's unique role in bringing her parents together and both vessels' dramatic demise, are helping bring wartime history to life.

Tomorrow she will be a special guest of honour at Trinity House museum in Leith, where maritime history experts will explore the fates of the Forth's many wrecks as part of Scottish Archaeology Month.

Historic Scotland's maritime unit will reveal footage of a sonar survey of the Firth's most famous wreck, HMS Campania - one of Cunard's first great liners which sunk in 1918 - and a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber.

Movingly for Joan, they'll also unveil recent underwater photography of the Royal Archer.

It will be a poignant event for the pensioner who spent years searching for two striking models of the vessels which she graphically recalled from her childhood, only to finally find them just a few miles away from her Portobello home, at Trinity House.

"I always remembered these huge models of the Fusilier and the Archer from when I was a little girl," says Joan, of Bryce Avenue.

"My mother would go to the shipping company offices in Bernard Street to pick up my father's wages and they were there. They were beautifully made, big with lots of detail and I loved to look at them because they reminded me of my father.

"When the offices closed, I always wondered what had happened to them."

Joan had given up hope of ever setting eyes on them again until last year when she popped into Trinity House for its open day.

"I walked in and, oh my goodness, there was the Archer," she says. "When I walked upstairs I found the Fusilier too.

"I'd been looking for years, and there they were."

Becoming reacquainted with the two vessels after so many years reopened poignant memories of when, as a little girl, she waved her dad off to serve on the Fusilier and the Archer.

The outbreak of war had transformed the glamorous liners into Merchant Navy workhorses, a far cry from the days when they'd cater for passengers in plush surroundings, serving breakfast for three shillings, dinner for four.

As war raged, Joan and her mother often had no idea where Archie might be. Which made his arrival on the doorstep of their home at 206 Leith Walk one bitter February evening in 1940, dishevelled and barely dressed, all the more disturbing.

"Of course there were no telephones, so we didn't know his ship had gone down," recalls Joan. "We heard a taxi outside, which was unusual enough. Then out he walked.

"He was wrapped in a blanket, wearing just long johns and shoes that didn't fit - he'd lost everything when the ship went down
"He'd been in Leith hospital, checked over and just sent home."

Her father had been on board the Archer, loaded with a cargo of gum and paste bound for Leith, when the blast from an underwater mine ripped through her bow.

The explosion destroyed three of her lifeboats and engulfed the wireless room in steam from burst pipes.

The captain frantically ordered three remaining lifeboats to be launched only for one to capsize, throwing the ship's quartermaster overboard.

Unable to swim, he drifted towards the damaged bow of the vessel, supported by his lifejacket.

In chaos, the remaining 28 crew, including Archie, struggled to launch the remaining lifeboats, pausing to rescue two stricken colleagues on the way.

The Royal Archer's demise was rapid - just 30 minutes after the explosion had occurred, she was gone. There was little time for recuperation for her crew either. Joan recalls her father being sent back to sea almost immediately.

This time he returned to the vessel which held such fond memories - the Royal Fusilier.

She was ferrying a cargo of rice and paper from London to Leith in June 1941 - an easy target for the German aircraft hunting for their prey along the east coast.

She was seven miles east of Amble in Northumberland when she was bombed.

As she began to list, the crew of 15 piled into lifeboats only to be told to return to the vessel while it was towed north by one of two destroyers in the area.

Seven miles north east of the Bass Rock, she could go no further and capsized.

Hugh Morrison, Collections Registrar for Historic Scotland, who runs the museum, says Joan's links with the two vessels has been invaluable in helping bring history to life.

"It is fantastic to have someone like Joan present who can bring the personal story to life of those who lived and served on some of Leith's most famous vessels," he says.

"We are delighted that she will be here this weekend to share her story with visitors."

The Trinity House, Secrets of the Forth, Archaeology Day takes place on Saturday. Entry is free.