A SONGWRITER has paid tribute to his son’s efforts, and those of his ship, in the way he knows best – through music.

Steve Atkinson’s son ‘Ron’ is serving in HMS Lancaster, on anti-piracy duty east of Suez.

“I write songs, and when he went off for seven months I came up with one, pretty much a tribute to HMS Lancaster and those who serve in her,” said Steve.

The track (“it’s not sentimental or boring stuff, it’s a rock track”, said Steve) is called Ron, has been professionally recorded and is available to hear on the Navy News website and can be downloaded from iTunes

cms/userfiles/file/MP3/Ron.mp3

Steve has also supplied the words Words in pdf format

My father passed away on 10th Feb 2010 aged 85. He was very proud of his time in the Royal Navy starting in 1943 where he did his training on HMS Ganges, near Harwich, then he became a torpedo man on HMS Caprice, a destroyer who successfully escorted 4 merchant convoys to Russia. She also escorted regular convoys and U boat hunts as well as the monster liners through the U boat zones bringing U.S troops to U.K for D-Day. Later Caprice went East to Japan where the Japanese surrendered on the Caprice. I have lots of memorabilla and photos if anyone interested.

Sadly on 19th December 2009, my father Angus (Ian) MacQuarrie passed away after a short illness aged 61 in Singapore where he had been resident for a number of years. He served in the Royal Navy during the 1960's and 1970's. Initially he served on HMS Zulu and then laterly on HMS Courageous based at Faslane and Gosport as an artifficer and a diver.

The Defence Industries Council, representing the UK-based defence industry has released an information video demonstrating the vital role that it plays in providing the equipment for the UK armed forces as well as employment for over 300,000 people across all regions of the country. You can see the video by clicking on this link.