ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 1945, Cunningham was appointed a Knight of the Thistle. ‘I am very proud of the Thistle’, he told Cowan, ‘it’s rather the ideal for a Scot.’1 On Victory in Europe Day (VE-day) (8 May), he celebrated with the Board of Admiralty by the ‘drinking of bottle of Waterloo brandy’, presented by the First Lord.2 The end of the war, however, found the Cunninghams exhausted and depressed, a common phenomenon, hardly surprising after six years of privation, stress, defeat and the long, hard road to victory.3 He resolved, however, to pilot the Royal Navy through the transition to peace before retiring. A viscountcy, somewhat undesired, was conferred on him at the beginning of 1946; he chose the obscure Scottish village of Hyndhope for his title, a distant family home, in keeping with his maturing sense of Scottish ancestry.4
