Could you give us a potted history of HMS Unicorn?
The Unicorn is a very unusual ship. She is a frigate, a rare survivor from the age of sail, built for the navy and launched in 1824 in Chatham, Kent. She was built in the years following the Napoleonic wars, but the subsequent period of relative ‘peace’ meant that HMS Unicorn never saw action.
At the time, newly built ships that were placed in reserve were ‘laid up in ordinary’, which still has her original roof, the only surviving one in existence. spent the next decades as a powder and coal hulk, before coming to Dundee in 1873 to be used as a training ship for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and the Royal Naval Reserve, a function she performed until 1968, when she was handed over to the Unicorn Preservation Society who maintain the ship as a museum and visitor attraction to this day.
