HMS Agincourt (D86): The Destroyer With a Habit of Bumping Into Things

A Slow Start

This third HMS Agincourt on our list was a rather more conventional ship than her extraordinary namesake of 1913, though she still had her moments. A Battle-class fleet destroyer built by R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Company on the Tyne, she was launched on 29 January 1945, just as the war she had been designed to fight was ending, and was not actually commissioned until 25 June 1947, well over two years later, a long gestation typical of the many warships completed at a more leisurely pace once the wartime urgency had passed.

She was a solidly capable postwar destroyer, armed with five 4.5-inch guns, eight Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft guns, ten torpedo tubes, and a pair of Squid anti-submarine mortars, and joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet on entering service.

A Ship Prone to Bumps

Agincourt's early career had a curious theme running through it: collisions. In June 1948 she collided with the motor fishing vessel MFV 1161, sustaining deck damage, and in July 1951, by then serving as flotilla leader, she collided again, this time with her own sister ship HMS Cadiz, damaging her port side. It is a small, amusing footnote that Cadiz would later be sold on to become PNS Khaibar in the Pakistan Navy, meaning Agincourt's collision partner went on to a rather more dramatic career than her own, eventually being lost in action during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Agincourt herself, thankfully, kept her collisions confined to the accidental and the survivable.

Royal Occasions and a Real Crisis

Between her mishaps, Agincourt carried out the more dignified duties expected of a fleet destroyer. In 1953 she took part in the Fleet Review held to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, one of the great set-piece displays of British naval strength of the era, before spending December 1954 to October 1955 on a Mediterranean deployment. She returned to more serious business in 1956, taking part in operations during the Suez Crisis, as Britain, France and Israel moved against Egypt over control of the canal, before heading back to the Mediterranean again the following year.

Reinvented as a Radar Picket

By 1959, with pure gun-armed destroyers looking increasingly dated in the missile age, Agincourt was converted into a radar picket ship, gaining new radar equipment and Sea Cat guided missiles in place of some of her older weaponry, a role built around detecting incoming air threats and extending the fleet's early warning range rather than closing for a gun action. In this new guise she returned to active service in 1962, taking part in helicopter search operations and at least one tanker rescue, proving there was still useful work for a well-built destroyer even once her original weapons fit had started to look old-fashioned.

A Quiet Retirement

Agincourt was reduced to the Operational Reserve in 1966 and formally placed on the disposal list in 1972, before finally being broken up at Sunderland in 1974, not far from the yard where she had first been launched almost thirty years earlier. Her career had none of the drama of her namesake's earlier incarnation, no seized foreign battleship, no armistice signings, but she put in a solid, useful three decades of service, punctuated by the odd unscheduled bump along the way.