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, laid down on 12 December 1943, 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.

Before her there was another one, and she is worth meeting, because she is the reason that habit is funnier than it looks. The Agincourt of 1865 was a Minotaur-class broadside ironclad of nearly eleven thousand tons, four hundred feet of iron with five masts and thirty-six guns, and she had one of the longest lives of any ship in the Navy List: launched in March 1865, completed in 1868, renamed Boscawen III in 1904, Ganges II in 1906, reduced to a coal hulk as C109 in 1908, and finally broken up in 1960. That is ninety-five years afloat under four names. Her better-known successor, the seven-turret battleship of 1913 that Britain seized from Turkey on the eve of the First World War, is covered in the article on HMS Agincourt (1913).

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.

The Battles were the Royal Navy's answer to a lesson it had learned the hard way. Pre-war destroyers had been built to fight other destroyers and had guns that could barely point upwards; by 1943 it was obvious that the thing most likely to kill a destroyer was an aeroplane. The Battle class put its main armament in high-angle twin mountings forward and piled anti-aircraft guns on the rest of the ship, and Agincourt belonged to the later 1943 group, the version that had absorbed the most of that thinking.

On paper she was a genuinely quick ship: 2,315 tons, 379 feet long with a 40 foot 3 inch beam, driven by Parsons geared turbines developing 50,000 horsepower for a top speed of nearly 36 knots, with a crew of around 268 to fight and run her.

A Ship Prone to Bumps

Agincourt's early career had a curious theme running through it: collisions. On 23 June 1948 she collided with the motor fishing vessel MFV 1161, the impact tearing away a three foot length of deck plating, and on 14 July 1951, by then serving as flotilla leader with the title Captain D, 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.

The Cadiz collision is worth a moment longer, because the two were Battle-class destroyers in the same fleet, named for two of the victories the Admiralty had gone through the history books to find, and on 14 July 1951 they were both in the same piece of water at the same moment. Cadiz went to Pakistan five years later and was sunk by Soviet-built missiles off Karachi in December 1971, taking two hundred and twenty-two of her people with her, which is a considerably harder end than the Sunderland breakers. Her story is told in the article on HMS Cadiz (D79).

Agincourt herself, thankfully, kept her collisions confined to the accidental and the survivable.

She was also, it must be said, keeping up a family tradition. On the morning of 1 July 1871 the ironclad Agincourt was steaming through the Strait of Gibraltar as a squadron flagship when she ran onto the Pearl Rock, a hazard so well known that it is marked on every chart of the approaches. The circumstances are almost too neat. The squadron had been ordered to economise on coal and so was making only six knots, on a clear, calm day, in a strait where the current runs at about four; nobody had allowed for the fact that the current was quietly setting the whole line sideways. She struck so gently that the men aboard barely noticed, and the Warrior, next astern, nearly went into the back of her. Her guns and her coal had to be taken out of her before HMS Hercules could pull her off, four days later. The question was asked in the House of Commons within forty-eight hours, her officers were court-martialled and reprimanded, and her captain was relieved of his command. Set against that, tearing three feet of deck plating off against a fishing boat looks like a rounding error.

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

The decision had actually been taken in 1955, though nothing happened for four years. Four Battles were selected for conversion into what the Navy called Fast Air Detection Escorts: Agincourt, Aisne, Barrosa and Corunna. The idea was to push a fast, well-found ship out ahead of the fleet carrying radar good enough to see an air attack forming while there was still time to do something about it.

The four of them make an interesting set, and all four are covered in this series. HMS Aisne (D22) was the first British warship launched after victory in Europe; HMS Barrosa (D68) went east and spent part of her second career dealing with actual piracy; and HMS Corunna (D97) had much the same second act as Agincourt did. The conversions were expensive and the ships were not young when they came out of the yards, which is why none of them lasted long afterwards. The problem the Fast Air Detection Escort was built to solve did not go away; it was simply handed, within a decade, to airborne early warning aircraft flying off the carriers, which could see very much further than a mast forty feet above the sea ever would.

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.

The rebuild was drastic. A new lattice foremast went up immediately abaft the bridge to carry a Type 965 double bedstead aerial that weighed four tons on its own, with a Type 293Q on a platform below it. A large deckhouse full of generators and radar offices was built abaft the funnel, a new lattice mainmast carried a Type 277Q height finder and a thicket of electronic warfare and direction-finding aerials, and the after deckhouse was extended to take a Sea Cat launcher. Everything that got in the way went: all ten torpedo tubes, all the light anti-aircraft guns. By the time the yard had finished, the only parts of the original destroyer still present were the hull, the engines, the funnel, the forward superstructure and the main guns.

There is a neat irony in that. A class designed around the lesson that aircraft were the real threat ended its useful life with four of its members rebuilt into ships whose entire purpose was to see aircraft coming, and which had given up almost everything else to do it.

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.