HMS Brissenden: One of Only Two, and a Fighter Against German Torpedo Boats

A Rare Variant

HMS Brissenden was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, on the Itchen in Southampton, ordered on 28 July 1940 under the War Emergency Programme, laid down on 28 February 1941 as yard job J6140, launched on 15 September 1942 and completed on 12 February 1943. She was the first ship of the Royal Navy ever to carry the name, and after a Warship Week National Savings campaign in March 1942 she was adopted by the civil community of Barnes in Surrey. Her badge was a hare, sitting upright and facing forward on a green field, which is a more thoughtful piece of heraldry than most ships get.

She was a Type IV Hunt-class escort destroyer, a Thornycroft-designed variant of which only two ships were ever completed, the other being HMS Brecon (L76), an entirely different vessel from the Hunt-class minehunter that carried the same name forty years later, making her a rare example within a class otherwise built in very large numbers.

The reason there were only two is a small story in itself. The Type IV was not an Admiralty design at all. Thornycroft drew it up privately in early 1940, on the view that their chief designer could produce something rather better than the Hunt as it stood: more stable, more seaworthy, and with better protection for the men who had to live in it. He was right about the ship. What went against it was that Thornycroft had not built vessels of that size before and made some mistakes doing it, and that by the time the two of them were ready the Royal Navy had escorts arriving from a good many other yards and no particular appetite for a new variant. Brecon and Brissenden were therefore the whole class. The name Brecon later went to a Hunt-class minehunter, as the article on HMS Brecon (M29) explains, because both classes take their names from British fox hunts.

She measured 296 feet 9 inches overall, driven by two Admiralty three-drum boilers feeding two-shaft Parsons geared steam turbines producing 19,000 shaft horsepower, giving her the speed and manoeuvrability the Hunt class needed for its escort and coastal warfare duties.

Sicily and the Channel War

Under her first captain, Lieutenant David Creagh Beatty, HMS Brissenden began her operational career on Home Fleet duties out of Scapa Flow and Rosyth, escorting the battleships HMS King George V, HMS Howe and HMS Valiant and the carrier HMS Furious through a run of anti-submarine exercises in the spring of 1943, before supporting the Allied invasion of Sicily between May and July that year as part of convoys WS 31/KMS 17 and KMF 18. On 13 July 1943, during this period, she collided with HMS Blankney, sustaining damage to her port bow, an occupational hazard of the crowded, high-tempo waters around an active invasion fleet.

Her part in Husky was busier and shorter than it sounds. She reached the Bark West beachhead on 10 July and went ashore, after a fashion, being sent with HMS Blankney to occupy the little port of Pozzallo. Three days later the two of them collided, and it was a good deal worse than a bent plate: the damage to her port bow structure was serious enough to take her out of the operation altogether. She went to Malta, then home, and spent from 21 August in a commercial yard at Liverpool being put back together. Her Sicily campaign had lasted six days.

By November 1943, under a new captain, Lieutenant the Hon. Douglas Vivian, she had swapped Mediterranean waters for the Arctic, escorting convoys RA 54A, JW 54A, JW 54B and RA 54B between Loch Ewe and the Kola Inlet, a considerably colder and equally demanding chapter in her first year of service.

She returned to English Channel convoy escort and patrol duties through the rest of 1943 and into 1944, and in February 1944 took part in Operation Tunnel, a series of Royal Navy sweeps against German E-boats and other light coastal forces operating in the Channel. On 5 February, in company with HMS Tanatside, HMS Talybont and HMS Wensleydale, she engaged the German torpedo boat T29 and the minesweepers M156 and M206 off the north coast of Brittany, one of several such sweeps mounted under the operation's name that spring.

What she did for the rest of that war is best shown by a list. Between December 1943 and May 1944 she escorted the WP convoys, the coastal traffic running between Portsmouth and the Bristol Channel, at a rate of roughly one every two or three days: WP446, 451, 459, 463, 465, 474, 475, 476, 477, 479, 480, 482, 483, 486, 487, 490, 491, 494, 502, 503, 505, 508, 509, 512, 519. Two days out, a day in, and out again, through a Channel winter, with E-boats coming across from the French ports whenever the weather allowed. It is the least romantic war record imaginable and it is exactly what kept the country supplied.

The March action has a name attached to it. On 15 March 1944, working with HMS Melbreak in defence of convoy WP492 north of Land's End, she intercepted a group of E-boats and damaged S143. The February sweep off Brittany had a longer tail: M156, one of the minesweepers engaged on the 5th, was badly damaged in the action and finished off later in harbour by the RAF at L'Aberwrac'h.

Repelling Torpedo Boats Off Normandy

HMS Brissenden repelled German torpedo boat attacks on 15 March and again on 12 June 1944, working alongside HMS Wensleydale to see off the second attack, which came in the immediate aftermath of the Normandy landings, in which she took part as part of Force B, one of the covering forces protecting the invasion fleet from German naval interference. The attacks were part of a wider campaign by the German 5th Torpedo Boat Flotilla, operating out of Le Havre, which made repeated night sorties against the invasion fleet after D-Day, generally without success beyond the loss of the Norwegian destroyer Svenner on 6 June itself.

She came under air attack during the Normandy operations on 22 June 1944, a reminder that Allied ships off the beachhead faced danger from above as well as from the sea, in a period when German aircraft, though increasingly outmatched, could still mount dangerous strikes against shipping in the crowded invasion anchorages.

After Normandy she went back to convoy work in the South Western Approaches, refitted at Pembroke Dock over Christmas 1944, and in February 1945 joined the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness. That posting is a reminder that the war in home waters did not politely wind down. Atlantic convoys were being re-routed through the Channel, U-boats fitted with schnorkel gear were working the focal points where those convoys converged, and E-boats and midget submarines were laying mines in the Thames Estuary. Escorts were in shorter supply in the last winter of the war than the maps suggest.

A Difficult Peacetime Posting

HMS Brissenden served in the Mediterranean as a reserve vessel with the Eastern Fleet between June 1945 and 1947, latterly under Lieutenant Lionel Lawford, and in this period was assigned to coastal patrol duties off Mandatory Palestine, part of the Royal Navy's difficult and often thankless role attempting to intercept ships carrying Jewish refugees seeking to enter Palestine in defiance of British immigration restrictions in the tense final years of the Mandate, a task that placed British sailors in the middle of one of the most emotionally and politically fraught episodes of the immediate postwar period.

She intercepted the Yagur on 11 August 1946, carrying 758 passengers who met her with passive resistance, and two days later took the Twenty Three, carrying 790, where the resistance was far more desperate. Her largest involvement came on 9 November 1946, when she and HMS Haydon intercepted the Knesset Israel, carrying some 3,845 passengers, the boarding itself unopposed, though the refugees later resisted fiercely when the Royal Navy tried to transfer them at Haifa onto ships bound for internment in Cyprus, a confrontation in which two people were killed and 46 injured.

A Quiet End

HMS Brissenden was decommissioned on 19 June 1948 at Portsmouth and lay there until 1953, when she was moved to the Reserve Fleet at Lisahally in Ulster. She came closer than anyone might expect to a grander retirement than that. At some point in the years that followed she was considered by Kuwait for purchase and conversion into a royal yacht. It came to nothing, and she went onto the disposal list in 1962 instead, which is a shame, because a Thornycroft escort destroyer built to fight E-boats in a Channel winter would have made an unusual royal yacht. She was sold to BISCO on 18 February 1965 for £29,000 and broken up by Arnott Young at Dalmuir on the Clyde, arriving at the yard on 3 March that year. Her battle honours were Atlantic 1943, Arctic 1943, English Channel 1943 to 1945, Sicily 1943, Normandy 1944 and Biscay 1944: six, for a ship that was in commission for just over five years.

Her career, spanning the invasion of Sicily, the Normandy landings and the fraught patrols off Palestine, stands as an eventful record for one of only two ships of her particular Hunt-class variant ever built.