HMS Camperdown (D32): Just Missing the War, Then a Steady Cold War Career

Commissioned as the War Was Ending

HMS Camperdown was built by Fairfields, launched on 8 February 1944 and commissioned on 18 June 1945, six weeks after the German surrender and about two months before the Japanese one, too late to see any of the wartime action her Battle-class design had been built for, her first commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander James John Simon Yorke, DSC, taking charge from February 1945.

Before any of that, it is worth saying what Camperdown was, because the article above is about ships called Camperdown and the battle itself has fallen almost entirely out of British memory despite being one of the largest fleet victories the Royal Navy ever won. It was fought off the Dutch coast on 11 October 1797 between Admiral Adam Duncan with twenty-four ships and Vice-Admiral Jan Willem de Winter with twenty-five, which is to say between two fleets of very nearly equal strength, a thing that almost never happened and which is why contemporaries rated it so highly. Duncan did not stop to form a line of battle. He attacked in two columns, leading one himself in Venerable while Vice-Admiral Richard Onslow took the other in Monarch, because his object was to break through the Dutch line and get between it and the shore before the Dutch, whose ships drew less water, could escape into the shoals where he could not follow. It worked, and it was brutal: two hundred and twenty British dead and eight hundred and twelve wounded, five hundred and forty Dutch dead and six hundred and twenty wounded, in a few hours.

What makes the victory extraordinary is what had happened in the six months before it. The Royal Navy had been through the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore that spring and summer, a genuine collapse of authority in which whole fleets refused duty, and at one point Duncan was left with two ships he could rely on to watch the entire Dutch coast. He kept them cruising off the Texel making signals to an imaginary fleet over the horizon, and the Dutch stayed in port. Then, in October, with his ships back and his crews reconciled, he took them out and won. Afterwards he asked the King to pardon the imprisoned Nore mutineers, and a hundred and eighty of them were released. That is a remarkable thing for a victorious admiral to spend his political capital on, and it is the reason his name is on a destroyer of its own; that side of the story is told in the article on HMS Duncan (F80).

The class naming is worth a note as well, because it explains why a Second World War destroyer carries the name of an eighteenth-century action against the Dutch. The Battle class were named, systematically, after British battles: Armada, Barfleur, Trafalgar, Camperdown, Lagos, Finisterre, Gabbard, Matapan, Alamein, Corunna, Dunkirk, Jutland, Agincourt, Hogue and the rest. Some of those names everybody knows. Camperdown is one of the ones that has quietly disappeared from the national memory despite being, at the time, the sort of victory that got a man an earldom and a state funeral. There is a certain irony in the fact that most people who have heard of Camperdown at all have heard of it because of a battleship that rammed the fleet flagship in 1893, rather than because of the battle. The ship that made the name notorious has entirely eclipsed the battle that made it worth having.

A Name With a Dark History

HMS Camperdown's name might sound unassuming, but it belonged first to one of the Royal Navy's most notorious peacetime disasters. The first HMS Camperdown, an Admiral-class battleship, was leading one of two lines of ships that Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon ordered to turn towards each other off the coast of Lebanon on 22 June 1893, a manoeuvre that only worked with far more sea room than the fleet actually had. Rear-Admiral Albert Markham, in command aboard Camperdown, hesitated before complying; Tryon signalled back sharply, "What are you waiting for," and Markham obeyed.

Camperdown's reinforced ram bow tore into the fleet flagship HMS Victoria amidships, and with her watertight doors still open, Victoria capsized and sank in barely ten minutes, her propellers reportedly still turning as she went under. Tryon and 353 of Victoria's crew were lost with her; among those pulled from the water was a young Commander John Jellicoe, who would go on to command the Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland a quarter of a century later. Tryon's own last words on the bridge, "It is all my fault," were borne out by the court martial that followed, though it also found that his own standing orders had given Markham the right to disobey a command that endangered his ship. This D32, the second and last ship to carry the name, arrived half a century later and thankfully kept her own brush with a collision a great deal gentler.

There is a postscript to 1893 that nobody could have predicted. HMS Victoria was found on 22 August 2004, lying in about 140 metres of water off Tripoli, by the Lebanese-Austrian diver Christian Francis, who had been looking for her since 1994, working with the British diver Mark Ellyatt. She is not lying on the bottom. She is standing in it, bow first, with something like thirty metres of her hull driven vertically into the seabed and her stern pointing straight up towards the surface, and she is believed to be the only shipwreck anywhere in the world sitting at ninety degrees. The usual explanation is the weight of that enormous forward turret combined with the momentum of the propellers that were still turning as she went down. She has been standing on her nose in the dark for over a hundred and thirty years, which is a strange sort of memorial to 358 men and one very bad decision.

She displaced 2,325 tons standard and up to 3,430 tons at full load, carrying two twin 4.5-inch gun mounts, a single 4-inch gun, no fewer than fourteen 40mm Bofors guns, ten 21-inch torpedo tubes and a Squid anti-submarine mortar, a heavily armed destroyer built for a conflict that ended before she could join it.

A Postwar Pacific Deployment

HMS Camperdown deployed to the Far East after VJ Day with the 19th Destroyer Flotilla, part of the British Pacific Fleet's continued presence in the region during the delicate early months of the occupation of Japan and the wider process of restoring order across the Pacific theatre, before returning to the United Kingdom in November 1946 by way of a long homeward passage through the Mediterranean, having called at a string of Far Eastern ports along the way.

An Accidental Ramming and a Coronation

HMS Camperdown was refitted in 1950 and recommissioned in May 1953, and that June took part in the Fleet Review on the Solent celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the postwar Royal Navy.

Her return to service was not entirely without incident: in 1953, she was accidentally rammed at Plymouth by HMS Coreopsis, a war-surplus Flower-class corvette that was, at that exact moment, standing in for the fictional HMS Compass Rose in the Ealing Studios film The Cruel Sea, wearing a fake pennant number borrowed from yet another ship entirely. It was an odd way for a Camperdown to be rammed twice in sixty years, this time by a corvette in costume rather than a fleet flagship in earnest, and, happily, with rather less to show for it.

A Modernised Cold War Destroyer

HMS Camperdown underwent a further refit and modernisation at Liverpool between 1956 and 1957, extending her useful service life, and joined the 3rd Destroyer Squadron that December before transferring to the 1st Destroyer Squadron in 1960.

On 21 September 1958, during a NATO exercise, a fire broke out in her boiler room, damaging electrical cables, a notably serious incident for any warship at sea but one that HMS Camperdown's crew brought under control without lasting harm to the ship.

The boiler room fire of 21 September 1958 deserves more than a line, because a fire in the machinery spaces is the thing that frightens a ship's company more than almost anything else. A steam warship's boiler room contains fuel oil under pressure, hot surfaces well above the ignition point of that oil, and a dense mass of electrical cable running through it, all in a compartment several decks down with two ways out. A fuel leak onto a hot casing produces a fire that spreads along the cable runs and takes the lighting and the machinery controls with it, which is exactly what happened here: the report is of electrical cables damaged. Getting that under control means men going down into a smoke-filled compartment in breathing apparatus while the ship is at sea on a NATO exercise, and the fact that it is recorded as an incident rather than a disaster is entirely down to them. Camperdown was thirteen years old and went on serving for another four.

A Steady Retirement

HMS Camperdown was paid off at Devonport on 9 April 1962, her Cold War service having run its course, and spent the next eight years in reserve before finally being towed to Faslane for scrapping in September 1970, closing out the career of a destroyer that had entered service just too late for the war she was designed to fight, but that went on to serve the postwar and Cold War fleet reliably for the better part of two decades regardless. Unlike her more famous near-namesake Campbeltown, no later Royal Navy ship has yet been given the name Camperdown again.

Eight years in reserve and then a tow to Faslane is a quiet ending, and it is worth knowing what that meant in practice. She paid off at Devonport in April 1962, at seventeen years old, with a modernisation only five years behind her, and then sat. The Royal Navy of the 1960s was shedding gun destroyers as fast as it could commission missile ships, and a Battle without the radar-picket conversion that some of her sisters received had nothing the fleet particularly needed. Faslane in 1970 was a shipbreaking yard as well as a submarine base, and a great many of the wartime and immediately postwar fleet were taken apart there. Unlike Armada, Aisne, Agincourt and several others, no later ship has carried the name. It has now been out of the Navy List for over sixty years, which for a battle of that size is a strange fate, and probably a permanent one.