HMS Caprice: The Last Wartime Destroyer Still on Active Duty

Launched as Swallow, Renamed Caprice

HMS Caprice was built by Yarrow and Company at Scotstoun, her keel laid on 28 September 1942, launched on 16 September 1943 initially under the name HMS Swallow before being renamed, and commissioned on 5 April 1944.

The renaming was not something peculiar to her, and the reason behind it is a small administrative comedy. By 1942 the Admiralty had worked its way to the end of the alphabet naming the wartime emergency destroyer flotillas: the tenth had used up the last available letter. So the eleventh was allocated a scattering of traditional destroyer names from all over the place, Swallow and Spitfire and Ranger among them. Then somebody pointed out that the letter C had fallen vacant, because the original C-class destroyers had been handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy and renamed there. In November 1942 the whole flotilla was renamed accordingly.

So Swallow became Caprice. Spitfire became Cambrian. Ranger became Caesar. Thirty-two ships were eventually built on that basis, four flotillas of eight, known as the Ca, Ch, Co and Cr groups, and every single one of them started life on the order book under a different name entirely. It is why so many of these articles open with the same sentence in a different arrangement, and why a destroyer that spent her career as Caprice has a keel that was laid down for a ship called Swallow.

A C-class destroyer driven by Parsons geared steam turbines producing 40,000 shaft horsepower, she was armed as built with three QF 4.5-inch guns, two 40mm Bofors guns and four 2-pounder guns alongside torpedo tubes and depth charges, an armament substantially updated from 1966 with Squid anti-submarine launchers and a Sea Cat missile system that kept her relevant into the jet and missile age.

Escort Duty and the Japanese Surrender

HMS Caprice served with the 6th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet, escorting the liners Queen Elizabeth and Île de France. The day after VE Day, on 9 May 1945, she and her sister ship HMS Cavalier escorted a German U-boat that had come out to surrender, watched over by a passing RAF Sunderland flying boat, before she was refitted at Portsmouth for the war still being fought against Japan.

She sailed for the Far East that August, one able seaman's log recording only that they had left England for "Destination Unknown." Word of the Japanese surrender reached the ship at Malta on 15 August; the crew marked VJ night properly the following evening with a lighting display so good the captain was complimented on it, "best in the harbour," before Caprice pressed on via Suez, Ceylon and Penang to reach Singapore on 1 October.

The formal moment came on 17 and 18 December 1945 at Kutaradja on Sumatra, now Banda Aceh, where Caprice's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander McKendrick, acted as Senior Naval Officer overseeing the surrender of some 4,000 Japanese troops. A Japanese general and 41 of his officers came aboard to hand over their swords and sign the surrender document, the crew watching, by one account, "the Japs bowing and saluting the Ensign." The general made one request granted before he left: since his own sword was said to be over 600 years old and engraved with the names of every ancestor who had carried it, it was passed instead to the American interpreter present, himself of Japanese descent, so it could stay within a Japanese family.

Not every moment of the deployment was quite so solemn. Weeks later at Batavia, HMS Cavalier's own crew found a spirit warehouse ashore, got thoroughly drunk, and started shooting at Royal Marines and British soldiers; the Commander-in-Chief's signal back was blunt, "Disgrace to Royal Navy," and Cavalier was sent to sea for five days at three knots as punishment, tied up alongside Caprice at the naval base once she returned.

A Dramatic Rescue at Pearson Reef

On New Year's Eve 1960, while transiting between Hong Kong and Singapore, HMS Caprice received an SOS at 0825 from the Panamanian freighter Galatea, aground on Pearson Reef in the Spratly Islands; she reached the reef by 2103 that night, but the sea was too rough for an immediate rescue attempt.

The ship's whaler, crewed by Lieutenant Mike Hare, Leading Seaman Leonard Cromwell and Able Seaman Brian Sessions, went in the next morning and brought back eleven survivors; the remaining seven, along with Galatea's captain, were rescued the following day, though the captain fell into the sea during the operation and drowned, and was later buried at sea. The survivors were landed at Labuan in North Borneo, and Caprice reached Singapore on 5 January.

Hare and Cromwell were both awarded the Queen's Commendation for Brave Conduct, announced in the London Gazette that May, while Sessions received the Royal Humane Society's Bronze Medal.

An Exploding Weapon at Aden

HMS Caprice served with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla at Singapore between 1960 and 1964, followed by service in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, before joining the Beira Patrol in the Mozambique Channel enforcing oil sanctions against Rhodesia between 1966 and 1967, a deployment her own crew remembered less for excitement than for a chronic case of what they nicknamed "condenseritus," failing condensers that left drinking water rationed and faintly salty, forcing the engineers to rig a dinghy and submersible pump under a tarpaulin to chase down passing thunderstorms for fresh water.

The Beira Patrol itself was one of the strangest tasks the Royal Navy has ever been handed, running from 1966 to 1975 and tying up seventy-six ships to stop oil reaching a landlocked country that simply bought it overland instead. It is set out properly in the article on HMS Berwick. Caprice's share of it, judging by her own crew's account, is best remembered as months of hot, monotonous steaming with the drinking water rationed and tasting of the sea.

It was during three weeks spent supporting the Army at Aden, on the way home, that tragedy struck: while a party from Caprice was spending five days alongside the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, a WOMBAT anti-tank weapon exploded during a demonstration, killing four guardsmen and wounding nine spectators, three of them from Caprice's own crew, Sub-Lieutenant John Brigstock, Petty Officer Robert Calver and Petty Officer Cook Norman Richardson.

The weapon that did it is worth naming properly, because the acronym is not a joke somebody made up afterwards. WOMBAT stood for Weapon Of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank. It was a 120mm recoilless rifle, the last of a British family that ran from the original BAT through MOBAT to this one, and the magnesium in the name is the whole point of the design. A recoilless gun works by venting a large part of the propellant gas backwards out of the breech, which cancels the recoil and allows a very large gun to sit on a very light mounting; building that mounting out of magnesium alloy brought the whole thing down to about three hundred kilogrammes, light enough to be towed behind a Land Rover or shifted by its own crew.

The consequence, which every gunner who ever served one knew about, is that a great deal of extremely hot gas and debris comes out of the back of the weapon as well as the front, and there is a danger area behind it as much as in front of it. What actually went wrong at Aden that day is not set out in any published account I can find, and it would be wrong to guess at it. What is recorded is that four Irish Guardsmen were killed, that nine people watching were hurt, and that three of those were sailors off a destroyer who had gone ashore for five days to see how the Army did things.

The passage home was no gentler: Caprice met bad weather the whole way from Suez to Spithead, worst of all through the Bay of Biscay, before finally returning to Portsmouth on 22 February 1967 and going on to complete a round-the-world deployment between 1968 and 1969.

The Last of the Wartime Destroyers

HMS Caprice was finally paid off in 1973, by which point she held the distinction of being the last wartime-built destroyer still in active Royal Navy service, a properly remarkable span given that her keel had been laid down over three decades earlier, during the depths of the Second World War.

Her sister ship outlasted her in a different way, and the story is worth having. On 6 July 1971, off the Firth of Forth, HMS Cavalier and HMS Rapid raced each other to settle a long-running argument about which was the fastest ship in the Royal Navy. The rules were simple: whichever covered the greater distance in two hours won. Cavalier took it by about thirty yards over sixty-four miles, after a safety valve let go on Rapid, and collected the Cock o' the Fleet, which is still fixed to her bridge. Two wartime destroyers, both nearly thirty years old, flat out in a straight line in the North Sea, because somebody wanted to know.

Cavalier is still there. She sits in No 2 Dry Dock at Chatham, the last surviving Royal Navy destroyer of the Second World War out of the ninety-six war emergency destroyers built, and she has been given a second job as the National Destroyer Memorial, to the 11,000 men and 142 Royal Navy destroyers lost between 1939 and 1945. So Caprice was the last of that generation still working, and her sister is the last of it still afloat. Between them they cover the whole story, and one of them is open to the public on most days of the year.

She was scrapped at Queenborough, arriving there in November 1979, bringing to a close the career of a ship that had begun life under a different name, accepted a Japanese surrender, rescued sailors from a Pacific reef, and survived an exploding Army weapon, before finally outlasting every other destroyer of her generation.