HMS Caradoc (D60): Bolshevik Destroyers, Canadian Gold, and an Admiral's Flag at Colombo

Built at Greenock

HMS Caradoc was one of the four ships of the Caledon group of the C Class light cruisers, the design whose beginnings are described in the article on HMS Caroline.

She was ordered from Scotts of Greenock on 8 December 1915, laid down on 21 February 1916 and launched on 23 December 1916, and the photograph at the top of this page shows her fitting out alongside the quay at Scotts' yard in 1917, under the cranes, with the frames of another ship rising on the slip behind. She was completed on 16 June 1917 and joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.

Her group's name ship, Caledon, has her own article on these pages.

The Grand Fleet and the Baltic

In August 1917 she ran aground on Fair Isle, and that November, by her own record, she was with the cruisers at the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight. When the war ended she was sent to the Baltic, where the newly independent Estonia was fighting for its life against the Bolsheviks.

In December 1918, with her sister Calypso, she gave gunfire support to the Estonian troops in the Gulf of Finland, and on 26 December, with Calypso and three destroyers, she took part in capturing two Bolshevik destroyers, the Spartak and the Avtroil, off Reval. They surrendered without firing back, and were handed over to the Estonian navy. The story is told more fully in the article on Calypso.

Between the Wars

From 1919 she served with the Mediterranean Fleet, including spells as guardship in Turkish and Greek waters in the troubled years after the war. In 1926 she went out to the China Station, and in 1928 she was sent to the America and West Indies Station to relieve the cruiser Dauntless, which had run aground off Halifax, visiting ports in South America and on both coasts of North America.

After another commission in China from 1930 to 1934 she went into reserve, and in 1938 and 1939 was the training ship for boy seamen at Devonport.

Gold for Canada

In August 1939 she was brought forward with a crew of reservists as flagship of the 11th Cruiser Squadron for the King's review of the Reserve Fleet in Weymouth Bay, and stayed in commission for war. In September she covered the convoys carrying the British Expeditionary Force to France.

In October she sailed for the West Indies, and on 12 October joined the battleship Revenge escorting the cruisers Emerald and Enterprise, which were carrying British gold to Canada for safe keeping, one of the first of the great shipments of Britain's reserves across the Atlantic. They reached Halifax on 17 October.

Two Blockade Runners

She went on to Bermuda to join the 8th Cruiser Squadron under Captain Eric Longley-Cook. Acting on sighting reports from Orion and the Canadian destroyer Saguenay, she went after the German tanker Emmy Friedrich, which had slipped out of Tampico in Mexico in the hope of getting home to Germany.

Late on the night of 24 October 1939, in the Yucatan Channel, Caradoc's boarding officer identified her, and within minutes her crew had opened the sea cocks and set her sinking. Caradoc picked up the German crew and put a salvage party aboard after midnight, but the flooding could not be stopped, and the tanker sank at five in the morning.

She then needed long repairs, and went for them through the Panama Canal to the Canadian dockyard at Esquimalt in British Columbia. Back in the Caribbean in 1940, she patrolled off Martinique, where the Vichy French had warships and gold, to stop French merchant ships slipping in or out.

On 11 December 1940 the Dutch sloop Van Kinsbergen intercepted the German merchant ship Rhein in the Straits of Florida; her crew set her on fire rather than let her be taken, and Caradoc came up and sank the burning wreck with gunfire.

In May 1941 she escorted the carrier Illustrious, on her way to repairs in the United States after being bombed off Malta, across part of the Atlantic, and that autumn she was herself refitted in the United States Navy Yard at Brooklyn.

Madagascar and the Indian Ocean

In July 1942 she sailed round the Cape for the Indian Ocean, and in September she was with Force A, with Warspite, for the final stage of the occupation of Madagascar, held by the Vichy French. On 9 and 10 September she and the minelayer Manxman landed a party of Royal Marines at Hellville on the island of Nosy Be.

In October she relieved her sister Capetown as guardship in the Persian Gulf, where the oil and the supply route to Russia had to be protected, and through the winter of 1942 she patrolled the Strait of Hormuz from anchorages at Bandar Abbas and Khasab Bay.

In 1943 she escorted convoys between Bombay and Aden, ran between the ports of Madagascar, and in June she went to Durban to be fitted out as a gunnery training ship.

Flagship at Colombo

In March 1944, worn out after nearly thirty years, she arrived at Colombo to serve as an accommodation ship. Her captain from April 1944 was Captain Joe Baker-Cresswell, who in May 1941, in command of the destroyer Bulldog, had captured the U-boat U-110 with her Enigma machine and codebooks intact, one of the great intelligence coups of the war.

She had one more distinction to come. When the British Pacific Fleet was formed in November 1944, Admiral Sir Arthur Power, Commander in Chief of what was now the East Indies Fleet, moved his flag from the battlecruiser Renown, which was going home, and at eight in the morning of 22 November hoisted it in Caradoc, and the old cruiser remained the fleet flagship at Colombo until the end of the war.

She sailed for home in October 1945, paid off at Devonport, and was broken up at Briton Ferry in April 1946.