HMS Cavalier: Britain's Last Surviving Wartime Destroyer, Now a Memorial to Eleven Thousand Sailors

A Destroyer Laid Down at Cowes

HMS Cavalier was ordered under the name HMS Pellew before being renamed to conform with her seven "Ca" group sisters, and was built by J. Samuel White and Company at East Cowes, her keel laid on 28 March 1943, launched on 7 April 1944 by Lady Sibell Glyn, and commissioned on 22 November that year, a C-class destroyer driven by Parsons geared steam turbines producing 40,000 shaft horsepower. Much of her construction, including a hull that pioneered welding at the bow and stern while keeping traditional riveting amidships for strength, was carried out by women working in place of the men who had gone off to fight.

She was armed with three 4.5-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns and two quintuple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts, later replaced by Squid anti-submarine mortars, and from 1964 fitted with a GWS20 Seacat surface-to-air missile launcher, an armament that evolved substantially across her long service life.

Rescuing a Scattered Arctic Convoy

In February 1945 HMS Cavalier was in action off Norway, screening the cruiser HMS Devonshire and escort carriers on Operation Selenium to lay mines in the Skateströmmen channel and destroy enemy shipping, followed by Operations Shred and Groundsheet providing fighter cover for minesweepers and aircraft mining strikes further up the coast.

Her most celebrated wartime action followed close behind. Convoy RA 64 left the Kola Inlet on 17 February 1945 and was attacked by U-boats and aircraft before a hurricane, combining force-12 winds with ice, scattered it entirely on 23 February. Cavalier was one of three destroyers, alongside HMS Myngs and HMS Scorpion, sent from Scapa Flow to reinforce the escort, round up the scattered merchantmen and bring the convoy safely home; thirty-one of the original thirty-four ships reached the Clyde, a real achievement given the ferocity of the U-boat and air threats that regularly devastated Arctic convoys, and one that earned HMS Cavalier her sole Battle Honour, "Arctic 1945."

What that convoy had already been through before the hurricane found it is worth stating. On 17 February, the day RA 64 sailed, the corvette HMS Bluebell was hit in the stern by an acoustic homing torpedo from U-711. Her own depth charges went up with the hit and she sank in under thirty seconds. One man came out of her alive, Albert Holmes of Southampton, from a ship's company of around eighty. The sloop HMS Lark was torpedoed by U-968 the same day and was a total loss. Then the weather arrived, and the weather on RA 64 is generally reckoned the worst any Arctic convoy ever endured, which is a considerable claim in that company.

The grim comedy of it is that the hurricane was the safest thing that happened. Scattered merchant ships in a force 12 are almost impossible for a submarine to attack, so once the convoy came apart the U-boats lost it as surely as the escorts did. Cavalier and the other two destroyers sent up from Scapa spent days finding ships one at a time and pushing them back into some sort of order, and thirty-one of thirty-four got home. That is what her single battle honour, Arctic 1945, is actually for: not a gun action, but rounding up a broken convoy in the worst sea anybody in it had ever seen.

She went on to the Far East, joining her sister ships HMS Caesar and HMS Carron off Surabaya, Java from 1 November 1945, first evacuating internees from the town and later bombarding the coast in support of the army during the battle there, before responding to the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny at Bombay in February 1946 and further service with the British Pacific Fleet.

That mutiny is one of the largest events in this whole series to be given a single clause anywhere, and it deserves the sentence it never gets. On 18 February 1946 every rating below chief petty officer at HMIS Talwar, the Royal Indian Navy's signal school in Bombay, refused duty. The immediate grievances were food, conditions and the way Indian ratings were spoken to by British officers. Within a day it had spread to Castle Barracks and to the ships lying in Bombay harbour, and within three days to Calcutta, Madras, Karachi and Vizagapatam. In the end more than twenty thousand ratings in seventy-eight ships and shore establishments were involved, some of them with the guns manned.

What ended it was not the Royal Navy. Sardar Patel met the president of the sailors' strike committee and gave assurances that nobody would be victimised, and Jinnah publicly backed Patel's call to stop; the ratings gave in on 23 February. Both Congress and the Muslim League then distanced themselves from the whole affair, having grasped rather quickly what an armed force outside anybody's political control would mean for the country they were about to inherit. The mutiny is now widely argued in India to have been one of the things that convinced London it could no longer rely on Indian forces to hold India. Eighteen months later the British left.

Cavalier's part in it was to be one of the British warships sent to Bombay while it was going on, which is an uncomfortable thing to have on a service record and an entirely ordinary one. She had spent the previous November bombarding Surabaya in support of an infantry assault on an Indonesian city, as described in the article on HMS Caesar (R07). The war had been over for six months and the ships that had fought it were being used, one after another, to hold together an empire that had already gone.

Nuclear Tests, and a Speed Race

HMS Cavalier was modernised at Thornycroft's yard between 1955 and 1957, receiving new radar and revised armament, and returned to service protecting the great ocean liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth on their wartime-scale trooping voyages before taking part in Operation Grapple Y between March and April 1958, serving as intruder patrol ship during Britain's hydrogen bomb tests at Christmas Island. She deployed in support of RAF operations at Gan Island in the Indian Ocean between August and September 1959, followed by a troop transport deployment to Brunei in December 1962 amid the unrest there, and later enforced the United Nations oil embargo against Rhodesia on the Beira Patrol.

Grapple Y deserves its proper description as well, because it was not one of a series of routine trials. On 28 April 1958 an RAF aircraft dropped a bomb off Christmas Island in the Pacific with a yield of about three megatons. It is the largest nuclear weapon Britain has ever detonated, it remains so, and it was the test that worked: most of the yield came from fusion rather than fission, which is what makes a device a hydrogen bomb rather than a very large atomic one. It put Britain into the thermonuclear club and it is a direct reason the country still has a deterrent today.

Cavalier's job at it was intruder patrol, which means keeping unauthorised shipping out of an enormous area of ocean around the test site. Many thousands of British service personnel took part in the nuclear test programme across the 1950s and 1960s, and a great many of them spent the following sixty years arguing with their own government about what it had done to their health. There was no official recognition of any kind until November 2022, seventy years after the first British test, when a Nuclear Test Medal was finally instituted. A good many of the men who watched from the deck of a destroyer in April 1958 did not live to be given one.

In July 1971, in a rather more light-hearted episode, HMS Cavalier raced her sister ship HMS Rapid over 64 miles off the Firth of Forth and won, averaging 31.8 knots and earning herself the nickname "The Fastest of the Greyhounds," a fitting demonstration of the raw performance her wartime-era steam turbines could still deliver, decades into her service life.

The margin is the good part. Over sixty-four miles she beat Rapid by roughly thirty yards, and only after a safety valve let go aboard Rapid, so the title was arguably decided by a fitting rather than a hull. Nobody in either ship cared. Cavalier took the Cock o' the Fleet for it, and it is still fixed to her bridge where visitors can see it. Her sister HMS Caprice was the last of the wartime destroyers still working; Cavalier is the last of them still here.

A Collision Under Tow

On 21 May 1964, while under tow to Gibraltar, HMS Cavalier collided with the Liberian tanker Burgan, sustaining bow damage that required a replacement bow to be fitted at Devonport, while a crew member of the tanker suffered head injuries requiring airlift to hospital, a particularly serious incident that nonetheless left HMS Cavalier's long career largely undisturbed.

The Last of Her Kind

Approved for disposal in December 1971, HMS Cavalier was formally paid off on 6 July 1972 after steaming 564,140 miles, by which point she held the distinction of being the last surviving British Second World War destroyer still afloat in the United Kingdom, every other wartime destroyer having already been scrapped or lost.

Rather than let that unique status slip away, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten of Burma led a five-year campaign to save her, and the newly formed Cavalier Trust bought her for £65,000, handing her over on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1977, in Portsmouth. At one point during her later wanderings the alternative on the table was reportedly a Malaysian theme park; supporters fought her case in Parliament instead, and she opened as a museum ship in Southampton in August 1982, relocated to Brighton in October 1983, and moved on to Hebburn dry dock on the River Tyne in 1987. She finally left the Tyne under tow by the tug Sun London on the evening of 21 May 1998, reaching the Medway early on the 23rd to crowds watching her arrive in time for that year's Navy Days, and settling into Chatham Historic Dockyard's No. 2 dry dock, the very dock in which HMS Victory herself was built.

A National Memorial

Lower decks opened to the public in August 2001, and in November 2007 HMS Cavalier was officially designated as the National Destroyer Memorial, commemorating the 142 Royal Navy destroyers and roughly 11,000 sailors lost during the Second World War; a bronze monument by the sculptor Kenneth Potts, carrying a Roll of Honour listing every one of those 142 lost ships, now stands alongside her. It is a properly fitting final role for the last surviving ship of her kind, allowing visitors to walk the decks of a real wartime destroyer while honouring the memory of the many hundreds of her sister ships and their crews who never came home.