HMS Cavendish: From a Wartime Flotilla Leader to Two Decades East of Suez

Launched as Sibyl, Commissioned as Cavendish

HMS Cavendish was built by John Brown and Company on the Clyde, her keel laid on 19 May 1943 under the name Sibyl, before being renamed and launched as HMS Cavendish on 12 April 1944, commissioning that December.

The name she ended up with belonged to a man most people have never heard of, and he deserves better. Thomas Cavendish sailed from Plymouth on 21 July 1586 with a hundred and twenty-three men in three ships: the Desire, a hundred and twenty tons and eighteen guns, which he had built for the purpose; the Content, sixty tons; and a forty-ton store ship with the splendid name Hugh Gallant. What made the voyage different from the two circumnavigations before it is that he meant to do it. Magellan's expedition went round the world because it could not get back the way it had come, and Drake's did so largely by improvisation; Cavendish set out from the Devon coast intending to sail round the world, and did, which makes his the first deliberately planned circumnavigation in history and the Desire only the third ship ever to finish one.

He also made it pay, which is more than either of the others managed on that scale. On 14 November 1587, off the coast of California, he took the Santa Ana, a six-hundred-ton Manila galleon carrying the year's trade from Asia to New Spain, and the haul was the richest that had until then fallen into English hands. He came home by the Philippines, the Moluccas, Java and the Cape of Good Hope, with one ship left out of three, and anchored at Plymouth on 9 September 1588. He was twenty-eight years old. Four years later he sailed again, and died at sea.

The date he came home is the detail that lifts the whole thing. Cavendish had been out of touch with England for more than two years, and while he was working his way up the Atlantic in the summer of 1588 the Spanish Armada came up the Channel, was broken by fireships off Calais and driven north to wreck itself on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. He sailed into Plymouth about a month after it was over, into a country transformed by an event he knew nothing about, with a hold full of Spanish treasure taken from the other side of the world. That campaign is set out in the article on HMS Armada (D14), another destroyer of the same generation as this one, named for the fleet Cavendish missed by a month.

A C-class destroyer built as a flotilla leader, she displaced 1,730 tons standard and up to 2,575 tons at deep load, carrying four QF 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns, a twin 40mm Bofors mount, six 20mm Oerlikon guns and two quadruple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts, a well-armed destroyer commissioning into the fleet in the war's final months.

Escorting the Fleet, Then Arriving Just as the War Ended

HMS Cavendish worked up with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow through January 1945, joining Force 3 for an aircraft minelay off Karmøy Sound on the Norwegian coast, Operation Gratis, before screening escort carriers for a second air-mining strike off Skatestrømmen the following month, Operation Selenium. Through the spring she took on grander duties still, escorting the battleship HMS Duke of York from Liverpool to Scapa Flow, then the battlecruiser HMS Renown and the battleships HMS Anson and HMS Nelson on their own passages between Scapa Flow, Portsmouth, Gibraltar and Malta, a flotilla leader trusted with shepherding some of the most powerful ships in the fleet.

She was then transferred to Far Eastern service in June 1945 and joined the East Indies Fleet at Trincomalee that August, arriving in theatre right as Japan's surrender brought the Second World War to its close, much like several of her C-class sister ships commissioned in the same period; with the shooting over, she spent that same month serving as a gunnery target ship off Fremantle, Western Australia, an oddly deflating job for a destroyer that had spent the winter escorting the Royal Navy's most powerful capital ships.

A Modernised Cold War Career

HMS Cavendish spent the best part of a decade laid up in the Reserve Fleet at Portsmouth after the war before being selected for modernisation, work completed in 1955 that extended her service life into the Cold War fleet. She recommissioned for the 6th Destroyer Flotilla in 1956, serving on Mediterranean deployments, including a 1958 commission alongside her sister ships HMS Contest and HMS Carysfort, and even called at the remote North Atlantic islet of Rockall in 1959.

The Rockall call deserves more than a passing mention, because Rockall in 1959 was very nearly the newest piece of British territory in existence. It is a granite stump about twenty-five metres across, sticking out of the North Atlantic two hundred miles west of the Hebrides, and it had belonged to nobody at all until 18 September 1955. On that day a Royal Navy helicopter from the survey ship HMS Vidal winched a naval officer, two Royal Marines and a civilian naturalist onto it, they cemented a brass plaque to a ledge, hoisted the flag, and Rockall became British. It was, and remains, the last territorial expansion of the British Empire.

The reason was not romance. Britain was about to start firing the Corporal, its first guided nuclear-capable missile, from the range at South Uist out over the North Atlantic, and somebody in the Ministry of Defence worked out that an unclaimed rock directly downrange was an ideal place for the Soviet Union to park observers and instruments. Annexing it was cheaper than watching it. Four years later Cavendish went and had a look at what the fuss had been about, which is a thing Royal Navy ships have done at Rockall ever since, generally in filthy weather and usually without being able to land.

She joined the Far Eastern Fleet at Singapore in 1960, and that August called at Fremantle, Western Australia, where her captain presented the city with a small commemorative plaque now held in its civic collection, a quiet echo of her earlier, less welcome visit as a gunnery target off the same coast fifteen years before. From 1960 to 1964 she took an active part in the Indonesian Confrontation, part of the substantial Royal Navy presence maintained east of Suez during a period of continuing decolonisation and regional tension across Southeast Asia, before returning to reserve at Portsmouth in March 1964, her long overseas service drawing to a close.

The Confrontation itself is set out in more detail in the article on HMS Brighton. It was an undeclared war that Britain fought for three years, largely won, and has almost entirely forgotten, and a great many ships of Cavendish's generation spent their last useful years on it.

The End of Service

HMS Cavendish was paid off on 1 January 1965, but her story did not end there and then: she spent the following eighteen months shuttling between reserve and an unfinished refit before being towed to Chatham in June 1966, finally placed on the disposal list in 1967 and sold to Hughes Bolckow for scrap on 2 August that year, arriving under tow at the breaker's yard in Blyth, Northumberland later that same month.

The paying-off pennant in that photograph is worth explaining, because it is one of the older customs still going. When a ship comes home at the end of a commission she flies a very long streamer from the masthead, traditionally a foot of it for every day she has been in commission, sometimes with a bladder or a balloon at the outer end to keep it clear of the water, and by convention the ship keeps it until the last man leaves. For a commission of two or three years that is a pennant hundreds of feet long, streaming astern as she comes up harbour. It is the ship telling everybody watching that she is finished, and it is the last thing most of her company will remember about her.

Her career, spanning the very last months of the Second World War through to the mid-1960s, took her from escorting the Royal Navy's mightiest battleships off Norway to shepherding the fleet through two decades of dramatic global change, from the end of one world war to the reshaping of Britain's presence across an empire that was, by the time she was finally sold for scrap, very nearly gone.