HMS Ceres (D59): From the Grand Fleet to Berbera and the Beaches of Normandy

The Ceres Group

HMS Ceres gave her name to the Ceres group of the C Class light cruisers, five ships that improved on the Caledon group before them by moving one of their guns to a raised position forward of the bridge. She was laid down by John Brown and Company at Clydebank on 11 July 1916, launched on 24 March 1917 and completed on 2 June 1917, and joined the 6th Light Cruiser Squadron of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.

Her motto was Tu ne cede malis, yield not to misfortune.

The Baltic and the Mediterranean

At the end of 1918 she was sent to the Baltic with the British squadron supporting the new governments of Estonia and Latvia against the Bolshevik fleet, the campaign in which her sisters Calypso and Caradoc captured two Russian destroyers.

In 1919 she joined the 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean, and stayed with it for most of the next ten years, including spells in the Black Sea in support of the White Russians. On 2 April, probably in 1923, she was damaged in a collision with the American destroyer Fox at the entrance to the Bosphorus.

In January 1928, when her sister Caledon collided with an Italian merchant ship in the Aegean, Ceres towed her into Piraeus.

From 1929 she spent most of the next ten years refitting or in reserve at Chatham and Devonport, apart from a few months back in the Mediterranean in 1932. Plans to convert her into an anti-aircraft cruiser, like Carlisle, were approved but never carried out.

The photograph at the top of this page belongs to these inter-war years.

The Northern Patrol

In August 1939 she was brought forward with a crew of reservists for the King's review of the Reserve Fleet at Weymouth, and stayed in commission.

She escorted five convoys carrying the British Expeditionary Force to France, and in November joined the Northern Patrol, the line of cruisers and armed merchant cruisers that watched the waters between Scotland, Iceland and Norway for German merchant ships trying to get home. Under her wartime captain, Captain E. G.

Abbott, she patrolled the Iceland and Faroes gap from Sullom Voe and Scapa. On the night the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi was sunk by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, 23 November, Ceres was stationed as a night striking force to attack the German ships if they came through, and afterwards she joined the cruisers sent to search for them.

The small C Class cruisers were found to be too wet and too short-legged for the northern winter, and in February 1940 she was sent east.

Berbera

By the time Italy entered the war in June 1940 Ceres was in the Indian Ocean, escorting convoys from Bombay to Suez through the Red Sea. In July, with the Australian cruiser Hobart, she searched the Eritrean coast for the Italian submarine Perla, reported stranded, and was attacked by Italian bombers; Perla had in fact already got back to Massawa.

In August the Italians invaded British Somaliland. The small British garrison fought a delaying action at the Tug Argan pass and was then withdrawn through the port of Berbera.

On 15 August Ceres was one of the ships, with Carlisle, Caledon, the Australian cruiser Hobart and the destroyers Kandahar and Kimberley, that took off the troops and civilians, more than seven thousand people in all, and carried them to Aden. Two days later she shelled an Italian column on the coast road.

Kismayu and the Indian Ocean

In February 1941 the British struck back from Kenya into Italian Somaliland. Ceres, with Colombo and the cruiser Shropshire, blockaded the port of Kismayu, and then joined Force T, with the carrier Hermes and Hawkins, to support the advance.

On 14 February the German merchant ship Uckermark broke out of Kismayu, and Ceres caught her; her crew scuttled her as the cruiser approached, and though Ceres took her in tow she could not be saved and sank that afternoon.

In March Ceres landed troops and supplies at Merca on the Somali coast, and on 30 April she saw the Indian minesweeping trawler Parvati blown up on a mine off the Italian coast and picked up her survivors. For the next two years Ceres escorted the great WS troop convoys up the east coast of Africa, relieving among others the battlecruiser Repulse, and in 1942 she joined the Eastern Fleet.

In September 1943, worn out, she was withdrawn and sent home.

Normandy

She was reduced to an accommodation ship at Plymouth, but in the spring of 1944 she was chosen for a last task. Her 6 inch guns and pom-poms were taken out, extra Oerlikons fitted, and she was converted to serve as depot ship for the Gooseberry breakwater off the American beaches, east of St Martin de Varreville.

She sailed for the beachhead on 8 June, and from the 9th she served as the control ship for all northbound sailings from the American sector, organising the endless traffic of empty landing ships and transports heading back to England, while her sister Capetown controlled the southbound ships.

In July she was released; the cruiser Durban had been sunk as a breakwater off the British beaches a few miles to the east.

She spent her last months as an accommodation ship at Portsmouth, and arrived at Blyth to be broken up on 12 July 1946. Normandy 1944 was added to her battle honours, alongside Guadeloupe, Martinique and San Domingo from the eighteenth century ships of her name. In March 1942 she had been adopted by the people of Luton.