HMS Chaplet (R52): From Malta and Suez to a Collision in the Cod War

Too Late for the War

HMS Chaplet was one of the eight Ch group destroyers of the C Class, the last of the wartime emergency destroyers, with four 4.5 inch guns, torpedo tubes and a speed of over 30 knots. She was built by John I.

Thornycroft at Woolston, Southampton, launched in July 1944, and commissioned on 24 August 1945, nine days after the Japanese surrender. The photograph at the top of this page shows her under way on 13 August 1945, as she was being completed.

Her sisters Chequers, Chevron and Charity have their own articles on these pages.

Malta

Like most of the Ch group, she spent her working life in the Mediterranean. In the early 1950s she served with the 1st Destroyer Squadron at Malta, the Mediterranean Fleet's destroyer force, in the years when the fleet was still the Navy's largest overseas command.

In 1954 she was given an interim modernisation to fit her for the submarine threat of the Cold War: her X gun mounting aft was taken out and replaced by two Squid anti-submarine mortars, which threw their bombs ahead of the ship onto a contact held by her sonar.

In the autumn of 1956 she took part in the Anglo-French operation at Suez, when the Mediterranean Fleet escorted the invasion force to Port Said and covered the landings.

The Cod War

In September 1958 Iceland extended its fishing limit from four to twelve miles, and Britain refused to recognise it. British trawlers went on fishing inside the new limit, and the Royal Navy sent warships to protect them from the Icelandic coastguard, which tried to arrest them.

It was the first of the Cod Wars, and the Navy's part in it was known as Operation Mint; the story of another destroyer on that patrol is told in the article on HMS Vigo.

In May 1959 Chaplet was on fishery protection duty off Iceland when she and the Icelandic patrol vessel Óðinn closed the same British trawler at the same time, and the two ships collided. Óðinn's lifeboat was smashed. Iceland protested to London that the destroyer had rammed her deliberately.

Chaplet's captain put the blame on a misjudgement by Óðinn, and the Admiralty, confirming that there had been an incident, said it appeared to have been an error of seamanship. Collisions of this kind, between warships, coastguard vessels and trawlers manoeuvring close together, were a feature of all three Cod Wars.

The End

Chaplet was laid up in 1961 and broken up at Blyth in Northumberland in 1965. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.