HMS Chequers (R61): Leading Malta's Destroyer Squadron Through the Palestine Patrols

A Destroyer Commissioned at War's End

HMS Chequers was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, commissioning on 28 September 1945, a Ch-subclass C-class destroyer entering service just after the Second World War had ended.

The name was no accident: Chequers is the Prime Minister's official country residence, gifted to the nation in 1917 by Arthur Lee, Lord Lee of Fareham, and itself named after the medieval "de Chekers" family who once owned the estate, so this destroyer went to sea flying, in effect, the coat of arms of Downing Street's weekend retreat.

As originally built she carried a rear 'X' gun turret, later replaced in a 1954 modernisation by two Squid anti-submarine mortars, a common upgrade path for C-class destroyers as the Royal Navy's priorities shifted increasingly towards anti-submarine warfare in the early Cold War years.

Patrolling the Waters Off Palestine

HMS Chequers took part in operations preventing illegal immigration into Palestine between 1946 and 1947, part of the Royal Navy's difficult and often thankless task of intercepting ships carrying Jewish refugees attempting to reach Palestine in defiance of British restrictions during the final, deeply fraught years of the Mandate, work that placed British sailors squarely in the middle of one of the most emotionally and politically charged episodes of the immediate postwar period.

It is worth following the intercepted ships past the moment of interception, because that is where the policy actually bit. A ship stopped at sea was boarded, taken into Haifa and impounded, and her passengers were put into the detention camp at Atlit on the coast south of the port. From 13 August 1946 the policy changed and they were deported instead, out of Palestine altogether, to camps in Cyprus at Karaolos near Famagusta, at Nicosia, at Dhekelia and at Xylotymbou. Something like fifty-two thousand people passed through those camps, taken off thirty-nine ships, and about two thousand two hundred children were born behind the wire. The last detainees did not leave until 10 February 1949, by which time the state they had been trying to reach had existed for nine months. Between August 1946 and May 1948 the Royal Navy intercepted more than fifty thousand people making the attempt, and the great majority of them were survivors of the camps in Europe.

What that meant for the ships' companies is the part that tends to get left out of both versions of the story. The sailors doing it had no say in the policy and every share of the job, and the job was to put a boarding party over the side onto a crowded, unlit, often unseaworthy vessel packed with civilians who had every reason to resist and nothing left to lose. They were met with bottles, tins, steam hoses and worse. They then had to get several thousand exhausted people ashore without anybody being killed, which on the whole they managed. Many of them found it a thoroughly wretched business and said so. The campaign as a whole, and what it was like to be on the receiving end of it, is set out in the articles on HMS Bigbury Bay (K606) and HMS Enard Bay (K435).

Her tally included the steamer Tel Hai, intercepted 140 miles out to sea on 27 March 1946 with 736 refugees aboard, and, on 13 May that year, the Max Nordau, carrying 1,754 more, captured jointly with HMS Jervis.

Her most famous moment by far came in July 1947, when she took station at high speed off the coast of Palestine flying the pennant of the task force commander himself, one of a small armada, alongside the cruiser HMS Ajax, the destroyers Chieftain, Childers and Charity, and the minesweepers Providence and Rowena, that surrounded the former Chesapeake Bay steamer President Warfield, freshly renamed Exodus 1947 by her Haganah crew. Chequers's own role was to coordinate rather than collide: it was Chieftain and Childers that carried out the actual ramming on the night of 18 July, while more than 4,500 refugees sweltered below decks and the ship's American crew needled their pursuers by playing "Rule, Britannia!" over the tannoy. The battered Exodus was eventually escorted into Haifa under the whole task force's watch, a single, wretched incident that did more to turn world opinion against British policy in Palestine than any diplomatic despatch ever managed.

The Exodus affair does not end at Haifa, and the rest of it is set out across two other articles here. The passengers were transferred to three transports and taken to Port-de-Bouc in the south of France, where they refused to land and stayed in the holds for twenty-four days in a heatwave, escorted by HMS Cardigan Bay. From there they were taken on to Hamburg and put ashore by force in the British zone of occupied Germany, with HMS Burghead Bay among the escorts. Photographs of British soldiers carrying survivors of the camps back into camps went round the world, and the argument about the Mandate stopped being one most people were willing to defend.

Leading the Fleet at Malta

HMS Chequers went on to become leader of the 1st Destroyer Squadron based at Malta between 1948 and 1954, a role of genuine responsibility that placed her at the head of one of the Royal Navy's key Mediterranean destroyer formations during a formative period of the early Cold War, when Malta remained one of Britain's most strategically important overseas naval bases.

The squadron she led was an unusually tidy piece of organisation. The 1st Destroyer Squadron in the Mediterranean consisted of Chequers as leader with Chaplet, Charity, Cheviot, Chevron, Chieftain, Childers and Chivalrous, which is the entire Ch group of the C class, all eight of them, working together under one commander. Ships of a class were normally scattered across the fleet as need dictated, so a complete sub-class in one squadron is rare, and it made for a genuinely homogeneous formation: identical machinery, identical armament, identical handling and a common pool of spares. It also meant that when the Exodus task force was assembled in July 1947, three of the ships in it, Chieftain, Childers and Charity, were Chequers's own squadron-mates. One of the others is covered in the article on HMS Cheviot (D90).

Malta in those years deserves a word too, because it was the reason a destroyer squadron was there at all. The island had been the headquarters of the Mediterranean Fleet since the middle of the nineteenth century, and after 1945 it remained the pivot of British power in the region: a dockyard capable of docking anything the Navy owned, a fleet headquarters, and the base from which Cyprus, Egypt, the Levant and the whole central Mediterranean could be reached in a day or two. Something like a third of the working population of the island depended on the dockyard. For a ship's company it was as close to a home port as an overseas station has ever come, with families living ashore, and it is precisely why a young officer and his wife could set up house at Guardamangia and live something resembling an ordinary married life. All of that ended within a generation. The Mediterranean Fleet was wound down in the 1960s, the dockyard was handed over in 1979, and Malta stopped being a British naval base after a hundred and eighty years.

Her most famous crew member arrived in 1949: a young officer named Philip Mountbatten, the future Duke of Edinburgh, was appointed her First Lieutenant that year. He and his wife, the then Princess Elizabeth, set up home at Villa Guardamangia on the island, in what both later remembered as some of the happiest, most ordinary years of their married life, the last stretch before her accession to the throne made anything resembling a normal naval posting impossible ever again.

It is worth following that posting through to its end, because of how it finished. First Lieutenant of a destroyer is the second in command, the officer who actually runs the ship day to day, and by every account he was good at it and thoroughly enjoyed it. In September 1950 he got what every naval officer wants: his own command, the anti-submarine frigate HMS Magpie. He took her round the Mediterranean, to Izmir, Livorno, Tripoli, Athens, Monaco and Gibraltar, and Princess Elizabeth came aboard for the passage of the Corinth Canal.

That appointment ended in July 1951, and it was the last one. The King's health was failing, and although Philip was promoted Commander the following year and eventually held the highest rank in the service, he never again served at sea in a job of his own. He was thirty years old. Malta was where he had been a serving officer with a ship and a wardroom and a proper job of work to do, and it is not hard to see why he and the Queen both spoke of those years as they did. Chequers was the last ship he served in as somebody's second in command rather than as the Duke of Edinburgh.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Chequers underwent her interim modernisation in 1954 before being placed into operational reserve that same year, and was eventually added to the disposal list in 1964.

Ten years in reserve and then a tow to Newport is the least remarked part of her record and it is not unusual. She was modernised in 1954, which cost real money, and then went straight into operational reserve at the age of nine and never went to sea in earnest again. That looks perverse until you count the ships: the Royal Navy came out of the war with more destroyers than it could crew, spent the 1950s converting the older ones into anti-submarine frigates and modernising the newer ones, and then discovered that the limiting factor was people rather than hulls. A ship in operational reserve was maintained and could in theory be brought forward, and a great many were kept in that state through the 1950s against a war that did not come. Chequers sat until 1964 and went to John Cashmore's yard at Newport in July 1966. She had been in commission for nine years and laid up for twelve.

She was sold to John Cashmore Ltd and scrapped, arriving at their facility in Newport, Wales, on 23 July 1966, closing out a career defined less by any single dramatic action than by years of steady, responsible squadron leadership during one of the tensest periods of the twentieth century.