HMS Cheviot (D90): From Palestine Patrols to a Final Job as a Torpedo Target

A Destroyer Laid Down at Linthouse

HMS Cheviot was built by Alexander Stephens and Sons at their Linthouse shipyard, her keel laid on 27 April 1943, launched on 2 May 1944, and commissioned on 11 December 1945, a Ch-subclass C-class destroyer, one of 32 such vessels built for the Royal Navy during the war.

Alexander Stephen and Sons is worth more than a line, because the firm that built her was older than most navies. The Stephens had been building ships at Burghead on the Moray Firth from about 1750, worked their way down the east coast and across to the Clyde over the following century, and bought the Linthouse estate just west of Govan in 1869, launching their first ship from the new yard in 1870. Between 1914 and 1918 Linthouse turned out sixteen torpedo boat destroyers and, when the Admiralty ran short of aircraft, wooden fuselages and wing sections as well. Cheviot was one of the last generation of destroyers they built. In 1968 the firm was folded into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders along with Fairfield, Connell, John Brown and Yarrow, and when that consortium was liquidated the Linthouse yard closed in 1972 and was demolished. A shipbuilding business that had lasted two hundred and twenty years did not outlive the ship it launched in 1944 by very much.

She displaced 1,885 tons standard and up to 2,566 tons at deep load, armed with four 4.5-inch guns in superfiring pairs fore and aft, a twin 40mm Bofors mount, two quadruple 20mm Oerlikon mounts and a quadruple 21-inch torpedo tube mount, driven by geared steam turbines producing 40,000 shaft horsepower for a designed speed of 36 knots, achieving 32.3 knots on trials.

The Ch group is a good illustration of how warship design works when everything is a trade. They were a development of the preceding Ca class, and the improvement asked for was a better dual-purpose fire control system, meaning one that could put the 4.5-inch guns onto an aircraft as effectively as onto a ship. The Royal Navy had spent the first half of the war discovering that a destroyer which cannot shoot at aeroplanes is a liability, so the requirement was entirely sensible. The catch is that fire control equipment is heavy and it goes high up, which is the worst place in a destroyer to add weight. Something had to come out to pay for it, and what came out was one of the two banks of torpedo tubes and part of the anti-submarine outfit. So a class designed in the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic ended up trading away torpedoes and depth charges to buy anti-aircraft gunnery. That was the right call for 1943. By 1954, when the same ships were having their after turret cut out to make room for Squid mortars, the pendulum had swung all the way back.

The wider C class had one of the strangest dispersals of any British destroyer class, largely because so many of them were finished into a world that no longer needed them. Thirty-two were ordered across four groups, the Ca, Ch, Co and Cr. Four of the Cr group were handed to Norway before they were completed and never wore a British pennant at all. Five more were sold to Pakistan in the 1950s, among them HMS Charity and HMS Creole. HMS Crescent was rebuilt into something else entirely, emerging in 1956 as a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate. And HMS Contest, launched three months before Cheviot, was the first British destroyer built with an all-welded hull rather than a riveted one, which is a genuine landmark buried in a class nobody thinks about. Cheviot herself was one of the ones that simply got on with it.

Patrolling Palestine

HMS Cheviot was assigned to the 1st Destroyer Squadron at Malta in 1946, and in 1947 took part in operations preventing illegal immigration into Palestine, part of the Royal Navy's difficult and politically fraught task of intercepting ships carrying Jewish refugees attempting to reach Palestine in defiance of British Mandate restrictions during its final, tense years.

The squadron she joined at Malta was an unusually tidy arrangement. The 1st Destroyer Squadron in the Mediterranean in 1947 consisted of Chequers as leader with Chaplet, Charity, Cheviot, Chevron, Chieftain, Childers and Chivalrous, which is to say the entire Ch group, all eight of them, in one squadron under one commander. Ships of a class were normally scattered across the fleet as need dictated, so having a complete sub-class working together is rare and it made for a genuinely homogeneous squadron: identical machinery, identical guns, identical handling, identical spares. The flagship's side of that commission is described in the article on HMS Chequers, and one of her sisters' in the article on HMS Chevron.

Her first captain is worth a note for a reason that is easy to miss in a date. Commander Robert Alastair Ewing, DSC, was appointed to Cheviot on 1 May 1945, seven months before she commissioned, and he stayed until 16 June 1947. That gap is the standing-by period, the months a captain and a nucleus crew spend living in lodgings near the yard while their ship is finished around them: watching the machinery go in, arguing with the builders, learning the ship as a set of drawings before she is a ship at all. It is one of the least visible and most useful parts of the job, and it means the man who took Cheviot to Malta had known her for two years by the time she got there. It also means Ewing had been appointed to command a destroyer intended for the Pacific war, and took her instead into a blockade of the coast of Palestine.

Commanded at the time by Commander Robert Alastair Ewing DSC RN, she was one of many C-class destroyers drawn into a fleet-wide effort that, across the whole of the Mandate period, saw Royal Navy ships arrest some 49 vessels attempting to run the blockade and detain in the region of 66,000 would-be immigrants, unglamorous and politically fraught work for everyone involved.

The best known single episode of that whole campaign, the interception of the Exodus 1947 in July of that year, is set out in the article on HMS Chequers, who flew the task force commander's pennant that night. It is not a comfortable part of Royal Navy history and it is not improved by leaving it out.

It is worth being clear about what the patrol was and was not, because the summary version flattens it. It was not a handful of interceptions but a sustained naval blockade of a coastline, run for three years: something over a hundred thousand people attempted the crossing in roughly a hundred and twenty ships making a hundred and forty-two voyages, most of them small, elderly and dangerously overcrowded. The people aboard were overwhelmingly survivors of the Holocaust, living in displaced persons camps in Europe with nowhere else to go. The ships' companies had no say in the policy and every share of the job, which meant going over the side onto a crowded unlit vessel full of civilians who had every reason to resist, and then getting several thousand exhausted people ashore without anybody being killed. The campaign as a whole is set out in the articles on HMS Bigbury Bay (K606) and HMS Enard Bay (K435), and it is not a part of the Royal Navy's history that is improved by summarising it politely.

A Modernised Destroyer, Renumbered

HMS Cheviot underwent an interim modernisation in 1954 that replaced her rear gun turret with two Squid anti-submarine mortars, and at some point in her career her pennant number changed from R90 to D90, a routine administrative change common to many Royal Navy destroyers of her generation as pennant numbering conventions evolved.

The 1954 modernisation was not a minor refit and it says a good deal about where the Navy thought the next war was. Taking out X turret meant giving up a quarter of a destroyer's main armament, permanently, in a ship that was only nine years old. What went into the space was Squid, a three-barrelled ahead-throwing mortar that fired a triangular pattern of large depth bombs out in front of the ship, fuzed automatically to burst at the depth the sonar had already worked out. Ahead-throwing mattered because a conventional depth charge attack requires the escort to pass over the submarine, at which point her own sonar loses contact for the crucial last minute; a mortar firing forward keeps the contact all the way in. Squid is described in detail in the article on HMS Duncan (F80). The Soviet submarine fleet was growing very fast in the early 1950s, and a gun that could shoot at aircraft was suddenly worth less than a mortar that could kill a submarine.

The pennant change is worth explaining once, because it happened to every destroyer of her generation and it confuses a great many ship records. During the war the Royal Navy used a set of flag superiors, the letter in front of the number, that had grown up piecemeal: destroyers wore G, H, I, L or R depending on when and how they had been ordered, frigates and sloops wore K, L or U, and none of it was systematic. In 1948 the whole thing was rationalised. K, L and U all became F for frigate. D became the destroyer letter, R went to aircraft carriers, S to submarines and M to minesweepers.

Where two ships would have ended up with the same number, an extra digit was put in front, which is how HMS Wakeful went from R59 to D159 and HMS Wager from R37 to D237. Cheviot was lucky and simply changed her letter. The system worked well enough that NATO adopted it, with adjustments, and it is the reason a British frigate today wears an F, a destroyer a D and a submarine an S. It is one of the few pieces of Admiralty administration that the rest of the world copied.

She went on to serve with the 8th Destroyer Squadron in the Far East between December 1956 and October 1959, part of the substantial Royal Navy presence maintained east of Suez during this period of continuing regional tension.

The Far East commission from December 1956 to October 1959 put her in the 8th Destroyer Squadron, a formation that had been out there since 1947 and would last until May 1963, when it was renamed the 24th Escort Squadron. It was a busy corner of the world and almost none of what it was busy with makes it into a ship's record. The Malayan Emergency was still running and would not be declared over until 1960. Singapore was the base, with the enormous dockyard at Sembawang behind it. There was piracy in the South China Sea, a permanent guard commitment at Hong Kong, a Commonwealth naval presence to be maintained in ports from Japan to Ceylon, and the constant, unrecorded business of exercising, showing the flag and being available. A destroyer on that station spent her commission steaming a very long way and appearing in nobody's despatches, and that is the shape of most of the Cold War at sea.

A Final Role as a Target

HMS Cheviot was decommissioned in March 1960, and before her eventual disposal was used as a target for homing torpedo trials, most likely involving the Mark 20 "Bidder", the passive-seeking anti-submarine torpedo the Royal Navy had under development throughout this exact period, and which, for all the punishment target hulks like Cheviot absorbed on its behalf, turned out too slow to reliably catch a modern submarine and was withdrawn from front-line service not long after. She was sold to Thos. W. Ward and arrived at their yard in Inverkeithing for scrapping on 22 October 1962, closing out the career of a destroyer whose final job, quite literally being shot at to help develop better weapons, was a fittingly practical end for a ship that had spent her career in the unglamorous but essential work of routine fleet and patrol duties.

Her end deserves its proper sequence, because being shot at is not the same as being sunk. She paid off in March 1960 and was expended as a target for homing torpedo trials, which for a hull of her size means being hit with practice heads and instrumented rounds rather than being blown apart; the object is to learn what the weapon does, not to lose the target on the first shot. When the trials people had finished with her she was still afloat and still worth something as scrap, and she was sold to Thos. W. Ward and towed to Inverkeithing, arriving on 22 October 1962. Fourteen years and ten months of commissioned life, of which the last two and a half were spent being aimed at. It is a strange thing to put on a ship's record, and it is also the reason a generation of Royal Navy submariners had a torpedo whose behaviour somebody had actually measured.