HMS Childers (R91): Leader of the Ch Destroyers and the Exodus 1947

The Leader

HMS Childers was the leader of the Ch group of the C Class destroyers. The C Class groups were each built with one ship fitted out to carry a flotilla captain, the Captain (D), and his staff, with extra cabins and office space, and in the Ch group that ship was Childers.

She was ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow, but the Barrow yard was overloaded with work, and the order was moved to William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton on the Clyde. She was launched in February 1945 and commissioned on 19 December 1945.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken three days before, on 16 December 1945, as she lay at anchor on the Clyde.

Malta and Palestine

In 1946 she joined the 1st Destroyer Squadron at Malta, with Chequers, Cheviot, Chieftain and the rest of the group, and in 1947 she was on the Palestine Patrol, intercepting the ships that carried Jewish refugees from Europe towards Palestine against Britain's restrictions on immigration; the patrol is described in the article on Chieftain.

The Exodus 1947

The most famous of all those ships was the Exodus 1947, an old American river steamer, the President Warfield, which sailed from France in July 1947 with about 4,500 refugees aboard, many of them survivors of the death camps. She was shadowed across the Mediterranean by the cruiser Ajax and a flotilla of destroyers, and Childers was one of the six.

In the early hours of 18 July 1947, some twenty miles off the coast of Palestine, the destroyers closed her and put boarding parties aboard. Childers' Lieutenant R. J. G. MacPherson is recorded as commanding the boarding party.

The refugees resisted with whatever they had, the fighting lasted for hours, and three people aboard the Exodus were killed.

The ship was taken into Haifa, and the British government decided to make an example of her: instead of being sent to Cyprus, the refugees were shipped back to France, and when they refused to land there, on to Germany. The world watched, and the episode did great damage to Britain's standing and helped build the support that led, within a year, to the end of the mandate and the founding of Israel.

Reserve

Childers came home in 1950 and went into reserve. In 1954 she was given the same refit as her sisters, with two Squid anti-submarine mortars in place of her after gun, but she was never commissioned again.

She spent her last years laid up at Gibraltar, and in 1963 she was towed to La Spezia in Italy to be broken up. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.