HMS Concord (R63): The Yangtze Escort the Navy Kept Quiet About

From Corso to Concord

HMS Concord was one of the Co group of the C Class destroyers, the last of the Royal Navy's wartime emergency destroyers, with four 4.5 inch guns, torpedo tubes and a speed of 36 knots. She was built by John I.

Thornycroft at Woolston, Southampton, and launched on 14 May 1945, a week after the war in Europe ended, as Corso. Like several of her sisters she was renamed before she was finished, and as Concord she was commissioned on 20 December 1946.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken ten days earlier, on 10 December 1946, as she ran her trials with a hoist of signal flags at her masthead.

In 1947 she went out to the Far East to join the 8th Destroyer Flotilla at Hong Kong, with Cossack, Consort, Cockade and their sisters, and she would stay there for ten years. Her ship's company took to the place: the association's history has a photograph of her sailors giving a Christmas party for the children of an orphanage.

The Yangtze, July 1949

On 20 April 1949 the frigate Amethyst was shelled and driven aground by Communist batteries in the Yangtze, on her way up to Nanking, and attempts by Consort, the cruiser London and the frigate Black Swan to reach her were beaten off with heavy loss.

For more than three months Amethyst lay trapped in the river, her men on short rations in the summer heat, while the Communists demanded that the British admit to having started the fighting. The full story is told in the article on HMS Amethyst.

On the night of 30 July, under her new captain, Lieutenant Commander John Kerans, Amethyst slipped her cable and made a dash for the sea, a hundred and forty miles down the river in the dark, past the batteries that had trapped her. Her last and most dangerous obstacle was the forts at Woosung, where the Yangtze meets the sea below Shanghai. Concord was waiting for her.

As Amethyst came down the river, Concord went into it, dashing some forty miles upstream, in the words of one of her men, Derek Hodgson, a stores accountant aboard, to meet her. On the morning of 31 July the two ships met.

Concord brought stores and fuel oil to the sloop, which had almost run out of both, and help for her exhausted crew, and then escorted her down past the heavy guns of the Woosung forts, ready to engage them if they opened fire. They did not.

That morning Kerans made his famous signal to the Commander in Chief: "Have rejoined the fleet south of Woosung. No damage, no casualties. God save the King."

A Visit That Never Happened

The celebrations that followed in Britain were for Amethyst. Concord's part was kept quiet. China's coastal waters were a sensitive matter, and the papers show that no publicity was to be given to the fact that a British destroyer had entered Chinese waters that morning.

For many years the official line was that Concord had stayed outside the river, and her men were not allowed to talk about where they had been.

Korea

When the Korean War broke out in 1950 the 8th Flotilla went north, and Concord served through the war on the blockade and bombardment of the Korean coast. In October 1951, under Commander Charles Mills, later Vice Admiral Sir Charles Mills, she bombarded Kojo and then, on Trafalgar Day, the port of Wonsan.

The North Korean gunners ashore were active and accurate, and she was straddled more than once. While she was bombarding Songjin a shell hit her Y turret, killing two of her men and wounding four.

Rosyth and the Breakers

She left the Far East in 1957 after ten years there, and came home to end her days as a static training ship at HMS Caledonia, the artificer apprentices' school at Rosyth. She arrived at the breakers at Inverkeithing, across the Forth, on 22 October 1962.

The Clasp

The men of Amethyst, Consort, London and Black Swan were awarded the clasp Yangtze 1949 to the Naval General Service Medal. Concord's men were not, though the Admiralty had originally recommended the clasp for all the ships involved, and the Honours and Decorations Committee did not accept it for her.

Long after, when the papers were opened and showed that Concord had been in the river, her surviving veterans formed the HMS Concord Association and asked for the clasp to be given. By 2009 there were about twenty of them left.

The Ministry of Defence held that actual risk and rigour had to be present to qualify for a medal, and that potential risk was not enough: Concord had not been fired upon. Members of Parliament and of the Scottish Parliament took up the case, and in 2012 an independent review of military medals under Sir John Holmes accepted that she had entered the Yangtze on 31 July 1949, but still declined to recommend the clasp.

The case was debated in Westminster Hall in July 2013, and in 2015 the Ministry restated its decision while saying that it recognised the courage of Concord's crew. The association's own history of the ship, The Life and Times of HMS Concord, compiled by Peter Lee-Hale, Derek Hodgson and Alan Ausden from official papers and her men's memories, tells her story in their words. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.