HMS Contest (R12): The Navy's First All-Welded Destroyer

Built Without Rivets

HMS Contest was one of the Co group of the C Class destroyers, ordered in July 1942 as part of the 13th Emergency Flotilla. She was built by J. Samuel White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, and she was different from every destroyer the Navy had built before her: her hull was welded throughout instead of being riveted.

Welding saved weight and time and made a stronger, smoother hull, but it needed new skills and new checks, and White's built new workshops for the job and examined the welds by X-ray. She is recorded as the first all-welded destroyer of the Royal Navy, and welded construction soon became the rule.

She was laid down on 1 November 1943 and launched on 16 December 1944, when her hull was already about ninety five per cent complete. Like the rest of her group she was delayed by the late delivery of her gunnery director, and she was completed on 9 November 1945.

She displaced about 1,825 tons, was 363 feet long, and on her trials made almost 32 knots on 40,000 shaft horsepower, with four 4.5 inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon guns and two sets of quadruple torpedo tubes. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in the Solent the day before she commissioned, within sight of the yard that built her.

She was the tenth ship of a name that went back to 1797; a destroyer Contest had been lost in 1917. The town of Halesowen, then in Worcestershire, had adopted the destroyer Achates during the war, and after Achates was sunk in the Barents Sea in 1942 the town adopted Contest in her place.

Her battle honours, inherited from the earlier ships, are Basque Roads, Burma 1855 and Jutland 1916, and her badge showed two gold fighting cocks.

The Far East

She went out to the Far East with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla, alongside Cossack. In 1947 she was sent to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in the south west Pacific, at the time of the arrests of the leaders of Maasina Ruru, the movement that was challenging British rule on the islands.

On her way home that December she called at Aden as rioting broke out in the town after the United Nations vote to partition Palestine, and landed men to help restore order.

Home Waters

In 1948 she was refitted and equipped to lay mines, and she later served as a torpedo training ship at Portsmouth and with the 6th Destroyer Squadron of the Home Fleet. Post-war refits took away her two after guns and her torpedo tubes in favour of an anti-submarine mortar.

In June 1953 she took her place in the lines at Spithead for the Coronation Review of the Fleet. After the Defence Review of 1957 she was placed in reserve, and she arrived at Grays in Essex to be broken up on 2 February 1960. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.