HMS Cotswold (L54): Five Years on the East Coast Convoys

Built at Scotstoun

HMS Cotswold was one of the first group of Hunt Class escort destroyers, ordered from Yarrow at Scotstoun in April 1939 and named, like all the class, after a fox hunt, in her case the Cotswold Hunt of Gloucestershire.

She was laid down on 11 October 1939, launched on 18 July 1940 and completed on 16 November 1940, the second ship of the name, with four 4 inch high-angle guns in twin mountings, a multiple pom-pom and depth charges. The photograph at the top of this page shows her in 1941, in a bold disruptive camouflage that breaks up the outline of her hull and funnel.

The East Coast

She joined the 16th Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich in December 1940, and for most of the next four and a half years her work was the escort of the convoys that ran up and down the east coast of Britain, through the narrow swept channel between the minefields, under attack from aircraft and E-boats. The route and its dangers are described more fully in the article on her sister Garth. Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Peter Knowling.

On 1 March 1941, off the Humber, she collided with the naval trawler St Donats, which sank. That summer she escorted the minelayers laying the East Coast mine barrier, the great field that protected the convoy route from the seaward side.

In February 1942 she escorted the cruiser Cumberland down the coast from Rosyth to Sheerness, and in March the people of North Cotswold in Gloucestershire adopted her.

Mined off Orford Ness

On 20 April 1942, off Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, she set off a mine. It exploded beneath her stabiliser compartment, and she flooded badly and lost all power. Four of her men were missing.

Coastal Forces craft took off her wounded, and the destroyer Leeds took her in tow, later relieved by tugs and a salvage vessel. She was beached off Shotley, near Harwich, to stop her sinking, refloated on 3 May and towed round to Chatham, where she was under repair until the spring of 1943.

She was back on the convoys in May 1943, but on 24 October she was badly damaged again in a collision with the destroyer Montrose, with her boiler rooms, engine room and gearing room flooded, and she spent the next six months under repair.

Normandy

She returned to service in May 1944, just in time for the invasion of Normandy, and was attached to Follow-up Force L. On 5 June, with the corvettes Narcissus and Oxlip, she escorted convoy L1, eighteen tank landing ships, from the Thames Estuary to the Solent and on to the beachhead, where she arrived on D-Day.

For the rest of June she escorted the shuttle of convoys between the Thames and the beaches, before going back to the North Sea. In September she was damaged in another collision, this time with a merchant ship, and repaired at Immingham.

On 15 January 1945, with the destroyer Curzon, she fought off an E-boat attack on a convoy off the Dutch coast, one of the last of the long E-boat war. Her battle honours are North Sea, English Channel and Normandy.

The End

She paid off after the war and was laid up in reserve at Harwich and later Barrow, and in 1956 she was hulked at Harwich. She was sold in August 1957 and arrived at Grays in Essex to be broken up on 11 September 1957. Her sisters Cleveland and Garth have their own articles, and the other Hunts are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.