HMS Cowdray (L52): Chichester's Destroyer and a Bomb on the First Day of Torch

Built at Greenock

HMS Cowdray was ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared, one of the Type II Hunt Class escort destroyers of the first War Emergency Programme. The Hunts were small, quick to build escorts of about a thousand tons with six 4 inch guns that could fire at aircraft as well as ships, and like the rest of the class she was named after a fox hunt, the Cowdray in West Sussex.

Her badge was a black spear inside an upturned horseshoe with a red sun in front of it. She was laid down on 30 April 1940 and launched on 22 July 1941, and while she was fitting out, in March 1942, the city of Chichester adopted her during its Warship Week.

She was completed on 29 July 1942, the only Royal Navy ship ever to carry the name, under Lieutenant Commander Cyril North. The photograph at the top of this page was taken that month, when she was brand new.

The Oilers at Spitsbergen

She worked up at Londonderry in August, carrying out anti-submarine exercises in Lough Foyle, and joined the Londonderry Escort Force. Her first real operation was in the Arctic. After the disaster of PQ 17 in July, the next Russian convoy, PQ 18, was to have a far bigger escort, and destroyers burn fuel fast.

So a secret refuelling base was set up in the fjords of Spitsbergen, and in September Cowdray sailed from Iceland as part of Force P with the destroyers Oakley, Windsor and Worcester, escorting the fleet oilers Blue Ranger and Oligarch up to the anchorage. There the oilers waited for the escorts of PQ 18 and the returning QP 14 to come in and fill their tanks.

On 21 September, the job done, she brought Blue Ranger back to Iceland. It gave her the battle honour Arctic 1942.

The Curacoa

On 2 October she was one of the escorts of the liner Queen Mary, coming into the Clyde with about ten thousand American troops, with the old cruiser Curacoa and her sister Bramham. Off the north of Ireland the liner, zig-zagging at full speed against U-boats, ran into the cruiser and cut her in two, and under orders not to stop for anything she steamed on with a damaged bow.

Cowdray was among the escorts that went back to the scene to pick up survivors, but only 101 of the Curacoa's 439 men were saved.

Algiers

On 25 October she sailed from the Clyde in the escort of KMF 1, one of the first troop convoys for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, and she was allocated to the Eastern Task Force for the landings at Algiers.

On 8 November, the day the troops went ashore, she was patrolling off C Beach, east of Cape Matifou, protecting the transports, when German aircraft attacked with torpedoes and bombs. The torpedoes missed, but a bomb struck her forward on the starboard side and exploded under the hull below her forward boiler room.

Seventeen of her men were wounded or killed, five of them fatally, and the ship was left disabled.

The next day the minesweeper Algerine towed her inshore and she was beached seven miles from Algiers, so badly damaged that she was prepared for scuttling in case she could not be saved. She was not abandoned.

On 16 November she was hauled off and towed into Algiers harbour, and for the next five months the dockyard there worked to make her fit to go to sea, renewing her plating and making her fuel tanks usable again. When she went out on trials in April 1943 it was found that her back had been strained: her hull had a distinct hog amidships and she sat low in the water.

On 24 April she sailed for home with the convoy MKS 12, and on 22 May she arrived at Chatham and was paid off into the hands of the dockyard.

Two Years at Chatham

The repairs took more than a year. For a time she was earmarked for transfer to the Royal Hellenic Navy, as Bramham had been, but in January 1944 the plan was dropped.

She was recommissioned in August 1944 under Lieutenant Denis Beckley, who had already won both the DSO and the DSC, and after working up at Scapa Flow she joined the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness in November.

Her job now was the North Sea and the approaches to the Thames, where the convoys carrying supplies to the armies in Belgium and Holland were attacked at night by E-boats and, from the turn of the year, by German midget submarines laying mines and firing torpedoes.

On 10 January 1945 she was attacking one of the midget submarines when she ran over a submerged wreck and damaged her asdic dome and propeller shafts, and she was back at Chatham for repairs until April.

She earned three more battle honours from these years, Atlantic 1943, English Channel 1944 and North Sea 1944-45, and in all her wartime service she was operational for barely three months before the bomb and for a few months more at the end.

The East Indies and the Nore

In May 1945 she was refitted for the war against Japan and sailed for Trincomalee to join the 18th Destroyer Flotilla of the East Indies Fleet. She arrived as the war ended, served only a few weeks out there, and was home again in November 1945.

She then joined the Nore Local Flotilla, and on the night of 12 January 1950 she was one of the ships that went to the help of the submarine Truculent, which had sunk in the Thames estuary after a collision with a Swedish tanker. Most of Truculent's crew escaped from the sunken boat, only to be swept away by the tide in the dark, and very few were saved.

She paid off into reserve at Chatham in 1951, was moved to Portsmouth in 1953 and then to Hartlepool, and was placed on the disposal list in 1959. She arrived in tow at J J King's yard at Sunderland on 3 September 1959 to be broken up.

Of her sisters whose stories are told here, Blankney, Garth and Cotswold saw the same North Sea war against the E-boats. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.