HMS Dainty (D108): Blankets and Tents for an Earthquake, Then a Collision at Portsmouth

Constructed at Cowes

HMS Dainty was built by J. Samuel White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, her keel laid on 17 December 1945, launched on 16 August 1950, and completed on 26 February 1953, a Daring-class destroyer displacing 2,830 tons standard and up to 3,820 tons at full load, armed with six 4.5-inch guns, six 40mm Bofors guns, torpedo tubes and a Squid anti-submarine mortar, and capable of a remarkably fast 34 knots with a crew of 286 officers and ratings.

The name had been used twelve years earlier and had ended badly. The previous HMS Dainty was a D-class destroyer ordered from Fairfield of Govan in February 1931 and completed just before Christmas 1932 at a cost of a little over two hundred and twenty-nine thousand pounds. She had a hard and successful Mediterranean war: she depth-charged and sank the Italian submarine Uebi Scebeli on 29 June 1940, fought at Punta Stilo ten days later in the first fleet action of the Mediterranean campaign, and ran Malta convoys through the worst of it. On 24 February 1941 she was lying in Tobruk harbour when a German aircraft put a thousand-pound bomb into her; the fires reached her after magazine and it went up. Sixteen men were killed and eighteen wounded. So when the keel of the new Dainty was laid at Cowes in December 1945, the name had been out of use for less than five years, and a good many people in the Navy remembered exactly why.

The Darings were the end of a line, and everybody knew it at the time. They were the largest and most heavily armed ships any Commonwealth navy ever called a destroyer, so large that the Admiralty spent a while insisting they were not destroyers at all but Daring-class ships, and they were the last British destroyers designed around guns rather than missiles. The 4.5-inch Mark 6 turrets were fully automatic and power-worked, which no British destroyer had carried before. And there is a detail in the class that says a great deal about where the Royal Navy was in 1949: the eight British ships were built in two halves as a deliberate experiment, four of them, Dainty among them, wired on the traditional direct current system, and the other four on alternating current. The Navy was working out how to electrify a warship, and it settled the argument by building both and seeing.

It is worth adding what the Darings were competing with, because the Admiralty's embarrassment about the word destroyer was not vanity. At two thousand eight hundred tons standard they were bigger than most of the light cruisers of 1918, they carried six 4.5-inch guns in three power-worked automatic turrets, and they had a proper action information organisation below decks. What they did not have was any answer to an aircraft coming in fast and low with a stand-off weapon, because such a thing did not exist when they were drawn. Within a decade of Dainty commissioning, the Royal Navy had ordered the County-class guided missile destroyers, and the argument about guns was over. The Darings were, in that sense, the finest examples of a type that had just stopped being the right answer, which is a thing that happens to warships more often than anybody likes to admit.

Her build dates are worth reading twice as well. Her keel was laid on 17 December 1945, four months after the Japanese surrender, and she was not completed until February 1953: seven years and two months on the stocks and in the fitting-out basin. That was not incompetence. Postwar Britain had no steel, no money and a shipbuilding industry being asked to earn foreign currency with merchant tonnage, and warship construction went to the back of every queue. A destroyer ordered for one war arrived in time for a different one entirely.

Mediterranean Service and Earthquake Relief

Upon commissioning, HMS Dainty joined the Mediterranean Fleet as part of the 2nd Destroyer Squadron, alternating between the Mediterranean and British home waters throughout her early years of service.

The electrical experiment shaped her whole career in a way the bare facts conceal. The four direct current ships, Dainty among them, were kept together and sent to the Mediterranean as what became the 2nd Destroyer Squadron, and the four alternating current ships formed the other squadron, the two of them swapping between the Mediterranean and Home Fleets. That was not tidiness for its own sake: a squadron of ships with identical electrical systems can share spares, share technicians and share the accumulated knowledge of what goes wrong, and mixing them would have doubled the burden on every base that had to support them. It also means that when the Royal Navy eventually decided that alternating current was the future, which it did, Dainty was on the wrong side of an argument she had been built to help settle. Both the ships that went to Peru and served into the twenty-first century were AC ships. The experiment produced a clear answer and Dainty was part of the control group.

One episode in her early career is odder than anything else in her record and says a great deal about the Navy of the mid-1950s. She was laid up in reserve in December 1955, barely three years after commissioning. Then in February 1956 she was brought back into service, not because anybody needed her, but as an exercise to test whether the arrangements for getting a ship out of reserve actually worked. She was manned, stored, steamed, found to function, and put back into reserve again in April. It is the naval equivalent of a fire drill conducted with a real fire engine, and it tells you two things: that the reserve fleet was large enough and important enough to be worth testing, and that nobody was entirely confident it would work if it were ever needed in earnest. She went back to the Mediterranean properly later that year.

On 29 April 1957, HMS Dainty delivered emergency earthquake relief to Fethiye, Turkey, carrying some 2,000 blankets and 300 tents along with medical supplies and a team of doctors, a notably valuable humanitarian contribution to a town struck by a pair of earthquakes in quick succession, putting her considerable capacity and speed to good use in the aftermath of a natural disaster rather than any military engagement.

What she arrived into is worth setting out. There had been two earthquakes, not one: the first at seventeen minutes past nine on the evening of 24 April 1957, magnitude 7.1, lasting twenty-five seconds, and the second at half past four the following morning, magnitude 7.3 and lasting a full minute, both with their epicentres in the sea between Rhodes and the Turkish coast. Sixty-seven people were killed, and three thousand two hundred buildings were damaged or destroyed, which was about ninety per cent of everything in Fethiye. The Turkish Red Crescent got the first relief in on 26 April. Dainty came alongside on the 29th, which for a warship that had to be told, loaded and sent from somewhere else in the Mediterranean is quick.

A Collision at Portsmouth

HMS Dainty's record was rather less distinguished on 2 April 1958, when, coming alongside in Portsmouth Harbour, she collided with the destroyer HMS Solebay, damaging both ships, an accident of the kind that, however embarrassing, was hardly unusual among busy naval ports crowded with ships coming and going on their various duties. Dainty entered refit at Portsmouth a fortnight later, on 16 April, the collision presumably featuring somewhere on the repair list.

The Solebay collision is worth a moment of sympathy rather than amusement. Portsmouth Harbour has a narrow entrance, a strong tidal stream through it, and in 1958 it held a very great many ships in a small area of water. A Daring was three thousand eight hundred tons at full load with a lot of freeboard and a lot of windage, and coming alongside in that harbour, with a tide under you and another destroyer where you want to be, is a genuinely difficult piece of ship handling that is done by eye and judgement. Ships hit each other in Portsmouth with some regularity, and the reason the incidents get remembered is that they were written down, not that they were rare. Both ships were repaired. Dainty went into refit a fortnight later, and it is fair to assume that the bill was amended accordingly.

Modernisation and Far East Service

HMS Dainty underwent major refits in 1958 and 1959, and again between 1962 and 1964, removing her torpedo tubes and simplifying her weapons systems to reduce the maintenance burden they placed on her crew, a common enough modernisation approach for destroyers of her generation as newer technology and changing naval priorities rendered some of their original armament less essential. She recommissioned on 20 January 1959 into the 2nd Destroyer Squadron of the combined Home and Mediterranean Fleets.

Between 1965 and 1969, HMS Dainty served across the Mediterranean, the West Indies and Far Eastern waters, a particularly wide-ranging final chapter to her operational career.

The last chapter is the most interesting one and it usually gets a single sentence. Between 1965 and 1969 she was working the Mediterranean, the West Indies and the Far East, which is three stations and most of the world for a ship in her last commission, and it was a period in which all three were busy. In the Far East, Confrontation with Indonesia had only just ended and the withdrawal from east of Suez was being argued about in London. In the West Indies the Royal Navy kept a guardship on permanent station for hurricane relief and to reassure a string of colonies that were becoming independent countries at a rate of about one a year. In the Mediterranean the fleet was shrinking and Malta's future as a base was already in question. A sixteen-year-old gun destroyer sent to all three in four years was being used, in effect, as a general-purpose ship because there were no longer enough ships to specialise.

The End of Service

HMS Dainty was paid off for disposal at Portsmouth on 31 July 1969, and was sold on 1 January 1971, broken up at Cairnryan, closing out a career of some sixteen years that had carried her from ceremonial Mediterranean deployments through genuine humanitarian relief work to a truly global final tour spanning three different oceans.

Cairnryan, where she was broken up, deserves a word too. It sits on Loch Ryan in Galloway and it was built during the war as a military port, a secret alternative to the Clyde and the Mersey in case those were bombed out of use; it handled the concrete caissons for the Mulberry harbours and, after the war, the assembly of surrendered U-boats for Operation Deadlight. When it was no longer needed it became a shipbreaking yard, and a long list of famous ships ended there, the aircraft carrier Eagle and the cruiser Blake among them. There is a certain neatness to a warship built at Cowes in the aftermath of one war being taken apart at a jetty built for the same war, by a firm whose entire business existed because Britain had built more ships than it could afford to keep.

Two of her sisters had a great deal longer. Diana and Decoy were sold to Peru in 1969, the same year Dainty paid off, and became BAP Palacios and BAP Ferre. Palacios served until 1993. Ferre was not decommissioned until 2007, by which time she was fifty-four years old and had spent thirty-eight of those years under the Peruvian flag, more than twice as long as she ever served the Royal Navy. Both of them, as it happens, were alternating current ships.