HMS Defiance (A187): The Submarine Depot Ship That Sailed From Holy Loch to Singapore

Laid Down at Clydebank

HMS Defiance began life as HMS Forth, built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, launched on 11 August 1938 and commissioned on 14 May 1939, a Maidstone-class submarine depot ship carrying eight 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns and eight 2-pounder anti-aircraft guns, built specifically to provide maintenance, supplies and accommodation for entire flotillas of submarines rather than to fight independently herself.

At 497 feet long and displacing almost 8,900 tons, she carried a complement of 1,167 officers and men, a floating small town's worth of engineers, torpedomen and stores staff assembled purely to keep somebody else's submarines fighting fit.

Wartime Service in Home Waters

HMS Forth spent most of the Second World War based in home waters, apart from a brief period at Halifax, Canada, in 1941. She moved to Holy Loch on the Firth of Clyde in 1940, and that February sailed from Greenock for Halifax alongside the Polish-crewed troop transport Batory, escorted by the destroyers HMS Hesperus and HMS Hurricane, the submarines operating out of Halifax at the time providing a useful extra layer of protection for convoys against surface raiders.

During 1943, she served as a target vessel for submarine attack exercises in the Clyde area, valuable if unglamorous training work supporting the development of the submarine crews she would otherwise have been supporting in a more conventional depot ship role.

She was adopted by the county of Stirlingshire during that year's Warship Week fundraising campaign, with the adoption plaque today held by the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

Malta, Nuclear Submarines and Singapore

HMS Forth was stationed in Malta during the 1950s, moored at Msida creek, and took part in the June 1953 Fleet Review celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Between 1962 and 1966, she was modified at Chatham Dockyard specifically to support the Royal Navy's new nuclear-powered submarines, a particularly significant adaptation given how recently nuclear propulsion had entered British naval service, with HMS Dreadnought, the fleet's first nuclear-powered submarine, having only commissioned in 1963 and the Valiant class still under construction.

In mid-1966, HMS Forth arrived in Singapore to relieve HMS Medway as depot ship for the 7th Submarine Squadron, and in 1968 she transported the first hovercraft to reach Australia, an unusual cargo for a vessel more usually associated with submarine maintenance.

Becoming HMS Defiance

HMS Forth departed Singapore on 31 March 1971 and reached the United Kingdom on 7 June that year, before being renamed HMS Defiance on 15 February 1972.

That name carried real history. The original HMS Defiance was the last wooden battleship the Royal Navy ever launched, built in 1861 and turned two decades later into a floating torpedo school moored in the Hamoaze off Wearde Quay, near Saltash. As the school grew, successive retired hulks joined her and took on the same name in turn, Defiance II, III and IV among them, until the whole establishment finally moved ashore to Portsmouth in 1955. Seventeen years on, the name returned to the water with a rather more modern job to do.

She went on to serve until 1978 as depot ship for the Fleet Maintenance Base at HM Naval Base Devonport, decommissioning on 1 January 1979 after a role that had kept her useful well into her fourth decade of service.

The End of Service

HMS Defiance was eventually scrapped on 25 July 1985, closing out a career of nearly half a century that had carried her from wartime depot duty on the Clyde through nuclear submarine support work and a Far Eastern posting in Singapore, to a final chapter supporting Devonport's submarine maintenance base under a name with a long tradition of its own within the Royal Navy.