HMS Diamond (D35): The Yard's First All-Welded Destroyer, Twice in Collisions

A First for Welded Construction

HMS Diamond was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, launched on 14 June 1950, and holds a properly notable technical distinction: she was John Brown's first all-welded ship, built without the traditional riveted construction that had defined shipbuilding for generations, a modernisation in build technique that reflected the broader postwar shift in how Britain's shipyards approached warship construction.

A Collision at Exercise Mariner

HMS Diamond took part in the June 1953 Fleet Review celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but suffered a serious setback that September: on 29 September 1953, she sustained severe bow damage after colliding with the cruiser HMS Swiftsure during Exercise Mariner off Iceland, a major NATO naval exercise, a remarkably significant accident for so young a ship barely three years into her active career.

Suez and a Second Collision

HMS Diamond deployed to Port Said in 1956 for flag-showing operations ahead of the Franco-British intervention in the Suez Crisis, subsequently joining the main assault force for Operation Musketeer at Port Said itself, direct participation in one of the defining and most controversial episodes of postwar British foreign policy.

She underwent a refit at Chatham Dockyard in 1959, but her run of accidental mishaps continued in 1964, when she collided with the frigate HMS Salisbury in the English Channel during a naval demonstration, a second embarrassing collision to add to her service record.

A Long Retirement as a Training Ship

From 1970 onwards, HMS Diamond was converted into a Harbour Training Ship, moored at the Priddy's Hard jetty in Gosport and attached to HMS Sultan's Marine Engineering School, with her operational steam plant deliberately maintained specifically to give trainee engineers hands-on experience with real, working machinery rather than simulators alone, a truly valuable final role for a ship whose active seagoing career, however eventful, had by then run its course.

The End of Service

HMS Diamond was eventually replaced in her training role by HMS Londonderry and was scrapped at Rainham, Kent, in 1981, closing out more than three decades of service that had begun with a genuine construction milestone and included both a major Cold War international crisis and two separate collisions with fellow Royal Navy warships along the way.