HMS Duchess (D154): Loaned to Australia After a Deadly Collision

Woolston-Built

HMS Duchess was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, Southampton, her keel laid on 8 July 1948, launched on 9 April 1951 by the Countess Mountbatten of Burma, and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 23 October 1952, a Daring-class destroyer displacing 2,950 tons standard, capable of 30.5 knots, and carrying six 4.5-inch guns alongside Bofors anti-aircraft guns, torpedo tubes and a Squid anti-submarine mortar.

Duchess was part of a much larger programme that never fully materialised: sixteen Daring-class destroyers were provisionally ordered in 1944, but only eight were ever completed, the rest cancelled once the war that had prompted them was over. Her own hull was notably all-welded rather than the mix of riveting and welding still used on some of her sisters, a modest but genuine step toward more modern shipbuilding methods.

That understates what the Darings were. For a while the Royal Navy did not call them destroyers at all. They were officially the Daring class ships, on the reasonable grounds that at 390 feet and nearly three thousand tons they were larger and better armed than half the light cruisers in commission in 1914, and they were given to full captains rather than commanders. They also sat on a technological fault line. Four of the eight British ships were wired for the traditional direct current supply and four for the new alternating current, which is the sort of decision a navy takes when it genuinely does not know which way the world is going to go. And they were the last of the line: the last destroyers either the Royal Navy or the Royal Australian Navy would ever build with guns rather than missiles as their main armament. What her all-welded hull actually meant on the slipway is set out in the article on HMS Diamond (D35).

The Last Ship Out of Port Said

HMS Duchess served initially with the Home Fleet, taking part in the coronation celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, before joining the Mediterranean Fleet between 1954 and 1956, conducting exercises and anti-smuggling patrols off Cyprus and serving as plane guard during the Suez Crisis.

HMS Duchess holds the distinction of being the last Royal Navy vessel to leave Port Said at the end of the crisis, departing on 22 December 1956, a fitting final image of Britain's military withdrawal from the operation.

What she was the last ship out of is more interesting than a British withdrawal, because 22 December 1956 was the day the Anglo-French withdrawal was completed and the United Nations took over Port Said. The force that relieved her was UNEF, the United Nations Emergency Force, and it was the first large-scale peacekeeping force the UN ever put in the field. There had been observer missions before. There had never been a body of armed troops from neutral countries interposed between combatants to let them stop fighting without either of them having to admit defeat.

It was invented, more or less on the spot, by a Canadian. Lester Pearson put the proposal to the General Assembly on 4 November 1956, four days after the Anglo-French bombing began, and the force was raised, commanded by the Canadian Major-General E.L.M. Burns and drawn from ten countries, and on the ground within a fortnight. Its mandate was to secure the removal of British, French and Israeli troops from the canal zone and hold the ring afterwards. Pearson was given the Nobel Peace Prize for it the following year, and every blue helmet since, in Cyprus, Lebanon, the Congo, Bosnia and everywhere else, traces its ancestry to that proposal.

So the image is a better one than it first looks. A British destroyer steaming out of Port Said in the last light of a December afternoon is not merely the end of a failed operation. She is the last British warship in a harbour that was being handed to an institution created specifically to get her country out of it with its dignity approximately intact. Pearson's scheme let Britain and France leave without being seen to be thrown out, and Duchess was the ship that did the leaving. It is one of the more consequential quiet moments in twentieth-century diplomacy, and it happens to have a Daring-class destroyer in the middle of it.

She underwent a major two-year modernisation refit between December 1958 and January 1961, before resuming Mediterranean Fleet operations, and from 1963 was assigned to the Far East Fleet in response to the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation.

Loaned to Australia After Tragedy

HMS Duchess's transfer to Australia arose directly from the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the Royal Australian Navy. On the night of 10 February 1964, during flying exercises some twenty nautical miles off Jervis Bay, the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne struck the destroyer HMAS Voyager at 8.56pm, her bow slicing into Voyager just behind the bridge and cutting the smaller ship clean in two. The bow section, where many of the crew were trapped, sank within ten minutes; the stern section stayed afloat until after midnight. Of Voyager's 314 men, 82 were killed.

Two Royal Commissions picked over what had gone wrong. The first, in 1964, controversially found Melbourne's own command team partly to blame despite a lack of supporting evidence, prompting her captain, Ronald John Robertson, to resign rather than accept what amounted to a demotion; he was widely seen at the time as a scapegoat. A second Commission, opened in July 1967 and reporting in February 1968, absolved Robertson entirely and instead found that Voyager's own captain, Duncan Stevens, had been medically unfit to command: not, as had been alleged, through drink, but through a duodenal ulcer and a confidential prescription for amphetamines.

Britain's response came within days of the disaster. The offer to loan HMS Duchess to the Royal Australian Navy was made on 18 February, just over a week after the collision, and accepted on 25 February.

There was a reason the offer could be made and accepted that quickly, and it is the detail the story usually leaves out. Three Darings had been built for the Royal Australian Navy rather than the Royal Navy: Vampire, Vendetta and Voyager. The ship cut in half off Jervis Bay was herself a Daring. So Australia already had the spares, the drills, the training pipeline and the dockyard experience for the class, and a British Daring could take Voyager's place in the squadron with almost no adjustment at all. Britain was not offering a warship in the abstract. It was offering the one ship on earth that could slot into the hole without anybody having to learn anything.

The initial loan ran for four years at no cost for the ship herself, though Australia covered operational expenses and any modifications.

She was formally handed over on 19 April 1964, with the handover completed on 8 May, when she commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy as HMAS Duchess under Captain I. M. Burnside.

Confrontation and Vietnam

HMAS Duchess, the former HMS Duchess, participated extensively in the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, earning the battle honour Malaysia 1965-66, and went on to escort the troopship HMAS Sydney, nicknamed "the Vung Tau Ferry" for carrying thousands of Australian troops to and from Vietnam across some twenty-five voyages between 1965 and 1972. Duchess herself provided that escort on six of those runs, including Sydney's very first trooping voyage on 27 May 1965 and her sixth and final one on 22 May 1971, a substantial personal contribution to Australia's military commitment in Vietnam even if the ferry service itself outlasted her part in it.

And the carrier at the centre of it all did it again. At around three in the morning on 3 June 1969, some 650 miles south-west of Manila during the SEATO exercise Sea Spirit, the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans was ordered to change station from ahead of Melbourne to astern of her, turned the wrong way, and passed directly under her bow. Melbourne cut her in two. The forward section went down in three minutes with seventy-four American sailors in it. That is two destroyers cut in half by the same carrier in five years, 156 dead between them, and in both cases the destroyer had crossed her bow while manoeuvring in company at night. Melbourne was never formally found at fault for either, and she spent the rest of her life being called a jinx ship by people who had not read the findings, which is unfair to her and beside the point besides. The real lesson was about how navies of the period ran night manoeuvres at close quarters, and it took two disasters and 156 funerals to get it learned.

The loan was extended to April 1972, before Australia purchased the ship outright from the Royal Navy for $150,000 (Australian) on 18 August 1972, formally ending her status as a loaned vessel.

A Training Ship and Retirement

HMAS Duchess arrived at Williamstown Naval Dockyard on 5 January 1973 for conversion into a training ship, work that removed her combat systems and installed educational facilities, completing on 14 August 1974 when she replaced HMAS Anzac as the Royal Australian Navy's dedicated training vessel.

She conducted midshipman training cruises throughout Australian, New Zealand and South Pacific waters until being replaced by HMAS Jervis Bay in September 1977, and was decommissioned on 23 October that year.

One last thing about the loan. Britain never got her back and never really wanted to, because by the time the four years were up the Royal Navy had no use for a Daring at all. The class received almost no modernisation and was thrown away wholesale in the early 1970s: Daring into reserve in December 1968 and scrapped in 1971, Defender broken up at Inverkeithing in 1972, Decoy and Diana sold to Peru in 1969, HMS Diamond (D35) reduced to an engineering training ship at Portsmouth in 1970. Duchess went on being a warship in Australian hands until 1973 and a training ship until 1977. The ship Britain lent away for four years because somebody else needed her more outlasted the fleet she came from, which is not what anybody had in mind on 18 February 1964.

HMAS Duchess was sold to Tung Ho Steel for scrapping on 7 May 1980, departing Sydney under tow for Taiwan on 9 July, closing out a career of nearly three decades that was born in postwar Britain, forged at Suez, and given its longest and most significant chapter, thirteen years of it, in the service of Australia's own navy.

Where she went is worth knowing, because Kaohsiung in 1980 was not simply a scrapyard. It was the largest shipbreaking operation the world had ever had. Taiwan had set a world record for tonnage broken in 1973 and held the title for most of two decades; at the peak something like twenty thousand men were working the ships, cutting up as much as ten thousand tonnes of steel plate on an average day, and roughly a third of all the steel Taiwan used came off the hulls that arrived there. Tung Ho Steel, the firm that bought Duchess, had started in the business as a shipbreaker and grew into a steelmaker on the back of it.

Warships went there routinely, guns and communications gear stripped out before they sailed, and a great many of the Royal Navy's postwar ships ended their days on that shoreline. It was appallingly dangerous work. In 1986 a tanker with residual oil in her holds exploded at the breaking zone and killed sixteen men and injured hundreds. Three years later the port authority took the ground back to build a container terminal, and by 1990 the industry had been squeezed out of Kaohsiung altogether and had moved on to Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, where it remains, and where the conditions are worse.