HMS Eglinton (L87): A Harwich Escort's Long War, Then a Trial in 'Sleeping Beauty'

Built on the Tyne

HMS Eglinton was ordered in March 1939 and laid down at Vickers-Armstrongs on the River Tyne that June, launched on 28 December 1939 and commissioned on 28 August 1940, a Type I Hunt-class destroyer, part of a wartime programme of fast, purpose-built escort destroyers designed to fill the urgent gap between large fleet destroyers and smaller convoy escorts.

She displaced 1,000 tons standard, rising to 1,340 tons at full load, and her Parsons geared turbines produced 19,000 shaft horsepower for a maximum speed of 27.5 knots, enough to keep pace with fast convoys and to chase down the small, quick surface craft that increasingly threatened coastal shipping.

Her armament centred on four 4-inch guns in twin mounts, backed by 2-pounder and 20mm anti-aircraft guns and a substantial depth charge outfit of 40 charges, two throwers and a rack, a well-rounded fit for a ship expected to face aircraft, submarines and surface raiders in more or less equal measure.

Four guns is the interesting number there, because she was designed to carry six. The Hunts were drawn with three twin 4-inch mountings, and when the first of them, HMS Atherstone, was inclined during fitting out in 1940, she turned out to be dangerously unstable. The enquiry that followed found something rarer than a compromise: a straightforward arithmetical error in the stability calculations, on a class of ships already being built in numbers. The fix was blunt. The X mounting came out, the superstructure and funnel were cut down, ballast went into the bottom, and the Royal Navy accepted a third less firepower than it had ordered. The later Type II ships were corrected properly by cutting the hulls lengthwise down the middle and inserting a two-and-a-half-foot strip to widen them, which is a remarkable thing to have to do to a warship and rather more remarkable to do it twenty-odd times.

A War Spent at Harwich

HMS Eglinton served with the 16th Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich for the entirety of her wartime service, an assignment that placed her at the heart of one of the Royal Navy's most consistently dangerous and unglamorous jobs: defending the East Coast convoy routes that kept Britain's own coastal trade running throughout the war, in waters that lay uncomfortably close to German-occupied Europe and were subject to constant harassment from German aircraft, minelayers, and above all the fast, heavily armed S-boats operating out of ports in the occupied Netherlands and France.

What those convoys were actually carrying is the part that gets left out, and it is the whole point of them. They were carrying coal. London needed a minimum of forty thousand tons of it a week to keep its power stations, gasworks, factories and hearths going, and neither the railways nor the roads could move that much; it had to come down the coast from the Tyne and the Forth in small colliers. So the FN and FS convoys, Forth North and Forth South, ran between Methil and the Thames continuously for five and a half years, with at least two under way in each direction at any moment, day and night, in all weathers, through the narrow swept channel between the defensive minefields. German aircraft mined the channel, U-boats worked its northern end and the S-boats came out of Holland after dark, which is why the escorts made a habit of working up to twenty-eight knots at dusk. It was the least glamorous convoy route of the war and quite possibly the one Britain could least afford to lose.

The stretch off the Norfolk coast where Eglinton fought most of her actions had a name among the men who used it, and they did not mean it affectionately: E-boat Alley. The German S-boats were fast, low, hard to see and armed with torpedoes and 20mm cannon, and the tactic was to lie stopped in the dark with engines off, listening, and then start up and go through a convoy at forty knots. Against that, a Hunt-class destroyer with radar and four 4-inch guns was doing something closer to police work than fleet action: patrolling a line, keeping between the raiders and the colliers, and making enough noise and light to spoil an attack. Nobody wrote books about it. It went on every night for years.

Her war along that coast started early. On 4 October 1940, barely a month after commissioning, she was sent searching for a German destroyer reported to be laying mines off South Foreland, the kind of tense, inconclusive patrol that made up the bulk of East Coast escort work even when no attack ever quite materialised.

On 21 June 1941 she escorted the coastal minelayer HMS Plover while it laid a section of the East Coast Barrier under Operation BS60, part of the extensive defensive minefield that ran almost the length of Britain's eastern seaboard to funnel enemy shipping, submarines and E-boats into predictable, watched channels.

Not every hazard came from the enemy. On 28 July 1942 she collided with the escort vessel HMS Sheldrake, damaging her forward structure badly enough to need repairs that kept her out of action until 12 September, an inglorious but far from unusual mishap for ships working the crowded, blacked-out waters of wartime coastal convoy routes.

HMS Eglinton is recorded as having taken part in at least two documented actions against German E-boats, sharp, close-range engagements typical of the running battle fought nightly along Britain's own shoreline throughout much of the war, a theatre that rarely received the attention given to the Atlantic or Arctic convoy routes but which demanded exactly the same vigilance and cost plenty of ships and lives of its own. On 24 October 1943 she was one of six destroyers, backed by coastal forces craft, that fought off E-boats attacking Convoy FN 1160 off Cromer, and on 24 February 1944 she was in action again, alongside HMS Vivien, defending Convoy FS 1371 further down the same stretch of coast.

HMS Eglinton earned four separate campaign honours over the course of her service: Atlantic 1940, English Channel 1940 to 1944, North Sea 1941 to 1944, and Normandy 1944, a broad spread reflecting just how continuously she was employed across nearly the entire span of the war.

She was also formally adopted by the town of Alton in Hampshire during Warship Week 1942, one of many such civic adoptions organised across Britain to raise money for the war effort and to forge a tangible link between a ship's crew and a community back home.

Supporting the Normandy Landings

HMS Eglinton's Normandy 1944 battle honour reflects weeks of preparation as much as the landings themselves. She took part in a defence exercise off Brighton on 3 May and a landing exercise at Bracklesham Bay on 18 May, in which she was allocated the code-named target 'Petit Enfer' for bombardment practice, part of the immense rehearsal effort that preceded the real invasion.

Assigned to Force S for the assault on Sword Beach, she sailed with the operation delayed twenty-four hours by weather, and on 5 June escorted Convoy S7 through the swept channel towards the Normandy coast. She took up her bombarding position at dawn on 6 June and provided naval gunfire support during the landings themselves, before returning to Portsmouth the following day to refuel and re-arm.

By 8 June she was back off Normandy as part of Escort Group 116, shepherding a reinforcement convoy across the Channel, and she stayed on patrol and escort duty in the Channel until 27 June once the main Neptune operation had wound down, continuing to do exactly what she had spent years doing already: shepherding vessels safely across contested waters, only now in support of the largest amphibious invasion in history rather than routine coastal trade.

The following night brought the war closer to home than most of her patrols ever had. At 9.30pm on 28 June 1944, the landing ship infantry Maid of Orleans, a former Channel packet steamer just back from ferrying troops and stores onto Sword and Juno beaches, was struck by an explosion south-east of St Catherine's Point on the Isle of Wight and sank within half an hour. HMS Eglinton, in company with HMS Hotham and the tug Empire Roger, picked up survivors and landed them at Portsmouth; six of the Maid of Orleans's crew did not survive. It was precisely this kind of steady, essential work, ferrying, escorting and, when needed, rescuing, that made the invasion possible in the first place, even if it rarely produced the dramatic headlines earned by the landing craft and bombardment forces closer to the beaches themselves.

Reserve Fleet and 'Sleeping Beauty'

The war's final months took her briefly out of home waters. After VE Day in May 1945 she joined the Nore Local Flotilla, and that June she carried out guardship duties in defeated Germany's own ports, a strange, quiet coda to five years spent defending Britain's coastline from the same enemy.

She was paid off after VJ Day later that year and reduced to reserve at Harwich, the port she had operated from throughout the war, before the reserve fleet moved her on again, first to Portsmouth in 1950 and later to Hartlepool, where she sat largely idle for the best part of a decade.

In mid-1955 she was selected for reactivation, and on 24 June that year was formally designated the trials ship for Exercise Sleeping Beauty, a Royal Navy evaluation intended to test exactly how quickly and effectively a destroyer held in long-term reserve could be woken up and made operational again, a fittingly fairy-tale name for an exercise about rousing mothballed old warships rather than mothballed old princesses, and a particularly sensible piece of Cold War contingency planning given how many wartime-built vessels the Royal Navy still held in reserve a decade after the war's end. It proved a final flourish rather than a fresh start: once the trial was complete, she reverted to reserve.

Exercise Sleeping Beauty makes more sense set against the size of the problem it was testing. By the mid-1950s the Royal Navy was sitting on a reserve fleet of extraordinary scale, hundreds of wartime-built ships laid up in trots at Harwich, Portsmouth, Hartlepool and half a dozen other places, cocooned, dehumidified and theoretically available if a war with the Soviet Union required them. The question nobody had actually answered was whether any of it would work. Eglinton was the test case: take one destroyer that had been sitting idle for the best part of ten years, and find out how long it takes and what it costs to make her fit to fight. She was fifteen years old, and the answer, judging by what happened to the reserve fleet over the following decade, was not encouraging enough to keep her.

The End

HMS Eglinton was placed on the disposal list in 1956, sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation, and arrived under tow at Hughes Bolckow's yard in Blyth on 28 May 1956 to be broken up, bringing to a close the career of a destroyer whose war, for all that it included one genuinely dramatic night off the Isle of Wight, was built above all on sustained, unglamorous endurance: years of continuous escort duty along Britain's own vulnerable coastline, defending the trade that kept the country running, right through to supporting, and rescuing from, the invasion that would ultimately end the war in Europe.