HMS Finisterre (R55): Gunnery School Destroyer, the Truculent Search and Kuwait

Cape Finisterre

HMS Finisterre was one of the Battle Class destroyers, named after battles fought by British forces at sea and on land, and she took her name from the two great victories of 1747 off Cape Finisterre, the north western corner of Spain: Admiral Anson's in May, when he took an entire French convoy escort, and Admiral Hawke's in October, when he broke another.

She was the first and so far the only ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name.

She was built by Fairfield at Govan, launched in June 1944 and completed on 11 September 1945. The photograph at the top of this page shows her at a buoy on the Clyde a week before, on 4 September 1945, her twin forward turrets pale against a dark sky.

The Battle Class were the Navy's first destroyers designed around the lessons of air attack, with their main guns in twin turrets that could fire at aircraft as well as ships, controlled by a director with radar. When a flotilla of the class was sent east at the end of the war, Finisterre and her sister Solebay stayed in home waters.

The Truculent Search

On the night of 12 January 1950 the submarine Truculent, returning from trials, collided with a Swedish tanker in the Thames Estuary and sank. Most of her crew escaped from the sunken boat, only to be swept away by the tide in the freezing dark, and sixty four men were lost.

Finisterre was among the ships that joined the search. The full story is told in Truculent's article.

The Gunnery School

From 1951 she served as the gunnery training ship for HMS Excellent, the Navy's gunnery school on Whale Island at Portsmouth, taking classes of officers and ratings to sea to train them on the guns and fire-control systems of the post-war fleet. It was an important if unglamorous job, and it kept her at Portsmouth for most of the 1950s.

In June 1953 she lay at Spithead for the Coronation Review of the Fleet, moored beside her sister St James.

The Far East and Kuwait

In 1959 she went east again with the 1st Destroyer Squadron, in which her sister Hogue had been wrecked that August in a collision with the Indian cruiser Mysore, the former British cruiser whose story is told in the article on HMS Nigeria. In 1960 the squadron was reconstituted with Saintes, Finisterre, Camperdown and Solebay.

In June 1961 Kuwait became independent, and within days Iraq claimed it and appeared to be massing troops on the border. Kuwait asked Britain for help, and in Operation Vantage British forces were rushed to the Gulf: commandos landed from the carrier Bulwark, and warships gathered offshore.

Finisterre was among the ships off Kuwait that summer. The Iraqis did not come.

The End

She paid off in 1965 and was broken up at Dalmuir on the Clyde in 1967, a few miles from the yard where she had been built. Her sisters are in the Battle Class destroyers collection.