HMS Gipsy (H63): Spain, and a Magnetic Mine at the Harwich Boom

Built at Govan

HMS Gipsy was one of the G Class destroyers of the 1933 programme, ordered from Fairfield at Govan in March 1934. She was laid down on 4 September 1934, launched on 7 November 1935 and completed on 22 February 1936, at a cost to the builder's account of £250,364; the guns, ammunition and wireless sets were supplied by the Admiralty on top of that.

She carried four 4.7 inch guns and eight torpedo tubes, and could make 36 knots. She was the fifth ship of the Navy to bear a name first used in 1799; the last Gipsy before her had been a destroyer of 1897, which served with the Dover Patrol in the First World War and earned the name its first battle honour.

Her badge showed a gipsy woman's head on a green field, and her motto was "Trust your luck". The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 23 June 1936, four months after she was completed, with her pennant number painted large on her pale grey hull.

The Mediterranean and Spain

After a short spell with the Home Fleet she went out to the Mediterranean to join the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, with Glowworm, Greyhound, Grafton and the rest of her class, under the flotilla leader Grenville.

Within months of her arrival the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the flotilla was drawn into the work of protecting British shipping, carrying refugees away from the fighting and patrolling for the Non-Intervention Committee. Gipsy helped take refugees off from the coast around Barcelona.

In February 1937, on passage between Gibraltar and Malta with Havock, she was bombed by an aircraft in Nationalist markings; the bombs missed both ships. It was one of a number of attacks on British warships in those years by aircraft and submarines whose nationality was never admitted.

In January 1939 Lieutenant Commander Nigel Crossley took command of her, and he was still her captain when war came.

Convoys from Gibraltar and Malta

In September 1939 the flotilla was based at Alexandria, on contraband control in the eastern Mediterranean, and was soon at work escorting the first convoys of the war. On 13 September Gipsy, with Garland, Grenade and Griffin, came out from Malta to join the escort of Green 1, a convoy of twenty seven British merchant ships bound from Gibraltar to Suez and the ports along the way.

On 26 September she sailed from Gibraltar with Grenville, Grenade, Griffin, the Polish destroyer Blyskawica and the cruiser Colombo as the escort of HG 1, the first of the homeward convoys from Gibraltar, and in early October she and Grenville took the liner Empress of Australia on from Malta.

With Italy still neutral the destroyers were needed more at home, and in October Gipsy was ordered back to Britain with Grenade and Griffin, hunting submarines on the way in the South Western Approaches.

On 6 November, with Grenville, Grenade and Glowworm, she met the Halifax convoy HX 6 as it came in from the Atlantic, and when the convoy split she took the west coast section on alone until two more destroyers found her. She brought her ships into Liverpool on the morning of 9 November.

Harwich

From Liverpool she went round by Plymouth to Harwich, with Greyhound, to join the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla for the North Sea convoys and patrols. On 12 November, in fog, the two sisters collided, and Gipsy was slightly damaged and put under repair at Harwich.

The Magnetic Mine

That autumn the Germans had begun to sow a new weapon in the shallow waters of the Thames Estuary and the East Coast: the magnetic mine, which lay on the bottom and was fired by the magnetism of a steel hull passing over it, so that it could not be swept by the usual methods. German seaplanes dropped them at night off the harbour mouths, and in November they began to sink ships at an alarming rate.

On 21 November 1939 Gipsy picked up three German airmen from the sea outside Harwich, and brought them into port to be handed over to the army. It has often been suggested that their aircraft was one of the seaplanes laying mines off the harbour that day.

That evening she sailed again for a North Sea patrol with Griffin, Keith, Boadicea and the Polish destroyer Grom. A German seaplane had been seen dropping mines nearby shortly before, but there was no time to search for them.

Just outside the harbour, in the channel to Harwich, Gipsy set off a mine amidships, and the explosion broke her in two. Thirty of her men were killed, among them Lieutenant Commander Crossley, and 115 were saved, most of them by Griffin and Keith.

The wreck lay in two parts in the approaches to the port. The stern half was towed across the harbour in 1940 and beached, and the ship was broken up where she lay over the following years; salvage men were still raising parts of her in 1943.

Too Soon

Two days after Gipsy was lost, a German magnetic mine dropped by aircraft on the mudflats at Shoeburyness was taken apart by two Royal Navy officers, and within months the Navy had devised the degaussing of ships' hulls that defeated it. It came too late for Gipsy.

She had been in commission for less than four years, and at war for less than three months; the naval historian Geoffrey Mason, writing her record, observed that her short career belied her motto. Of the G Class she was the first to be lost, and before the war was a year old Glowworm, Grenville, Grafton and Grenade had followed her.

Gipsy's battle honours were Dover Patrol 1914 to 1918, won by her predecessor, and Atlantic 1939. The G Class prints are in the G Class destroyers collection.