HMS Imogen (D44): Two U-Boats, a Trawler Prize off Norway and a Collision in the Pentland Firth Fog

Built on the Tyne for the Mediterranean

HMS Imogen was ordered from Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on the Tyne on 30 October 1935, one of the nine ships of the I Class destroyers in that year's programme. She was laid down on 18 January 1936 and launched on 30 December, and when she was handed over on 2 June 1937 the builders' bill came to £256,917, not counting the guns, the radio sets and the other equipment the Admiralty supplied itself.

The I Class were the last of the line of similar destroyers that had begun with the A Class in the late 1920s, with four 4.7 inch guns, but they were the first class to carry ten torpedo tubes as standard, in two sets of five, and they were designed so that they could be converted quickly into minelayers if need be.

She was the sixth ship of the name. The first had been a French prize, the Diable a Quatre, taken in 1800, and the last before her was a steam yacht bought in 1882 and sold in 1919.

Her badge was a hand holding a golden looking glass, in which the sky and the sea were reflected, and her motto was "Quit you like a man", from St Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

Under Commander Eric Stevens she joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, whose ships wore three black bands on their after funnels, as she does in the photograph above.

Spain was in the middle of its civil war, and the flotilla spent much of its time on the international patrols off the Spanish coast, watching for ships running arms to either side and guarding British merchant ships against the submarines and aircraft that attacked them.

Two U-Boats in Five Months

When war came in September 1939 she had just finished a refit and was on her way back to Malta. She arrived on 3 September, the day war was declared, and was sent straight home with the rest of the flotilla to Plymouth, where the Western Approaches needed every destroyer it could find.

In mid September she and Isis escorted the old carrier Hermes on one of the anti-submarine sweeps that the Navy was sending its carriers out on, a practice that was abruptly stopped when Courageous was torpedoed on 17 September. Then she went to work on the first Atlantic and Gibraltar convoys.

On 13 October 1939, far out to the south west of Ireland, U-42 surfaced to attack the British steamer Stonepool, which fought back with her own gun and called for help. Imogen and Ilex came up and hunted the U-boat down with depth charges, and U-42 went to the bottom on her first patrol, the destroyers picking twenty of her crew out of the water while 26 died.

Over the next two days Imogen picked up the survivors of two French ships, Louisiane and Bretagne, which had been sunk by other U-boats nearby, and took them into port. After repairs at Liverpool in October and November she went north to join the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow.

That winter she was screening the heavy ships and escorting convoys across the North Sea to and from Norway. In December she was with the covering force for TC 1, the convoy bringing the first Canadian troops to Britain, and with the screen of Barham and Repulse on a sweep to the north; on 30 December she escorted Rodney round from Liverpool to the Clyde.

In January and February 1940 she was out again and again with the Norway convoys, which had the cruisers Edinburgh and Glasgow in support.

On 25 February, with convoy HN 14 coming back from Norway, the submarine Narwhal, sailing with the convoy, sighted a surfaced U-boat south east of Shetland. Escapade made the first attacks, and then Escort, Inglefield and Imogen took over and pounded her with depth charges until U-63 was forced to the surface. Her crew abandoned her and scuttled her, and the destroyers picked up 24 of them; only one man was lost.

It was Imogen's second U-boat in five months, at a time when the Navy was sinking very few.

Escorting the Great Ships

In March, now under Commander Charles Firth, she was busy escorting the big ships of the fleet on their passages: the battlecruiser Hood from Scapa to the Clyde, Ark Royal out of Portland on her way to the Mediterranean, and Furious from Plymouth up to Greenock.

At the end of the month she was picked, with Inglefield, Ilex and Isis, to escort the minelayer Teviot Bank on Operation Wilfred, the British plan to mine the Norwegian coastal route that carried Swedish iron ore to Germany. They sailed on 5 April, but on the 7th the German fleet was reported at sea and the lay off Stadlandet was called off. Two days later the Germans invaded Norway.

Norway

Through the Norwegian campaign she worked with the cruisers off the coast. On 11 April she and Inglefield went with the cruiser Berwick to search the Inner Leads between Trondheim and the Vestfjord for German shipping, and on the 14th they were searching the fjords around Andfjord and Vagsfjord north of Narvik.

On 20 April, while escorting Furious north of the Lofoten Islands, she was sent to look at a trawler and found her to be German. The Rhein was taken as a prize and brought into Harstad, the base for the Narvik operations. Imogen then escorted Furious home to Greenock.

In May she was with the convoys bringing the troops home from Norway, and that month her pennant number was changed from D44 to I44. In June she escorted the new armoured carrier Illustrious on the first part of her voyage to Bermuda to work up, and at the beginning of July she brought Barham round from Liverpool to Scapa after her repairs.

On 10 July she escorted the four converted merchant ships of the 1st Minelaying Squadron from the Kyle of Lochalsh on the very first lay of the Northern Barrage, the great minefield laid across the gap between Orkney and the Faroes, alongside the new Hunt Class destroyer Hambledon.

Fog off Duncansby Head

On 16 July 1940 Imogen sailed from Scapa Flow with the cruisers Southampton, Glasgow, Sussex and Shropshire and a strong force of destroyers, including Inglefield, Sikh, Maori, Zulu, Fortune and Fury, for a raid on German shipping off the west coast of Denmark. That afternoon the air reports came back empty and the force turned for home.

Shortly before midnight, in the Pentland Firth off Duncansby Head, the force ran into thick fog. Glasgow came out of it and struck Imogen. The destroyer was badly holed and fire broke out, spreading so fast that she had to be abandoned.

Glasgow, with her own bow damaged, picked up the survivors, eleven of them wounded. Imogen was never seen to sink; she simply disappeared into the fog, still burning, and went down off Duncansby Head.

Seventeen of her ratings were lost that night, and two more, Petty Officer John Bradshaw and Chief Yeoman of Signals William Fuller, died of their wounds in the days that followed.

She had been at war for ten and a half months. In that time she had shared in the sinking of two U-boats and earned the battle honours Atlantic 1939 and North Sea 1940. Her sister Imperial and her old flotilla leader Inglefield are among the other prints in the I Class destroyers collection.