HMS Jutland (D62): A Postwar Destroyer Renamed Before She Even Launched

Renamed Before She Launched

HMS Jutland began construction under an entirely different name, laid down as HMS Malplaquet as part of the 1943 Battle-class destroyer programme. She only became Jutland because the Royal Navy's first attempt at the name had already come to nothing: an earlier hull, also ordered as HMS Jutland, was launched in November 1945 but never completed, and Malplaquet inherited the name shortly before her own launch on 20 February 1946, a fairly common fate for the large batch of Battle-class hulls ordered during the war.

As for the ship whose name she took: the original, unfinished Jutland was not scrapped straight away either. Her hull, along with three further unfinished sisters, Albuera, Namur and Oudenarde, was kept in reserve in case the Admiralty decided to complete them after all, an option seriously considered in 1950 before being dropped for good. All four were eventually broken up between 1957 and 1961, the original Jutland herself going to the breakers at Rosyth in 1957, a full eight years before the ship that had taken her name would follow her.

She commissioned on 30 July 1947, arriving in service just as the Royal Navy was adjusting to a considerably smaller, tighter postwar budget, and cut a distinctive figure doing it: unusually for a destroyer of her day, both of her twin 4.5-inch gun turrets sat forward of the bridge in a raised, radar-directed mounting designed to give her a fighting chance against aircraft rather than just other ships.

Home Fleet and a South African Cruise

HMS Jutland joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet in April 1947, and in September 1948 sailed for South Africa in company with the aircraft carrier HMS Theseus, her sister ship HMS Vengeance and several more Battle-class destroyers, calling at a string of ports on the way down. The squadron put in a round of exercises after its South African visit before heading home in December, a substantial showing of the flag that reflected the Royal Navy's continuing determination to maintain a visible global presence even as its wartime strength steadily wound down.

Middle Eastern Tensions and the Coronation Review

HMS Jutland was temporarily laid up in 1950, before resuming active service the following year, by which time her old flotilla had been redesignated the 4th Destroyer Squadron and detached from the Home Fleet to the Mediterranean Fleet amid rising tension over the Suez Canal Zone. She was in the region through the worst of it. In January 1952, British troops besieged the Egyptian police barracks at Ismailia after officers there refused to disarm, a clash that killed dozens on both sides and helped trigger rioting in Cairo and, within months, the revolution that toppled King Farouk. Jutland's own part in it was the unglamorous one common to most destroyers on a tense station, patrol and presence rather than direct action, but it placed her squarely in one of the last, and least comfortable, chapters of Britain's military presence in Egypt.

The following year, 1953, she swapped one kind of duty for the opposite extreme, taking part in the Coronation Fleet Review for the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, a rather more ceremonial and considerably more photogenic assignment, before entering reserve.

A Late Return and a Bridge Too Far

HMS Jutland returned to active service in 1957 as part of the 7th Destroyer Squadron, and suffered a minor collision with HMS Dunkirk off Malta the following year, the kind of unremarkable mishap that was an occupational hazard of destroyer squadrons operating in close company.

Her final commission, running from 1961 into 1962, turned out to be one of her more colourful. She took part in NATO exercises in the North Sea, called at Rosyth in December 1961 just as work was under way on the new Forth Road Bridge, an occasion that reportedly landed two of her ratings in court at Dunfermline for walking across the bridge's construction catwalk, and completed a summer cruise round Scandinavia, calling at Oslo, Copenhagen and Kristiansand. She also carried the Royal Marines Band, under its celebrated director Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Dunn, to a military band contest at Ostend, which the band duly won. The commission was not entirely trouble-free: a collision with a Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel left her with serious bow damage that needed putting right at Chatham Dockyard before she could carry on.

She paid off to Portsmouth after the Scandinavian cruise, spent a further year in reserve, and was finally broken up at Faslane in 1965, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service, while never touched by the drama of the war that gave the Battle class its name, nonetheless carried her through nearly two decades of steady, useful and occasionally quietly eventful postwar duty under a name she had not even been laid down with.