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.

The name she lost is worth a moment, because it was an odd one to give a warship in the first place. Malplaquet, fought on 11 September 1709, was Marlborough's fourth and final great victory and comfortably his worst. Some 86,000 Allied troops under Marlborough and Prince Eugene attacked about 75,000 French under Villars in prepared positions among woods and entrenchments, and won the field at a cost of roughly 22,000 casualties against the French 11,000. It was the bloodiest battle fought in Europe in the eighteenth century, and it shocked opinion across the continent. Villars, wounded and beaten, wrote to Louis XIV that if it pleased God to give the enemy another such victory they were undone, which is one of the better lines any losing general has produced. At home it finished Marlborough: it was the only one of his victories for which Queen Anne sent him no letter of thanks, his political enemies used the casualty lists against him mercilessly, and within two years he had been dismissed. Naming a destroyer after it in 1943 was a curious choice, and swapping that for Jutland, a battle whose outcome the Royal Navy has been arguing about since 1916, is arguably no improvement at all.

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.

The story of the unfinished hulls is a small monument to how quickly a war ends. Twenty-six of the later Battles had been ordered, and when Japan surrendered in August 1945 the Navy suddenly had far more destroyers on the stocks than it could crew, pay for or think of a use for. Some were cancelled outright. Four, Jutland, Albuera, Namur and Oudenarde, were launched or nearly complete and were simply stopped where they were and kept, on the theory that the money spent was already spent and that a hull in reserve might be worth finishing if the international situation deteriorated. It did deteriorate, in Korea in 1950, and the Admiralty looked at completing them seriously and decided against, because a 1943 destroyer completed in 1953 would be obsolete before she commissioned and the money was needed for the anti-submarine frigates that became the Type 12s. So the four sat in the mud for another decade and went to the breakers between 1957 and 1961, never having gone to sea. The class as a whole, and what happened to the ones that were finished, is set out in the article on HMS Aisne (D22).

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.

Both turrets forward is the single most distinctive thing about a Battle-class destroyer and it was not an aesthetic decision. Every British destroyer before them had carried guns fore and aft, because the assumption was that a destroyer would be fighting other ships, which come at you from any direction. The Battles were designed after two years of the Mediterranean and the Norwegian campaign, in which destroyers had been sunk in numbers by aircraft, and the design assumption changed accordingly: the enemy was overhead. Putting both twin 4.5-inch mountings forward, on high-angle mountings controlled by a radar director, concentrated the anti-aircraft fire where it could be used and freed the after end of the ship for close-range weapons. It looked odd to anybody trained before the war, and the ships were criticised for having nothing much to shoot at a surface enemy astern. Both criticisms were correct and both were beside the point, because the thing that killed destroyers in 1941 was not other destroyers.

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 Canal Zone deserves considerably more than patrol and presence, because it was a small and extremely nasty colonial war that Britain has largely chosen to forget. Under the treaty of 1936 Britain kept troops in a strip of Egyptian territory along the canal; by 1951 there were around eighty thousand of them, in what was one of the largest military installations in the world, in a country that no longer wanted them there. Egypt abrogated the treaty that October and set about making the position untenable: the Egyptian labour force walked out, food and water supplies were cut, and irregular units and auxiliary police attacked camps, convoys and married quarters, often with the connivance of the authorities. On 25 January 1952 British troops surrounded the auxiliary police barracks at Ismailia and demanded they disarm; the police refused, the British stormed the building, and forty-one Egyptians were killed. The following day Cairo burned. Black Saturday destroyed a large part of the city centre, killed a number of foreigners including eleven Britons, and made the monarchy's position impossible; six months later the Free Officers deposed King Farouk, and four years after that the man who emerged from that coup nationalised the canal. Several dozen British servicemen were killed in the Canal Zone between 1951 and 1954, and there was no campaign medal for it until 2003.

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.

The Coronation Review was the last really enormous gathering of the Royal Navy and it is worth recording what it looked like. On 15 June 1953 something over three hundred ships lay at Spithead in lines several miles long, including the battleship Vanguard, a row of British aircraft carriers and cruisers, and a large number of Commonwealth and foreign warships, and every kind of small craft the Navy still possessed; the Queen reviewed them from the despatch vessel Surprise, and the whole fleet was illuminated after dark. It was, in a sense, an illusion. Britain had fewer than eight years left of the fleet that made that possible, and by the early 1960s most of what lay at Spithead that afternoon had gone to the breakers, Jutland among them. There is also a fine piece of Royal Navy folklore attached to the equivalent review for George VI in 1937, when the BBC commentator, Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe, having been entertained aboard his old ship, delivered a broadcast beginning with the words the Fleet's lit up and continuing in that vein until the BBC faded him out. He was suspended for a week.

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.

The Forth Road Bridge story is a good period detail. Work began in 1958 and the bridge opened in September 1964, and at the point Jutland was lying at Rosyth in December 1961 the two towers were up and the main cables were being spun, which meant a narrow catwalk slung between them, hundreds of feet above the Firth of Forth, with nothing much on either side. It was, then as now, absolutely forbidden to the public, and it was also the most tempting thing any two young sailors on a run ashore in Fife had ever seen. They walked it. They ended up in front of the Sheriff at Dunfermline, which suggests they were caught at the far end rather than turned back at the near one, and one hopes somebody in the wardroom appreciated the sheer nerve involved. The bridge they trespassed on was, when it opened, the longest suspension bridge outside the United States.

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.

She is a useful illustration of what happened to an entire generation of British warships. She was ordered for a war she was not finished in time for, launched under a name that had been intended for a ship nobody bothered to complete, commissioned into a navy that was already shrinking, and spent eighteen years alternating between reserve and short commissions because there was never quite enough money to run her continuously. In that time she showed the flag in South Africa, patrolled off Egypt during the ugliest years of Britain's exit from it, lay in the lines at Spithead for a coronation, bumped into a sister ship and a fleet auxiliary, carried a Royal Marines band to a competition in Belgium, and had two of her ratings arrested for walking across an unfinished bridge. Then she was scrapped at nineteen with the paint barely dry. Nothing about that is heroic and all of it is what a navy actually consists of in peacetime.