HMS Keith (D06): Boulogne, Dunkirk and the Admiral's Flag off La Panne

The B Class Leader

HMS Keith was the leader of the B Class destroyers, a repeat of the A Class with improved sonar, built under the 1928 programme. She was ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow on 22 March 1929, laid down on 1 October 1929 as Yard No. 656, launched on 10 July 1930 and completed on 20 March 1931.

She was the first ship of the Navy to carry the name, chosen to honour Admiral George Keith Elphinstone, Lord Keith, who took the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch in the 1790s and later commanded in the Mediterranean and the Channel in the long wars against Napoleon. Her badge was a red boar's head on a silver field, and her motto, Fatis Fortior Virtus, means "Valour is stronger than fate".

As a leader she was meant to carry the captain of the flotilla and his staff, and the plan was to give her only three gun mountings so that extra cabins and offices could be built aft. In the end she kept the usual four 4.7 inch guns, and the staff officers who could not be fitted in were carried in the other ships of the flotilla.

Between the Wars

Her peacetime career was interrupted by a serious collision with a merchant ship in fog, which did major damage. After repairs, and alterations to her ventilation, she spent six months in reserve.

In August 1937 she was recommissioned to take the place of Faulknor, damaged in a collision of her own, and spent the rest of that year on the Non-Intervention patrol off the coast of Spain during the Civil War; the photograph at the top of this page belongs to that year. She went back into reserve in November 1937, was refitted in 1938, and then rejoined the fleet for patrols based at Gibraltar until May 1939.

After a further refit she was manned from the Reserve Fleet at Chatham, and in August 1939 she was one of the ships inspected by King George VI at the review of the Reserve Fleet in Weymouth Bay. She stayed in commission when the review ended, and sailed for her war station.

The First Winter

Her captain at the review, Captain Alfred Phillips, handed over on 6 September 1939 to Commander Henry Pawsey, a retired officer recalled for the war. Keith was sent to the Western Approaches Command at Milford Haven for the Atlantic convoys, and on 11 September she and Vivacious escorted BC 1, one of the first convoys of the war.

She escorted homeward convoys from Gibraltar and outward ones into the Atlantic through the autumn, and on 7 October she and Vesper took the aircraft carrier Hermes out of Plymouth to meet the French warships with which she sailed for Dakar.

At the end of October she moved to Harwich and the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla, as leader of a division made up of the destroyers of the Polish Navy, which had escaped to Britain when Poland was overrun. On the night of 21 November she sailed from Harwich with Griffin, Boadicea and Gipsy for a patrol in the North Sea.

A German seaplane had dropped magnetic mines off the harbour shortly before, and there was no time to sweep for them. Gipsy set one off and broke in two, and most of her survivors were picked up by Griffin and Keith.

In December she brought the Channel section of the fast Halifax convoy HXF 10 up to Dover, and then went to Devonport to have her propellers repaired. In January 1940 she escorted the outward Gibraltar convoy OG 15 through the South Western Approaches, and in early February she met the Halifax convoy HX 17 at the mouth of the Bristol Channel and saw five of its ships into Milford Haven.

A week later she joined the screen of Ark Royal, coming home from Freetown after the hunt for the Graf Spee, and brought her into Portsmouth on 15 February.

The Dover Strait

That month she became leader of the 19th Destroyer Flotilla at Dover, taking over from Codrington, and with her came a new captain, Captain David Simson, known in the Navy as "Ginger", who had commanded Codrington at the start of the war. The Dover destroyers kept the Strait, stopped and searched neutral ships for contraband and escorted the Channel convoys, and the work was hard on the ships.

Keith was damaged in a collision with an armed yacht at Dover in February and repaired at Chatham. In March she helped Boadicea bring in the tanker Charles F.

Meyer, which had been mined and was under tow to Southampton, and escorted the minelayer Hampton while she laid a deep field of mines in the Galloper area of the southern North Sea. On 13 March she ran aground on the Goodwin Sands and was under repair again until April.

Holland and Boulogne

When the Germans invaded the Low Countries on 10 May 1940, Keith sailed from Sheerness that afternoon with the cruisers Galatea and Arethusa and the destroyer Boreas for the Dutch coast.

While the cruisers took off Dutch officers and part of the Dutch gold reserve, Keith escorted the merchant ship Titus and the uncompleted Dutch cruiser Jacob van Heemskerck across to England, so that the cruiser could be finished in British yards rather than fall to the Germans.

Two days later she was back at the Hook of Holland to take off Allied troops, and on 19 May she rescued the men of the destroyer Whitley, beached near Nieuport after an air attack, and then destroyed the wreck with gunfire.

On 23 May the Germans reached Boulogne, and the Dover destroyers were sent in to land reinforcements and then to bring out the Guards and the men of the base. They lay alongside the quays under fire from German guns, mortars and snipers in the buildings around the harbour, and fought back at point-blank range.

Keith was hit by mortar and machine gun fire. During a Stuka attack after half past seven that evening Captain Simson was shot in the chest by a sniper on his own bridge. Her navigator, Lieutenant Lumsden, later wrote that the captain "fell down on top of me", and the doctor could do nothing for him.

Lumsden took her off the berth while the crew cast off the wires, and as she made for England "Captain Simson and some dozen others were buried quietly at sea as we scanned the skies for enemy aircraft." The captain of Vimy was killed the same evening, but the destroyers brought several thousand men out of Boulogne.

Dunkirk

On 27 May Captain Edward Berthon took command, and with him Keith went to the beaches. From that day she lay off La Panne, the easternmost of the Dunkirk beaches, coordinating the embarkation of the troops from the open sands into the boats and ships offshore.

On 31 May Rear Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker, the senior naval officer afloat, who was directing the evacuation off the beaches, hoisted his flag in her. That day, under fire from the shore, she took on board 992 troops at Dunkirk, among them the officers of the army's headquarters staff; the commander in chief, Lord Gort, crossed in the minesweeper Hebe.

On 1 June she took the admiral back to La Panne, and the German bombers came over the beaches in strength. Keith was hit first by fire from the shore, and then by an air attack which damaged her steering gear. Unable to manoeuvre, she anchored and went on firing at the aircraft until her ammunition was almost gone.

Then she was straddled by bombs, one of which went down her after funnel into No. 2 boiler room, killing everyone inside and setting her on fire. Wake-Walker shifted his flag to the motor torpedo boat MTB 102 and went on directing the evacuation from her, and the ship was abandoned.

She sank off the beaches, and her wreck lies in about 23 metres of water. Thirty six of her men were killed and 130 survived, but about a hundred of the survivors were lost later that day when the tug St Abbs, which had picked them up, was bombed and sunk in her turn.

On the same morning Basilisk was bombed and lost off La Panne, and Havant off Dunkirk. Keith was awarded the battle honours Atlantic 1939 to 1940 and Dunkirk 1940. The other B Class ships are in the B Class destroyers collection.