HMS Lagos (D44): Named for the Battle That Wrecked a French Invasion

Named for an Eighteenth-Century Victory

HMS Lagos was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, one of ten Battle-class destroyers ordered under the 1942 naval estimates, launched on 4 August 1944 and commissioned on 2 November 1945, just too late to see any wartime action.

Too late is the defining fact of the whole class. The Battles were drawn up for the Pacific, with twin 4.5-inch mountings designed from the outset to shoot at aircraft rather than at other destroyers, and they came off the slipways just as the shooting stopped. Why they were built that way, and what a contracting Navy then did with more brand-new fleet destroyers than it could afford to crew, is set out in the article on HMS Hogue (D74), built in the same yard and destined to matter a great deal to this ship.

She carried the pennant number R44 before being redesignated D44 as part of the Royal Navy's post-1948 numbering rationalisation, and took her name from the Battle of Lagos in 1759, a Royal Navy victory against a French fleet off the coast of Portugal rather than any connection to the Nigerian city of the same name.

The battle deserves telling, because it is one of the more consequential fortnights in British history and hardly anybody has heard of it. In the summer of 1759 France intended to invade Britain. Troops were gathering on the Channel coast, and the whole scheme rested on the French Mediterranean fleet getting out of Toulon, round into the Atlantic and up to Brest to join the fleet already there. On 5 August the Comte de la Clue sailed to do exactly that, with twelve ships of the line and three frigates.

Admiral Edward Boscawen had spent the summer off Toulon waiting for him and had just been forced to give up. His fourteen ships of the line were foul with weed and worn out aloft, and on 4 August he took the whole fleet into Gibraltar to scrape bottoms and refit. On the evening of 17 August the French came through the Strait in the dark and very nearly got away with it. A British frigate on watch east of Ceuta saw them and raised the alarm. Boscawen was ashore at the time, dining with the Governor of San Roque, and his flagship Namur had her sails unbent and a good part of her people on leave.

He got to sea anyway, and caught them the next day. The running fight of 18 August turned on a single ship. The Centaure took on the leading British ships one after another for something like five hours, absorbing a beating that ought to have finished her long before it did, and struck at last having bought her fleet a night. Namur was knocked about badly enough that Boscawen simply called for his barge, had himself rowed across to the Newark and hoisted his flag in her instead, which is not an option available to a modern admiral.

By the morning of the 19th what was left of the French had run for neutral Portuguese water off the little port of Lagos, and it did them no good at all. De la Clue drove his flagship Ocean ashore with her colours flying and every sail set, and the Redoutable went in after her; both were burned where they lay. The Temeraire and the Modeste anchored under the Portuguese batteries in Lagos Bay and were boarded and taken regardless. Portugal protested at the violation of her neutrality and was politely ignored. De la Clue himself was badly wounded and carried ashore, and lived another five years.

The consequences ran a very long way. The Toulon fleet never reached Brest, and three months later Hawke destroyed the Brest fleet at Quiberon Bay in a November gale, which ended the invasion before a single soldier embarked. 1759 has been known ever since as the annus mirabilis, the year of victories. The Royal Navy, which never wasted a good name, took the three captured ships into service as HMS Centaur, HMS Modeste and HMS Temeraire, and it is from that last prize that the Navy got the name it carried into Trafalgar, that Turner painted under tow to the breakers, and that was still in the fleet in the ironclad era, as the article on HMS Temeraire (1876) records. That is a considerable weight of history to hang on a destroyer built at Birkenhead in 1944.

Joining the Pacific Fleet

HMS Lagos deployed east in 1946 with the 19th Destroyer Flotilla to join the British Pacific Fleet, calling at Port Said, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai on the way, before reaching Japan in July of that year, a substantial voyage that gave her crew a proper tour of Britain's remaining imperial and naval presence across Asia in the immediate aftermath of the war.

She returned home in early 1947 and was placed into reserve, her active service curtailed by the general postwar drawdown of the fleet.

Back in Service

HMS Lagos returned to active duty in 1957, joining the 1st Destroyer Squadron and operating with both the Home and Mediterranean Fleets, before being assigned to the Far East Fleet the following year, once again finding herself operating in the waters she had first visited over a decade earlier.

The move east was not the whole of that period. In 1958 Lagos was also off Iceland for the First Cod War, working with her sisters Hogue and Solebay to keep British trawlers fishing inside a limit Iceland had just extended and Britain refused to recognise. What that actually involved was a good deal less dramatic and rather more interesting than the name suggests, and it is described in the article on her sister Hogue, linked above.

The Tow That Would Not Hold

HMS Lagos's most memorable moment came in 1959, when she came to the aid of her sister ship HMS Hogue, another Battle-class destroyer, after Hogue had been badly damaged in a collision with the Indian cruiser INS Mysore.

The collision belongs to Hogue rather than to this ship, and it is set out in full in her own article: Exercise JET off Ceylon, a thirty-degree turn to starboard by a squadron making better than thirty knots, one rating killed, courts martial at Singapore afterwards, and the small cruelty that the Indian cruiser which wrecked her had been built as HMS Nigeria in the same Birkenhead yard a decade before Hogue herself. What concerns Lagos is what happened next.

Lagos and her sister HMS Solebay got lines across and took Hogue in tow, and that is usually where the story stops. It should not, because they could not hold her. Hogue's bow had folded back on itself almost ninety degrees and was hanging under her forefoot acting as a rudder, so the tow sheered about behind them and would not steer. Destroyers, as one of the men who was there put it afterwards, do not make good tugs. A small private tug came out from Trincomalee and did no better, and in the end an ocean-going tug had to be sent up from Singapore to drag Hogue stern first into Trincomalee, a slow business that took three days. She was patched up there and only later moved on to Singapore, where she was laid up until she was broken up in 1962.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Lagos was decommissioned in 1960 and was eventually scrapped at Bo'ness in 1967, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service, though never touched by the war she was built for, nonetheless carried her across two decades and two oceans, and ending with a wire passed across to a sister ship that nobody, in the end, could save.