HMS Lurcher (1912): The Royal Navy's Fastest Ship, and a Commodore's Flagship at Heligoland

The Fastest Ship in the Fleet

HMS Lurcher was laid down by Yarrow and Company at Scotstoun on the Clyde on 1 July 1911 and launched on 1 June 1912, a modified Acheron-class destroyer measuring 255 feet in length, armed with two 4-inch guns and two 21-inch torpedo tubes, the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry the name.

Her three Yarrow oil-fired boilers drove her well beyond her contracted speed of 32 knots, reaching over 35 knots on trials, a remarkable performance that made her, when new, the fastest ship in the entire Royal Navy, a distinction that speaks to just how rapidly destroyer technology was advancing in the years immediately before the First World War.

Escorting the Submarine Fleet

HMS Lurcher commissioned on 29 October 1912 and joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, and at the outbreak of war in August 1914 she and her sister ship HMS Firedrake were assigned to the 8th Submarine Flotilla, based at Parkeston Quay in Harwich under Commodore Roger Keyes, tasked with escort and submarine training duties, a role that made good use of her exceptional speed to keep pace with and protect the still relatively new and vulnerable submarine arm.

Flagship at the Battle of Heligoland Bight

The plan for that engagement had been hatched by Keyes together with fellow Harwich commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt, who between them ran the submarine flotilla and the destroyer force respectively, and it was daring enough to win over the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who approved it with some changes of his own.

HMS Lurcher earned her place in naval history on 26 August 1914, when Commodore Keyes hoisted his flag aboard her ahead of the Battle of Heligoland Bight two days later, leading a mixed force that included HMS Firedrake and eight British submarines into the first major naval engagement of the war.

During the confused fighting, both destroyers came dangerously close to engaging their own side's cruisers amid poor visibility, a sharp reminder of just how chaotic and disorientating early twentieth-century naval combat could become. Keyes himself, spotting two ships looming out of the mist that were almost certainly the British cruisers Nottingham and Lowestoft, signalled a warning to the battlecruisers Invincible and New Zealand that he was being chased by four German cruisers, a false alarm that very nearly saw a British submarine attacked by its own side's approaching squadron before the confusion was untangled. Keyes was later admonished by the First Sea Lord for personally leading his submarines to sea aboard Lurcher rather than directing the flotilla from ashore, a piece of after-the-fact criticism that rather undersold how useful his presence at the sharp end had just proven to be.

Following the disabling of the German light cruiser SMS Mainz, Keyes laid Lurcher alongside the stricken vessel to take off her wounded, more than 220 men pulled to safety in all, before Mainz capsized and went down with a suddenness that narrowly missed swamping Lurcher herself, her own captain having ordered her scuttled and abandoned once she was beyond saving, a moment of genuine humanity amid the battle that came within a few feet of costing Lurcher dear.

The other end of that morning is worth setting beside it. Rear-Admiral Maass, who commanded the German torpedo boats, was flying his flag in the light cruiser SMS Coln, and she was caught about two hours after Mainz by the battlecruisers coming in from seaward. Coln rolled over and went down with Maass and virtually everybody aboard her. One man came out: a stoker, picked out of the water three days later, by which time he was the sole survivor of a ship's company of more than five hundred.

The arithmetic of the day makes the point about what Lurcher was doing. The Germans lost three light cruisers and a torpedo boat, with seven hundred and twelve men killed, three hundred and thirty-six taken prisoner and nearly two hundred wounded. The British lost no ships at all and fewer than forty men. Something over two hundred of those prisoners were alive because a destroyer went alongside a burning cruiser that was about to capsize and took them off, and one of them turned out to be a son of Grand Admiral Tirpitz, the man who had built the fleet Lurcher had just helped to maul.

Four More Years of Submarine Support

HMS Lurcher continued supporting submarine operations throughout the rest of the war. That September she towed submarines to the Skagerrak, and on 6 October she took part in the brief, ultimately pointless British occupation of Zeebrugge, Commodore Keyes himself stepping ashore onto the mole there some three and a half years before he returned to lead one of the most celebrated raids of the entire war on that same stretch of coast.

On Christmas Day 1914 Lurcher supported the Cuxhaven Raid, the Royal Navy's first ever combined sea-and-air strike, escorting seaplane carriers sent to bomb the German Zeppelin sheds; when one returning aircraft ran out of fuel and had to ditch on the way home, it was Lurcher who fished the crew out of the sea, a fitting reprise of her rescue work at Heligoland Bight four months earlier.

She continued taking part in interception attempts following German coastal raids on the British east coast, and in April 1916 her sister ship Firedrake claimed a trophy of her own, capturing the grounded German submarine UC5 on the Shipwash Shoal, later put on public display in London and New York; that September both destroyers moved from the Eighth to the Ninth Submarine Flotilla.

In May 1917 she collided with and sank the submarine HMS C17, which was later successfully repaired and returned to service, and on 6 July 1918 she drove off German seaplanes attacking the submarines E51 and C25, continuing her original protective role right up to the war's final months.

A Quiet Postwar End

HMS Lurcher survived the entire war and was sold for scrap to J. Cashmore of Newport, Wales, on 9 June 1921, closing out the career of a destroyer whose combination of record-breaking speed and a starring role at one of the war's earliest and most significant naval engagements made her one of the more notably notable small warships of the entire conflict.