HMS Malaya: The Battleship a Malay Sultan Paid For

A Battleship as a Present

HMS Malaya is the only capital ship in this series that somebody gave to Britain. In 1913 the Sultan of Perak put a motion to the Federal Council of the Federated Malay States proposing that the four states, Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan and Pahang, should present the British government with a first-class armoured ship.

The motion passed, and the bill, £2,945,709, was met in full from Malaya. Nobody in London had asked.

She was ordered from Armstrong Whitworth on the Tyne and laid down on 20 October 1913, the fifth and last of the Queen Elizabeth class, launched on 18 March 1915 and completed on 1 February 1916. The class is the one that gambled on oil fuel and a 15-inch gun that had never been fired when the drawings were signed off, so there is no need to go over that ground again here.

What Malaya added to the class was a badge, a gold tiger on a red field holding a Malay kris, a motto that reads Malem Fero Malis, "I bring evil to the evil", and a set of paymasters six thousand miles away.

She also wore something no other ship at Jutland wore. Alongside the White Ensign she flew the red, white, black and yellow ensign of the Federated Malay States, which one contemporary is supposed to have said made her look like an enraged P&O liner, the flag being uncomfortably close to that shipping line's house flag.

It is the sort of remark that could only be made by somebody who had not yet seen what was about to happen to her.

Last in the Line, and Half an Hour of It

Malaya had been in commission for less than four months when she went to Jutland on 31 May 1916 as the rear ship of Rear-Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas's 5th Battle Squadron, the fast division of Queen Elizabeths attached to Beatty's battlecruisers. Being last in the line of the fastest and most heavily armed squadron in the fleet sounds like a safe place to stand. It was the opposite.

When the squadron turned north after the German battle fleet came up, the turn was made in succession, which meant every ship passed through the same patch of sea in turn and the German gunners had the range of it by the time the last of them got there. Malaya was the last of them.

She spent roughly half an hour under concentrated fire and was hit eight times, seven of them by heavy shell, two below the waterline, which put water into her and gave her a list.

The dangerous hit was the one that burst by her starboard 6-inch battery. It set off ready-use cordite, and fire ran through the battery. Burning cordite then went down an ammunition hoist into a 6-inch shell room, which is the precise sequence that had already destroyed three British battlecruisers that afternoon.

Petty Officer Day and Leading Seaman Watson went in and got it out. Both were badly burned. Both were awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, and between them they are the reason there is an article to write.

Her casualties are quoted two ways and the difference is worth explaining rather than fudging. The official history records 63 dead. The named roll of her officers and men killed in action or dead of wounds runs to 65, because it carries on to 24 June and includes men who died of their burns in the weeks afterwards.

Either way it was the heaviest loss suffered by any British battleship that day. Barham was hit six times, Warspite fifteen, and Valiant not at all. Each of the three has her own account here: Barham, whose loss off Sollum was caught on film, Warspite, who would not go quietly even to the breakers, and Valiant, who came through Jutland untouched and was later sunk at her own mooring. A headstone at Lyness naval cemetery in Orkney remembers Malaya's fallen.

On 24 August 1916, less than three months later, the Federated Malay States presented their ship with a silver bell, at a ceremony attended by Jellicoe and Evan-Thomas. Keep the bell in mind. It comes back at the end.

Two Funnels Into One

The peace treated her the way it treated all of them, as too expensive to run and too new to scrap. She was refitted between 1927 and 1929, gaining anti-torpedo bulges and having her two funnels trunked into one, which is the single change that makes the difference between the two photographs on this page.

The bigger job came at Devonport between October 1934 and December 1936: thicker deck armour, a modern anti-aircraft outfit of eight 4-inch guns and sixteen 2-pounder pom-poms, and a hangar, cranes and a fixed catapult so that she could fly off and recover her own spotting aircraft.

It was a serious modernisation and it is often written off, because it was not the same thing as the full reconstruction Warspite, Valiant and Queen Elizabeth received, in which the ships were re-engined outright. Malaya kept her original machinery, and by 1943 that decision would end her seagoing career.

In 1936 it simply made her a competent, unglamorous battleship, which is what the Navy needed rather more of than it needed glamorous ones.

Hunting Graf Spee, Carrying Gold

She began the second war at Alexandria with the 1st Battle Squadron alongside Warspite and Barham, and was almost immediately sent off to do something else.

In October 1939 she went to Aden with the carrier Glorious to sweep the Gulf of Aden for the Graf Spee, joining HMS Ramillies, who would later survive a midget submarine attack in Madagascar, in a hunting group designated Force J, an operation whose entire achievement was to be in the wrong ocean while the raider worked the South Atlantic.

Then the Atlantic, and the most nerve-racking cargo a battleship can carry. In February 1940 she sailed from the Clyde with gold bullion for Canada, part of the enormous wartime shipment of Britain's reserves across the ocean, a story the corpus tells properly in the article on HMS Revenge (06).

Between the bullion runs she worked as ocean escort for the Halifax convoys, which is what a slow battleship was actually for in 1940: not to fight, but to be present, so that a German surface raider looking at a convoy would see a capital ship in the middle of it and go away.

Force H, and a Shell in a Cathedral

In the summer of 1940 she was back in the Mediterranean and in action off Calabria on 9 July, a rare occasion on which both fleets actually brought their heavy ships out, seen from a submarine's deck in the article on HMS Phoenix. On 9 January 1941, covering a Malta convoy, eight Italian bombers picked her out and attacked her specifically.

Every bomb fell just ahead of her. Two of the attackers were shot down by Fulmars from Ark Royal.

She then joined Force H at Gibraltar, and in February 1941 went with HMS Renown and Ark Royal to bombard Genoa. That operation is chiefly remembered for two things that happened at Malaya's end of it: a salvo that fell within fifty yards of the Italian battleship Caio Duilio, sitting helpless in a dry dock, without touching her, and a 15-inch armour-piercing shell that went into Genoa Cathedral and did not explode.

Both are set out in Renown's article, so here it is enough to say that of all the things a Malay sultan might have expected to buy in 1913, an unexploded shell in an Italian cathedral was probably not among them.

In March 1942 she escorted HMS Eagle on the operation that flew the first Spitfires into Malta, the first ever sent anywhere outside Britain. Eagle had begun life as a Chilean battleship and ended it as the island's lifeline.

Torpedoed, and Mended in Brooklyn

On the night of 20 March 1941, 250 miles north-north-west of the Cape Verde Islands, Malaya was escorting the homeward convoy SL 68 when U 106 put a torpedo into her port side. It flooded a boiler room and gave her a seven-degree list.

Nobody was killed, which for a torpedo hit on a twenty-five-year-old ship is close to miraculous.

She limped to Port of Spain in Trinidad for temporary repairs and then did something no British warship had done in that war. On 6 April 1941 she went into the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York and was taken in hand by the United States Navy, the first Royal Navy ship repaired and refitted in America in the Second World War.

This was eight months before Pearl Harbor, in a country that was formally neutral, and the politics of it were as much the point as the welding. She came out in August with Type 281 air warning radar, three types of fire control radar and eleven Oerlikons, better equipped than she had ever been.

There is a footnote to the New York months that is pure 1941. While she lay in Brooklyn, part of her ship's company was drafted off to man United States Coast Guard cutters being transferred to the Royal Navy, and it was Malaya's own captain who formally accepted the first four of them on the Navy's behalf on 30 April.

A battleship bought by Malay sultans, lying in an American dockyard, handing over her sailors to crew American ships for a British war. The map of who was paying for what had become genuinely complicated.

A Target for Her Own Side

Her machinery finally caught up with her. In August 1943 she paid off into reserve at Faslane because her engines could no longer keep up with fleet operations, and her 6-inch guns were taken out. That should have been the end of it, and for most ships it would have been.

Instead, in February 1944, somebody found a use for a battleship nobody wanted to steam: she was moored in Loch Long and bombed. The Royal Navy was developing Highball, the smaller naval cousin of the bouncing bomb, and it needed something ship-shaped and expendable to throw them at.

Malaya was damaged in the trials, which one hopes was taken as evidence that the weapon worked.

She was patched up, given the latest radar and yet more Oerlikons, forty-five of them by the end, and radio jamming gear to protect her against the German glider bombs that had been sinking Allied ships in the Mediterranean. On 22 June 1944 she was recommissioned as a bombardment ship and sent to Portsmouth to sit as the spare, in case one of the ships shelling the Normandy beaches was knocked out.

She got one afternoon. On 1 September 1944 she opened fire on the German fortress island of Cézembre, off Saint-Malo, whose garrison had held out for weeks after the town itself had fallen. The island surrendered the following morning.

It was the last time HMS Malaya fired her guns, twenty-eight years and three months after the first time. At Jutland she had been hit eight times in half an hour. At Cézembre nobody laid a finger on her, and the war had eight months left to run.

Vernon II

She paid off into reserve at Faslane again in October 1944 and lay on the Clyde through the winter. In May 1945 her main and secondary armament was taken out altogether and she was commissioned at Portsmouth as VERNON II, an accommodation and training ship for the torpedo school, which is the naval equivalent of a racehorse ending up giving rides at a fete.

She went on the disposal list in 1947 and was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation on 20 February 1948. She arrived at Faslane under tow on 12 April 1948 and was broken up there by Metal Industries, a few miles round the corner from the loch where her own side had bombed her four years before.

The Bell Went Home

The best ending belongs to the bell. On 12 September 1947, Malayan Victory Day and the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender, HMS Malaya's watch bell was presented to the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur.

Rear-Admiral Egerton handed it over on behalf of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, the Governor of the Malayan Union, Sir Edward Gent, received it for the people of Malaya, and the school's headmaster took it into safekeeping.

The choice of a school was not sentimental padding. The Victoria Institution's own bell had disappeared during the Japanese occupation, and the idea was that the battleship's bell would be rung every morning to start the school day. It hung there for sixty years and was handed to the Royal Malaysian Navy in 2007.

So the ledger closes about even. The Federated Malay States bought Britain a battleship for £2,945,709 in 1913.

The battleship spent thirty-two years being shot at, torpedoed, bombed by both sides and finally cut up in a Scottish loch, and what came back was a bell, ringing every morning in a school in Kuala Lumpur that had lost its own. Of all the returns on a naval investment, it is not the worst.