HMS Midge (H13): Screening the Fleet at Jutland, Then Guarding a Fortune in Gold

Built on the Clyde

HMS Midge was laid down on 1 April 1912 at the Govan yard of the London and Glasgow Shipbuilding Company, a Harland and Wolff-owned yard, launched on 22 May 1913 and completed in March 1914, an Acasta-class destroyer, later redesignated the K-class, one of twenty standard Admiralty-design destroyers ordered under the 1911 to 1912 building programme, displacing 892 tons and armed with three 4-inch guns and two 21-inch torpedo tubes, capable of a brisk 29 knots.

She joined the Fourth Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth on commissioning, just months before the outbreak of war.

She was one of twenty near-identical sisters ordered together under the 1911 to 1912 building programme and spread across yards from Clydebank to Belfast, the first Royal Navy destroyers built with three 4-inch guns rather than two, even if the third gun's field of fire was cramped enough to cover only 35 degrees either side of dead ahead. Lieutenant-Commander Hubert Gore-Langton had her first command from February 1914, before Lieutenant-Commander James Cavendish took over in August 1915 and was still in charge when she steamed out to Jutland the following spring.

Hunting U-boats From Scapa Flow

HMS Midge transferred to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in August 1914 as war broke out, and spent much of 1915 engaged in largely unsuccessful searches for German U-boats, the kind of frustrating, unglamorous patrol work that occupied so many British destroyers in the war's early years, long on effort and frequently short on results.

Screening the Fleet at Jutland

HMS Midge was one of nineteen ships of her flotilla that sailed in support of the Grand Fleet during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916, tasked with screening the Second Cruiser Squadron and remaining alongside the cruisers through the confused and dangerous night action that followed the main daylight battle, a remarkably nerve-wracking assignment given how many ships on both sides came to grief in the darkness and chaos of that night.

Twenty Sisters, Seven Lost

Midge came through that night without a scratch, which was rather more than could be said for several of her sisters. Of the twenty Acasta-class destroyers built alongside her, four, Ardent, Fortune, Shark and Sparrowhawk, were lost at Jutland itself, and a fifth, Acasta, was hit twice by the German battlecruiser Derfflinger and had to be towed home to Aberdeen practically wrecked. Seven of the class never made it through the war at all. Whatever screening a cruiser squadron through a chaotic night action actually involved, Midge evidently did it well enough to be one of the lucky ones.

There's a darker footnote to that assignment, too. The Second Cruiser Squadron Midge screened that night, Minotaur, Warrior and Hampshire under Rear-Admiral Herbert Heath, made it back to Scapa Flow on 1 June largely unscathed. Hampshire, however, was ordered straight back out within days, carrying Lord Kitchener on a diplomatic mission to Russia, and on 5 June she struck a German mine off Marwick Head in Orkney and went down with the vast majority of her crew, Kitchener among them. The cruiser Midge had helped shepherd safely through the Battle of Jutland didn't survive the week that followed it.

From Minesweeper Escort to a Fortune in Gold

HMS Midge transferred to Immingham in July 1916 to provide protection for minesweeping operations, before moving to Portsmouth that November, where she was given the rather more glamorous task of helping escort a shipment of gold worth some £4,000,000 from Cherbourg on 28 November 1916, sharing the job with fellow destroyers Hardy and Active. Three warships for one cargo gives some sense of how seriously the Admiralty took it, and a reminder of just how much unglamorous but critically important logistics work underpinned the wider war effort.

It is worth saying why gold was crossing the Channel at all. Britain and France were buying the war largely from the United States, and until the Americans came in there was no arrangement for buying it on credit indefinitely: somebody had to settle. France held the largest gold reserves in Europe, Britain had the best credit in the world, and between them they used both to keep the shells and the wheat moving. From January 1916 J. P. Morgan and Company, acting for the British Treasury, was pegging the pound against the dollar in New York to stop the whole arrangement coming apart.

Which is why three destroyers were detailed to look after one cargo. Four million pounds in 1916 was a serious fraction of what Britain could actually lay hands on in a hurry, and a torpedo in the wrong place would have taken it to the bottom of the Channel where nobody was going to get it back. Midge was not escorting treasure. She was escorting the country's ability to go on paying for the war.

Protecting Portuguese Convoys

HMS Midge deployed to Lisbon in January 1917 to help protect Portuguese troop convoys crossing the submarine-infested waters of the Bay of Biscay, and in May that year carried out an unsuccessful attack on the German submarine UC-41, one of the many close calls that never quite translated into a confirmed kill but which nonetheless kept enemy submarines wary and off balance.

UC-41 survived Midge's attention on 26 May 1917, but not by much longer. Three months later, on 21 August 1917, one of her own mines detonated as she was laying them in the Tay estuary, forcing her to the surface where British trawlers finished the job with depth charges, taking all twenty-seven of her crew down with her. By then she had sunk seventeen Allied ships, so Midge's failed attack, whatever it achieved on the day, was very much not the end of the danger UC-41 posed.

The Portuguese convoys deserve rather more than a line, because that traffic was the whole existence of an army. Portugal came into the war on the Allied side, and between 2 February and 28 October 1917 the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps, 59,383 men, was carried to Brest almost entirely in British ships behind British destroyers. Portugal had no means of its own to keep the line between Lisbon and France open. If the escorts failed, the corps in France was on its own.

They went by train from Brest to a concentration area around Aire-sur-la-Lys, learned trench and gas warfare, and took over a stretch of the front. On 9 April 1918 about twenty thousand of them were holding that sector, exhausted, badly under-relieved and expecting to be pulled out at any moment, when roughly a hundred thousand German troops came at them behind some seventeen hundred guns and a Bruchmuller bombardment. What followed is remembered in Portugal as the Battle of the Lys and is barely remembered in Britain at all.

None of which was Midge's doing, and it does not diminish the work. But it is worth holding the two ends of it together. A twenty-nine-knot destroyer plodding across the Bay of Biscay in the winter of 1917, doing the dullest possible job, was one link in a chain that ended with twenty thousand men in a Flanders field on a spring morning. That is generally what escort work is: the boring end of something that is not boring at all.

She remained in active service right through to the Armistice on 11 November 1918.

Broken Up at Granton

HMS Midge was transferred to reserve at The Nore after the war and reduced to Care and Maintenance status on 4 February 1920, before being sold to Granton Shipbuilding on 5 November 1922 for breaking up, one of dozens of Great War destroyers quietly scrapped in the early 1920s as a Navy that had built them in their hundreds for one specific war found itself with far more than peacetime required. It was an unremarkable end for a ship whose war had ranged from the tense night waters off Jutland to the considerably calmer, if no less important, business of keeping gold and troops safely on their way.