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.

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 genuinely nerve-wracking assignment given how many ships on both sides came to grief in the darkness and chaos of that night.

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 escorting a shipment of gold worth some £4,000,000 from Cherbourg, a genuinely valuable cargo for a single destroyer to be entrusted with, and a reminder of just how much unglamorous but critically important logistics work underpinned the wider war effort.

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. 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, closing out the career of a destroyer 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.