HMS Queenborough (G70): The Destroyer Britain Gave to Australia Twice

A Wartime Destroyer, Built on the Tyne

HMS Queenborough was a Q-class destroyer ordered on 2 April 1940 and built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend-on-Tyne, laid down on 6 November 1940 at a cost of £725,000, launched on 16 January 1942, and commissioned that September under Commander Eric Percival Hinton, DSO, fully completing that December. She entered a war that, by 1942, was demanding escorts in every theatre simultaneously, and Queenborough would end up serving in rather more of them than most.

The Arctic, Sicily and Salerno

Queenborough's early war took her onto the Arctic convoy routes during the punishing winter of 1942 and 1943, a period that saw some of the fiercest and most consequential naval actions of the entire Arctic campaign. She was one of ten ships Admiral Sir John Tovey sent to reinforce the escort of convoy JW51B on the last day of 1942, arriving in the wake of the Battle of the Barents Sea, as German surface raiders repeatedly tried and failed to break through to the convoys carrying vital supplies to the Soviet Union.

The action she arrived just too late for deserves naming, because it is the one that ended German surface raiding in the Arctic. On the last day of 1942 the pocket battleship Lutzow and the heavy cruiser Hipper, with six destroyers, came at JW51B in the dark and found it defended by five destroyers and a couple of very small ships under Captain Robert Sherbrooke. The escort attacked, bluffed, laid smoke and kept turning towards a force that could have annihilated it, and held the Germans off long enough for the cruisers Sheffield and HMS Jamaica (44) to arrive. Not one merchant ship was lost.

It cost the destroyer HMS Achates (H12), who went on making smoke to cover the convoy after she had been mortally hit and her captain killed, and it cost Sherbrooke the sight of an eye, for which he was given the Victoria Cross. It also cost Hitler his temper: the failure enraged him so completely that he ordered the surface fleet scrapped and Grand Admiral Raeder resigned over it. HMS Obedient (G48) was in the thick of it and tells the story from inside. Queenborough steamed into the aftermath of all that as a three-month-old destroyer on her first Arctic run.

From those freezing northern waters she moved south to the Mediterranean, supporting the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the landings at Salerno that September, a considerable change of climate and circumstance within the space of a few months.

Later in the war she transferred first to the British Eastern Fleet and then the British Pacific Fleet, where her pennant was changed from G70 to D19 to fit American hull-numbering conventions used for joint operations. From 23 March to 29 May 1945 she screened British aircraft carriers as their aircraft struck Japanese airfields in the Ryukyu Islands during the Okinawa campaign, one of five battle honours, Arctic 1942-43, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Mediterranean 1943 and Okinawa 1945, she carried away from the war.

Lent to Australia, Then Given Outright

Queenborough's post-war story became distinctly Australian. Command passed that September to her second and last wartime captain, Commander Philip Lionel Saumarez, DSC, who saw her through to the Royal Australian Navy's formal commissioning of the ship at Sydney on 29 October 1945, part of a wider post-war reshuffle in which Australia handed back the four N-class destroyers Britain had loaned it during the war, HMAS Norman among them, in exchange for three Q-class destroyers, Queenborough included.

The loan became permanent on 1 June 1950, when the British Admiralty formally presented the ship to Australia as an outright gift, clearing the way for a substantial rebuild at Cockatoo Island Dockyard between May 1950 and December 1954 that converted her into a dedicated anti-submarine frigate. She recommissioned on 7 December 1954 as the first ship in the entire RAN fitted with the Type 170 Asdic set and the Mk 10 Limbo anti-submarine mortar, a thorough transformation that gave the ageing wartime destroyer a genuinely modern second role.

She was not alone in going south. Of the eight Q-class destroyers, five ended up Australian: Quiberon and Quickmatch were lent as early as 1942, and Queenborough, Quality and Quadrant followed in 1945 in the same shuffle that sent the N-class boats home. Four of the five, all but Quality, were later rebuilt into anti-submarine frigates of exactly this kind. It is one of the most thoroughly exported destroyer classes the Royal Navy ever built, and the reason is simple enough: the Q-class hull was sound, the Royal Navy had more destroyers than it could man in 1945, and Australia had a coastline and no shipyards capable of turning out escorts at speed.

Queenborough outlived all of them. Quadrant went to the breakers in 1962, Quiberon and Quickmatch in 1972, Queenborough in 1975. And she outlived her British sisters by a rather wider margin than that: HMS Quail (G45) hit a mine off Bari in November 1943, was fought for over six months and capsized under tow in May 1944 having never fired another shot. The two of them were laid down on the same day, 6 November 1940, three miles apart on the same river. One managed nineteen months of war. The other managed four hundred and forty-three thousand miles and two navies.

A Long Australian Career

As HMAS Queenborough, she went on to serve for the best part of two decades. Barely two months after her frigate recommissioning she was off again, sailing from Sydney on 24 February 1955 for a training cruise to the United Kingdom to learn the latest in anti-submarine warfare, before settling into a long run of Far East Strategic Reserve deployments, one from September 1956 to July 1957 and five more in successive years from 1959 to 1963, through the tense years of Confrontation and the wider Cold War in South East Asia. In 1962 she also took on the unglamorous business of a genuine rescue operation, searching north of Singapore for the missing cargo ship Kawi.

She was decommissioned on 10 July 1963, but her career was not quite finished: she was recommissioned as a training ship on 28 July 1966, giving a new generation of Australian sailors their sea training aboard a ship that had already fought in the Arctic, the Mediterranean and the Pacific. That October she proved she still had some fight left in her too, making a high-speed dash from Hobart all the way to Macquarie Island to rescue a seriously ill scientist.

A Long Voyage to the Breakers

Queenborough was finally decommissioned for good on 7 April 1972, having steamed some 443,236 miles in Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy service combined. She was sold for scrap on 8 April 1975 to Willtopp (Asia) Limited, towed out of Sydney on 12 May 1975 and all the way to Hong Kong, where she was broken up after arriving that June, more than three decades after she had first slipped down the ways on the Tyne.

One Ship, Two Navies, Three Oceans

Few Royal Navy destroyers of her generation can claim service across quite so many theatres and, ultimately, two entirely different navies.

HMS Queenborough's journey from the icy convoy routes of the Arctic to a long, useful second life defending and training the Royal Australian Navy stands as one of the more complete examples of just how far a well-built wartime destroyer could travel, in every sense, once the original war she was built for had ended. Fittingly for a ship whose war began escorting convoys through Arctic ice, one of her very last acts before retirement was another dash through cold water, this time to the sub-Antarctic, proving that old destroyers, like old habits, die hard.