HMS Redgauntlet (F97): The Destroyer That Survived Her Own Navy's Minefield

Constructed at Dumbarton for the Harwich Force

HMS Redgauntlet was an R-class destroyer built by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton, laid down in September 1915, launched in November 1916 and completed in February 1917, displacing just under 1,000 tons, capable of 36 knots, and armed with three 4-inch guns and four torpedo tubes in two twin mounts behind a crew of 82. She also went through pennant numbers with unusual enthusiasm even by wartime standards, changing from F58 to F51 to FA4 and finally, in January 1918, to the F97 she is remembered by today, more identity changes than most ships manage in three times the career.

The name is Walter Scott's. Redgauntlet is his 1824 novel about a Jacobite conspiracy that nobody much wanted to join, and she is the only ship the Royal Navy has ever put on the list under it. She was not even the only Scott title in her own class: Rob Roy was building at the same time. Somebody at the Admiralty in 1915 was clearly working through a bookshelf, which is a more agreeable way of naming sixty-two destroyers than most of the alternatives.

Sixty-two is the striking number, and the reason for it is fuel. In July 1915 the Admiralty Board decided that all future destroyers would be built with two-shaft geared turbines rather than three shafts, on the strength of barely a year's service from two L-class boats. It was a considerable bet placed on very little evidence, and it came off handsomely. Comparative trials against the N-class Norman showed the new design burning about fifteen per cent less fuel at 18 knots and twenty-eight per cent less at 25 knots, which translated into roughly forty per cent more range at the higher speed. In a North Sea war fought largely by ships that had to steam a long way to reach the fighting and a long way home afterwards, that was worth more than another gun.

In other respects the R class was deliberately a copy of the M class, because copying was faster. What did change was aimed squarely at the weather: more flare forward, another few inches of freeboard, the after 4-inch gun lifted onto a bandstand so its crew were not standing in the sea coming over the stern, and a proper hard-built bridge with wings instead of a platform under canvas. She measured 276 feet, displaced 975 tons standard, and her three Yarrow boilers pushed 27,000 shaft horsepower through those two shafts for 36 knots on trials and something nearer 32 once she was carrying ammunition, stores and a full crew. The armament was three 4-inch guns, a single 2-pounder pom-pom and two twin revolving 21-inch torpedo mounts.

She joined the 10th Destroyer Flotilla of the Harwich Force, one of the Royal Navy's busiest wartime commands, based on England's east coast and heavily committed to escorting merchant convoys through waters that German submarines and minelayers worked hard to make as dangerous as possible.

What the Harwich Force Actually Was

The Harwich Force deserves rather more than a name in passing. It was Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt's command, built up from a couple of flotillas in 1914 into something that by early 1917 ran to eight light cruisers, two flotilla leaders and forty-five destroyers, with the Tenth Flotilla alone up to twenty-seven boats by that March. Its job was the southern North Sea: convoys to and from the Netherlands, the Channel approaches, and being ready to go and find any German flotilla that came out of the Flanders bases. The force had been in business since the first weeks of the war, and one of the ships that started it off has an account here, HMS Lurcher (1912), the fastest ship in the fleet when new and Commodore Keyes' flagship at Heligoland Bight in August 1914.

Her First Captain Had Already Led a Line Across the German Fleet

Redgauntlet's first commanding officer was appointed on 25 January 1917, a fortnight before Denny handed her over. Commander Malcolm Lennon Goldsmith had been a Lieutenant since 1902 and a Commander since October 1914, and had spent the war in destroyers. Seven months before he took her, he had done something at Jutland that is worth setting out properly, because it explains the sort of officer the Admiralty thought a brand new destroyer needed.

On the night of 31 May 1916, with the daylight battle over and the two fleets groping about in the dark, Goldsmith was in the destroyer Lydiard leading a scratch line of a dozen boats: Liberty, Landrail and Laurel of his own Ninth Flotilla, Morris, Termagant and Turbulent of the Tenth, and Nerissa, Nicator, Narborough, Pelican and Petard of the Thirteenth, who had lost their own leader and simply latched on. Goldsmith was steering roughly at right angles to the German course, and he took the head of his line clean across the front of the High Seas Fleet before it came up. The ships at the back were not so lucky. Petard and Turbulent, the last two, found themselves in the middle of it, and Turbulent was finished off at point-blank range by the battleship Westfalen. Petard's captain thought she had been rammed; Nicator's people described searchlights and a ripple of fire running the whole length of her. The records disagree even about whether the Germans picked anybody up. Around ninety men were lost. The wider night action is told here from the deck of a destroyer screening the cruisers through it, in HMS Midge (H13).

Goldsmith had Redgauntlet for a year, handing over to Commander Aubrey Tillard in January 1918 and going on to the flotilla leaders Nimrod, Shakespeare and Montrose. He made Captain in 1919, commanded the leader Abdiel and then the light cruisers Conquest and Cambrian, and was promoted Rear-Admiral on 7 October 1931 and placed on the Retired List the following day, which is the Royal Navy's traditional way of saying thank you and goodbye in the same breath. He was a Vice-Admiral on the Retired List by 1936. Then, on 4 September 1939, at fifty-nine, he was recalled and sent to sea again as a convoy commodore, and on 1 January 1943 he was mentioned in despatches for three arduous years running ocean convoys. He died in 1955. A good many of the men who took Redgauntlet to sea in 1917 were still doing the job in 1943, which is the least comfortable fact in her whole history.

Escort Duty and the Zeebrugge Bombardment

The Harwich Force's work was relentless rather than glamorous, shepherding merchant shipping safely through the southern North Sea and Channel approaches, though as one account of the flotilla notes, casualties through direct conflict with the enemy were comparatively rare given the sheer volume of escort work undertaken.

Redgauntlet also supported the Royal Navy's bombardment operations against the German-held Belgian coast around Zeebrugge in May 1917, part of the ongoing effort to disrupt the U-boat bases operating from occupied Belgian ports.

That bombardment is worth naming, because it was a failure and an instructive one. Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon's plan was to close the Bruges canal by knocking out the Zeebrugge lock gates with the 15-inch guns of the monitors Erebus, Terror and Marshal Soult, firing from well out to sea behind a smoke screen laid by small craft. It began on the evening of 11 May 1917 and came apart the next day when the wind shifted, cleared the smoke and left the whole arrangement in plain view. The gates survived. So did the U-boat base behind them, which is precisely why the Navy came back in April 1918 and tried to do the same job with blockships, a cruiser alongside the mole and a landing party of Royal Marines.

Mined on Her Own Patrol

On 21 May 1917, while carrying out an anti-submarine patrol in the English Channel, Redgauntlet struck a British mine, a grimly ironic hazard of a war in which the Royal Navy's own defensive minefields could prove just as dangerous to friendly shipping as to the enemy if a ship strayed into the wrong patch of water.

The explosion caused severe damage, but Redgauntlet's crew kept her afloat and brought her home to Sheerness, where she was repaired and returned to active service, a testament to the destroyer's sound construction and her crew's damage control under difficult circumstances.

How quickly is worth knowing. The Admiralty's Pink List for 30 June 1917 has her back on the strength of the Tenth Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich, five and a half weeks after the explosion. That is a mined destroyer patched up and returned to the line inside forty days, in a dockyard that was doing the same thing for a good many other ships at the same time. Her pennant number then changed to F51 in July and to FA4 in August, so the Navy contrived to mislay her twice more on paper in the same summer it had very nearly lost her for real.

While she was in dockyard hands her flotilla had its best afternoon of the war. On 4 June 1917 the same two monitors went back for Ostend, covered this time by seven cruisers and twenty-five destroyers, and a detachment of Satyr, Taurus, Sharpshooter and Torrent ran into two German destroyers making a run for Zeebrugge and sank S20. Satyr led the action, and her captain took seven of the German crew out of the water while still under fire and was given a DSO for it. Two of the flotilla mates Redgauntlet went back to are here as well: HMS Sceptre (F79), who was at sea for the humiliating hunt after Bremse and Brummer that October, and HMS Thisbe (F82), who in 1918 towed a flying boat on a lighter towards Heligoland and watched it fail to take off.

Helping Build Britain's Submarine-Hunting Science

After the Harwich Force was dissolved at war's end, Redgauntlet transferred to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla under HMS King George V as part of the newly formed Home Fleet.

The rest of it is Navy List work, and the Navy List is blunt about what happens to a five-year-old destroyer in a fleet with far too many of them. Lieutenant Alban Knubley had her from March 1919 to March 1920, and on 24 August 1920 she was reduced to a reserve complement at the Nore, where she effectively sat for the best part of five years. Lieutenant-Commander Cyril Gore borrowed her for three weeks of reserve fleet exercises in the summer of 1924. She recommissioned with a special complement on 6 March 1925 and again properly at Portsmouth on 1 July that year, under Lieutenant-Commander Theodore Voysey, who would be her last captain. It was that second commissioning that sent her to Portland.

She subsequently joined the Royal Navy's Anti-Submarine School at Portland, established in 1924 as HMS Osprey, where she served in the flotilla that trained the operators and tried out the equipment, work bound up with the development of ASDIC, the early sonar technology that would go on to define anti-submarine warfare for the rest of the century, a quieter but remarkably significant contribution from a ship whose wartime career had already proven her toughness.

HMS Osprey is worth explaining, because it is easy to read the phrase anti-submarine school and picture a classroom. Portland was commissioned as an independent shore command on 1 April 1924 as the parent of the First Anti-Submarine Flotilla, and it had laboratories and workshops, a large water tank for running experiments indoors, and an inshore trials site on the inner breakwater where sets could be tested against a known target in known water. The establishment moved fully ashore in 1927. What came out of it over the following fifteen years was the equipment and, just as importantly, the people who could work it.

Redgauntlet's part in that should be stated honestly: she was a platform, not a laboratory. The flotilla's job was to go out into Weymouth Bay day after day and be the ship a submarine was hiding from, so that operators under training could learn to hold a contact and hand it over, and so that new gear could be tried at sea rather than in a tank. It is about as unglamorous as naval service gets. It is also the part that mattered, because a detection set is useless without a rating who can read it under pressure, and the ratings who could read it in 1939 had been taught by ships like her.

The Navy's gratitude was characteristically prompt. She had been back in full commission for barely two months when The Times reported, on 22 September 1925, that she was among a further fifteen destroyers to be scrapped in the financial year beginning 1 April 1926. She and three others of the Portland flotilla, Raider, Rocket and Retriever, went together. Voysey left her on 22 July 1926.

Sold for Scrap in 1927

Redgauntlet's service ended a decade after she was built. She was sold to J.J. King of Garston in July 1927 and broken up there, a fairly typical fate for a First World War-era destroyer as the Navy trimmed its fleet of older vessels through the interwar years.

She left behind a record that combined the unglamorous grind of convoy escort with a genuine brush with disaster survived, and a real contribution to the science that would help the Navy hunt submarines in the war still to come.

One of the sixty-two outlived all the rest by a very long way. HMS Skate (H39) transferred into the same Tenth Destroyer Flotilla, was torpedoed in the North Sea five weeks after Redgauntlet was handed over, survived that too, and was still going in 1939 as the sole surviving ship of her class. She was converted to a minelayer, then to a magnetic minesweeper, then back to an escort, and she was off the Normandy beaches in June 1944 at twenty-seven years old. The design that had been bought to save fuel turned out to have been built to last.

The name came back once, after a fashion, and it did not end well. Red Gauntlet, two words, was a 338-ton motor trawler built by Smiths Dock at South Bank-on-Tees in 1930, requisitioned by the Royal Navy and given the pennant FY 900. On 5 August 1943, under Temporary Lieutenant James Noel Childs RNVR, she was torpedoed and sunk off Felixstowe by the German motor torpedo boat S-86. Felixstowe is directly across the harbour from Parkeston Quay, where the Harwich Force used to lie. Twenty-six years after a destroyer of that name limped home from a mine, a trawler of very nearly the same name was lost within sight of her old base, to exactly the sort of fast raider the Harwich Force had spent four years trying to catch.