HMS Restless (H82): Traded for an Ocean Liner

Built on the Clyde for the Grand Fleet

HMS Restless was an R-class destroyer built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down in September 1915 and launched in August 1916. She joined the 15th Destroyer Flotilla of the Grand Fleet on completion, taking her place among the large force of modern destroyers tasked with screening Britain's capital ships and hunting the German submarines that posed an ever-present threat to the fleet and its supply lines.

She was one of sixty-two. The Admiralty R class was the largest single group of destroyers Britain built in the First World War, and it existed because in July 1915 the Admiralty Board decided that all future destroyers would have two-shaft geared turbines instead of three shafts, a change made almost entirely to save fuel and one that worked spectacularly well. The reasoning behind it, and the trials that justified it, are set out in the article on HMS Redgauntlet (F97). Of the sixty-two, exactly one was still in commission when the next war started, and she is here too: HMS Skate (H39) was off the Normandy beaches in June 1944 at twenty-seven years old.

Sixty-One Sightings, No Confirmed Kills

Restless spent much of her war on the unglamorous but essential business of anti-submarine patrol and convoy support across the North Sea.

A single patrol period between 15 and 24 June 1917 gives some sense of just how busy that work could be, with sixty-one submarine sightings and twelve attacks reported by the flotilla, even though no vessels were confirmed sunk in that stretch, a reminder of how much effort the anti-submarine campaign demanded for results that were often frustratingly hard to verify.

The flotilla's log for that same week captures the kind of near-miss chase this work usually amounted to: on 24 June, after Restless's flotilla-mate Rowena sighted a U-boat on the surface, Rowena, Rob Roy and Trenchant gave chase together, only for the submarine to slip away unharmed, a fair summary of how the 15th Flotilla's war generally went.

Sixty-one sightings and nothing to show for it looks like incompetence until you consider what a destroyer actually had to work with in June 1917. She had lookouts, a chart, a stopwatch, a rough plot of where a periscope or a swirl in the water had last been seen, and a rack of depth charges whose settings were essentially a guess at how deep a boat that had already gone had chosen to go. Hydrophones existed and were close to useless in a ship that was moving. There was no way at all of holding contact with a submerged submarine, which meant that once a boat went down and stopped making a wake she had simply ceased to exist as far as the hunters were concerned.

The equipment that solved that problem was still a decade away, and when it came it was worked up at the anti-submarine school at Portland by a flotilla of elderly destroyers acting as targets and platforms, Redgauntlet among them. Restless and her flotilla were doing in 1917 what could be done in 1917, which was to be present in sufficient numbers to make a U-boat captain's afternoon uncomfortable. The measure of it is not the boats they sank. It is the convoys that got through while they were about.

Standing Ready for the Kaiser's Last Gamble

On 23 and 24 April 1918, Restless was called to respond to what turned out to be the German High Seas Fleet's final large-scale expedition of the war, an attempted raid on a Scandinavian convoy that ultimately failed to make contact with its target after the battlecruiser SMS Moltke suffered a spectacular mechanical failure: a propeller flew off entirely, sending her turbine racing out of control until it wrecked itself and let some 2,000 tons of seawater flood her engine spaces.

Moltke had to be taken under tow, and even that failed to go smoothly: while she was being hauled home the next day, the British submarine E42 put a torpedo into her escorting battleship Oldenburg, adding a second casualty to a sortie that had already gone thoroughly wrong for the Germans before either side's battle fleets ever came within sight of each other.

The sortie was doomed before Moltke's propeller ever came off, and for a reason nobody on either side knew at the time. German intelligence had the Scandinavian convoy cycle wrong, and Scheer took the whole High Seas Fleet to sea straight into a gap in the schedule. A convoy of thirty-four merchantmen had left Selbjorns Fjord at a quarter past one on the afternoon of 22 April and reached Methil in the Firth of Forth on the morning of the 24th; the outbound convoy was due to leave Methil that same day. There was nothing between Norway and Scotland for the Germans to find. Had every ship in the fleet performed perfectly, they would have steamed several hundred miles, seen nothing, and gone home.

That was the last time the German fleet went to sea to look for a fight. The next time it came out in force was on 21 November 1918, in the Firth of Forth, to surrender, an occasion described in the article on HMS Renown (1916), who was there for it. Restless stood by on 23 and 24 April for a battle that was never going to happen, and that is as close as she ever came.

It was as close as Restless came to a major fleet action, standing ready to help intercept a German sortie that fizzled out before real battle could be joined.

Interwar Service at Gibraltar

With the war over, Restless served with the Grand Fleet through 1919 before settling into interwar duty with the local defence flotilla at Gibraltar, a quieter posting reflecting her transition from a wartime hunter to a peacetime guardian of a key imperial staging post.

A Very Unusual Way to Leave the Fleet

Restless's end came in an unusual form of disposal. On 23 November 1936, she was one of twenty-four ageing destroyers handed over to the shipbreaking firm Thos. W. Ward, in exchange for a single, far grander vessel, the ocean liner RMS Majestic, before Restless herself was towed away to be broken up at Briton Ferry.

Majestic had begun life as the German liner Bismarck, launched at Hamburg in 1914 and still unfinished when war broke out. Handed to Britain as reparations and completed for the White Star Line, she briefly caught fire in 1920 before she had even entered service, then went on to become, at over 56,000 tons, the largest ship in the world until France's Normandie overtook her in 1935. Retired in 1936 after two hundred and seven Atlantic crossings, Majestic could not simply be sold for scrap outright: the terms under which Britain had originally received her as war reparations stood in the way, so Thos. W. Ward was given two dozen obsolete destroyers, Restless among them, to make up her scrap value instead, while the liner herself passed to the Admiralty.

The beginning of that liner is better than the end of her. She went down the ways at Blohm and Voss in Hamburg on 20 June 1914 as the Hamburg America Line's Bismarck, the largest ship in the world, and she was named by Countess Hanna von Bismarck, granddaughter of the Chancellor she was called after. The countess swung the bottle at the bow and it did not break. She tried again and it still did not break. Kaiser Wilhelm II, watching, came forward, took the bottle and smashed it himself. Six weeks later his country and the country that would eventually own the ship were at war.

The compensation she was handed over as is worth naming as well, because it closes a circle nobody intended. Bismarck came to Britain in place of the tonnage the White Star Line had lost, and the largest single item on that list was the hospital ship Britannic, the third of the Olympic-class sisters, mined in the Aegean in November 1916 without ever having carried a fare-paying passenger. So the Kaiser's biggest liner was handed over to stand in for the Titanic's youngest sister, and finished up being swapped for twenty-four worn-out destroyers.

It proved a good trade for Majestic, at least for a while: rather than the breaker's yard, she was renamed HMS Caledonia and became a boys' and artificers' training ship at Rosyth from 1937. Her reprieve was short. On 29 September 1939, less than a month into the Second World War, she caught fire at her moorings and sank, an incident the Admiralty put down to an electrical fault or careless workmen rather than enemy action; it took until 1943 to raise what was left of her, by which point she yielded nearly 40,000 tons of steel for the war effort anyway, rather more usefully than Restless's own hull ever managed.

The conversion to a training ship took some doing. She went into Southampton in July 1936 and had her masts and funnels cut down, not for economy but for clearance: nothing that tall could get under the Forth Bridge, and Rosyth was on the far side of it. Her lifeboats were reduced. She sailed from Southampton on 8 April 1937 and commissioned as HMS Caledonia on the 23rd, with room for fifteen hundred cadets and artificer apprentices, the longest ship the Royal Navy has ever had on its books.

It is a small but telling detail of how the interwar Royal Navy managed the disposal of its First World War fleet, treating old warships as tradeable assets in deals that could, on occasion, involve saving one of the largest ocean liners ever built rather than simply scrapping it.

The arithmetic of the whole affair is worth sitting with for a moment. Twenty-four destroyers, every one of which had spent the First World War at sea and several of which had been shot at, were reckoned by the Admiralty and the breakers between them to be worth roughly the same as one obsolete passenger liner. Restless went to Briton Ferry and was cut up. The liner she had been traded for went to Rosyth, burned out at her moorings a month into the next war, and did not give up her steel until 1943. Neither side of that bargain got much out of it.