HMS Saintes (D84): Gunnery Trials, the Empire Windrush and Kuwait

The Battle Class

HMS Saintes was one of the Battle Class destroyers, the first British destroyers designed from the start around the lessons of the war at sea: above all, that a destroyer needed to be able to defend herself and the fleet against aircraft.

Their guns were mounted in twin turrets that could elevate high enough to fire at aircraft as well as ships, controlled by a director with radar, and they carried a heavy battery of Bofors guns.

They were named after battles fought by British forces at sea and on land, and Saintes took her name from Admiral Rodney's victory over the French fleet under de Grasse at the Battle of the Saintes, off Dominica, on 12 April 1782. She has been the only ship of the name.

She was ordered from Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on the Tyne on 27 April 1942, laid down on 8 June 1943 and launched in July 1944. Like many of her class she was overtaken by the end of the war.

The new gunnery director she was to carry was late, and its fire control gave trouble, and she was not completed until the end of September 1946. The photograph at the top of this page shows her under way on the Tyne a week later, with her twin forward turrets trained ahead and her pennant number painted large on her pale hull.

The Gunnery Trials Ship

Saintes had been chosen to try out a new weapon. In place of her forward turret she was fitted with the prototype of the twin 4.5 inch Mark VI mounting, the gun that was to arm the Navy's post-war destroyers, frigates and carriers for a generation, and she was attached to HMS Excellent, the gunnery school at Whale Island in Portsmouth, as its trials ship.

For two years, from the end of 1946 to 1948, she worked out of Portsmouth testing the new turret and its fire control and training the Navy's gunners in it. The prototype was later taken out and replaced by a standard mounting.

The 3rd Destroyer Flotilla

In the summer of 1949 she commissioned with a full ship's company as Leader of the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, with her sisters Armada, Gravelines and Vigo, and that August sailed for the Mediterranean to replace the wartime V Class destroyers.

The flotilla was based at Malta, attached to the depot ship Forth, and for the next five years Saintes led it through the round of fleet exercises, visits and duties that made up the life of the Mediterranean Fleet.

Twice in those years she was called away to deal with trouble. From August to October 1951, when Iran nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and seized the great refinery at Abadan, she went to the Persian Gulf to relieve the ships already there, until the British oil workers had been taken out.

In August 1953 a severe earthquake struck the west of Cyprus, and Saintes, with the carrier Theseus and the destroyer Daring, went to help, landing a party at Paphos to work among the ruined villages.

The Empire Windrush

On 28 March 1954 the troopship Empire Windrush, the ship whose arrival at Tilbury in 1948 with passengers from the Caribbean had become a landmark in British history, was steaming home from the Far East with servicemen and their families aboard when an explosion and fire broke out in her engine room off the coast of Algeria. Four of her engine room crew were killed.

The fire spread so fast that within half an hour the master ordered everyone to abandon ship, and every one of the passengers and crew was taken off by the ships that came to her aid.

Saintes was sent from the fleet with a Greek destroyer to help. She put men aboard the burning ship and took her in tow, in the hope of getting her to Gibraltar. It was hopeless. The fire could not be put out, and in the early hours of 30 March, after only a few miles under tow, the Empire Windrush sank. That December the flotilla came home and Saintes paid off.

Later Commissions

In January 1955 she recommissioned as Leader of the 3rd Destroyer Squadron, as the flotillas were now called, and went back to the Mediterranean that autumn. In 1956 she went into dockyard hands for a long refit, and so missed Suez, where her sisters Armada, Barfleur and St Kitts were in action.

She spent 1957 in reserve. At some point in these years she was also given the Squid anti-submarine mortar.

In November 1958 she was back in service as Leader of a squadron with Camperdown and Armada in home waters, and in 1960 she joined the reconstituted 1st Destroyer Squadron with Finisterre, Camperdown and Solebay for a last commission in the Mediterranean.

In July 1961, when the newly independent Kuwait asked for British help against a threatened Iraqi invasion, she was among the ships sent to the Persian Gulf in Operation Vantage. The Iraqis did not come, and she returned to Malta. Her last deployment ended in March 1962, and in April she paid off.

Rosyth

She had one more job to do. She went to Rosyth and was attached to HMS Caledonia, the training establishment for the Navy's artificer apprentices, the young engineers who would maintain its ships.

Her guns were mothballed, but her engines and boilers were kept in full working order by the apprentices, and for ten years generations of them learned their trade in her machinery spaces. She was sold for scrap on 26 June 1972 and arrived at Cairnryan for breaking up on 1 September.

Her sisters, among them Gravelines, Finisterre and Dunkirk, are in the Battle Class destroyers collection.