HMS Savage (1910): The Destroyer That Recovered the Dead of HMS Formidable

Built at Woolston Before the Storm

HMS Savage was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, Southampton, laid down in March 1909, launched in March 1910 and completed that August, joining the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth as a peacetime addition to the fleet that would, within a few short years, find herself at the centre of a truly eventful war.

The Last British Destroyers to Burn Coal

The most interesting thing about her is what was in her bunkers. Savage was one of sixteen Beagles, and the Beagles were the last destroyers the Royal Navy ever built to burn coal. That was not conservatism, it was arithmetic: the Admiralty wanted the price held below a hundred thousand pounds a ship, and coal was cheaper than oil. The Director of Naval Construction pointed out at the time that coal gave less power out of the same volume of boiler room, and he was right, and they built them that way anyway. Everything that followed her, from the Acorns on, burned oil.

What that bought was a 945-ton ship good for 27 knots with a crew of ninety-six, carrying one 4-inch gun, three 12-pounders and two 21-inch torpedo tubes. The gun arrangement was itself a change of mind: the original drawing put four 12-pounders on the forecastle, and trials established that four small guns did not do enough damage, so one proper one went there instead. The sixteen of them formed the 1st Destroyer Flotilla in 1910 and were shifted out to the Mediterranean as the 5th by the end of 1913, which is where the war found them, and which is very largely why a class of coal burners spent the war in the one theatre where the coaling was still convenient. Her sister HMS Scourge has an account here too, and she turns up again later in this one.

The Hunt for Goeben and Breslau

When war broke out in August 1914, Savage was almost immediately thrown into one of the war's more dramatic early episodes, redeployed from Alexandria to Malta to join the unsuccessful hunt for the German warships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau, a chase whose failure would have significant strategic consequences when the two German ships reached Ottoman waters and helped draw the Ottoman Empire into the war on Germany's side. In the days either side of that chase, her patrol work protecting French troop convoys also yielded the rather smaller consolation prize of a captured German merchantman, a modest trophy from an otherwise frustrating few weeks.

Guarding the Suez Canal

By October 1914, Savage had relocated to Port Said, taking up convoy escort duties protecting troop transports and, crucially, the Suez Canal itself, a vital artery of imperial communication that Britain could not afford to see disrupted, making this quiet guardianship role every bit as strategically important as more celebrated combat actions elsewhere.

There was one piece of shooting that November as well. Savage took part in the bombardment of Aqaba, at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, which the Ottoman garrison had been using as a base at the very bottom of the Hejaz. It is a footnote in her record and an odd little prefiguring of what that stretch of coast would become: Aqaba is the port T E Lawrence and the Arab forces would take from the landward side in July 1917, in the action that made his name.

Recovering the Dead of HMS Formidable

Savage returned to home waters that winter, and on 1 February 1915, a month after the sinking, recovered five bodies from the sea, though sadly no survivors, following the loss of HMS Formidable, a pre-dreadnought battleship torpedoed by the German submarine U-24 off Start Point on New Year's Day 1915, taking 547 of her 780 men down with her in one of the earliest and most shocking British warship losses of the entire war.

It is worth knowing what she was picking up. Formidable was hit by two torpedoes in a rising gale in the dark, took two hours to go, and her boats had to be got away in weather that made launching them nearly impossible. Captain Arthur Loxley stayed on his bridge with his fox terrier Bruce and went down with the ship; the dog's body came ashore afterwards and there is a headstone for him in the gardens at Abbotsbury. A Brixham sailing trawler, the Provident, under her skipper William Pillar, found one of the launches in the storm and took seventy men out of it, for which Pillar and his crew were given the Albert Medal by the King. A cutter with forty men in it made the shore at Lyme Regis in the early hours, and the police who heard the shouting got them out; nine of the forty could not be brought round. Of about 780 men aboard, roughly two hundred lived.

A month is a long time for a body to be in the Channel in January. That is the context for the entry in Savage's log on 1 February 1915: five men recovered, no survivors, somewhere off the Dorset and Devon coast, thirty-one days after the ship went down. The reason an obsolete battleship had been sunk across the entrance to Portland harbour ten weeks earlier, and why that decision looked so much better on 2 January than it had in November, is set out in HMS Hood (1891).

That grim task of recovery, however briefly documented, represents exactly the kind of unglamorous but deeply necessary work that fell to destroyers throughout the conflict.

Back to the Dardanelles for Gallipoli

Savage's spell in home waters was brief. By late March 1915 she was ordered back to the Dardanelles, and that August she was in among the fighting, supporting the army's right flank at Cape Helles and helping cover the landings at Suvla Bay, two of the grimmest chapters of the whole Gallipoli campaign. Rather unfairly given that record, she ended up as one of only two ships in her class never awarded the Gallipoli battle honour, an administrative quirk rather than any reflection on the work her crew actually did there.

The battle honour business is worth untangling, because the article of faith is that she did not get one and the ship's own name says otherwise. Two honours cover that campaign. Dardanelles 1914-15 is for the naval operations in and around the straits, and the name Savage carries it: it appears on the honours board of the 1943 destroyer that inherited the name. Gallipoli 1915 is for the landings, and that is the one she and HMS Pincher, alone out of sixteen sisters, were not awarded, even though Savage was off Cape Helles in August 1915 supporting the right of the line and Scourge was one of six Beagles towing loaded lighters onto the beach at Suvla on the 6th and 7th. Nobody has ever produced a reason. It looks exactly like what it probably was, which is a clerk working from an incomplete list.

Escort Duty in the Mediterranean

Savage went in for a refit at Southampton in January 1916, then returned to Mediterranean operations with the 5th Destroyer Flotilla through to the middle of 1917, serving as an escort vessel as German submarine warfare intensified across the theatre, continuing the pattern of steady, essential escort work that defined much of her wartime career. That December she finally came home for good, transferred first to the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla at Londonderry and then, from the spring of 1918, to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla at Devonport, where she was still serving among some forty patrol and escort destroyers when the Armistice was signed.

Declared Surplus and Broken Up

With the Armistice signed and the fleet no longer needing every destroyer built for the war, Savage was declared surplus and sold to Ward at Portishead to be broken up on 9 May 1921, a routine end for a ship whose wartime service had nonetheless carried her across three seas and touched on some of the conflict's most significant early episodes.

The name did not stop with her. She was the sixth ship to carry it and the seventh was another destroyer, ordered in 1941 and completed in June 1943, who took eight torpedoes to the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst at the Battle of North Cape and carried a prototype twin turret nobody else in her class had. Her account is in HMS Savage (G20). Between the two of them the name covers both world wars almost end to end, and it is the earlier one, the coal burner, who did the quieter and in some ways the harder half of it.

A Destroyer at the Centre of a Wider War

HMS Savage's First World War career reflects just how far a single destroyer's duties could range within a few short years, from a dramatic and consequential naval chase in the Mediterranean to the grim, necessary work of recovering the dead from a torpedoed battleship, by way of guarding one of the empire's most vital strategic waterways and fighting at Gallipoli, a campaign for which, battle honour or not, she was very much present.