HMS Sceptre (F79): The Harwich Force Destroyer That Helped Sink Two German Raiders

The Build: Linthouse for the North Sea

HMS Sceptre was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at their Linthouse yard in Glasgow, laid down in November 1915, launched in April 1917 and completed that May, joining the 10th Destroyer Flotilla of the Harwich Force, one of the Royal Navy's busiest wartime commands, tasked with patrolling the southern North Sea against German raiders and submarines.

Sixty-Two Ships Built to Fix One Problem

The R class existed to solve a single complaint. Their predecessors, the Admiralty M class, were fast, plentiful and good, and they could not stay out. So the R class was drawn with two shafts instead of three and geared turbines instead of direct drive, which meant the turbines could turn fast where they were efficient while the propellers turned slowly where they were efficient, and the ship could do the same work on markedly less fuel. Sixty-two of them were built between 1916 and 1917. They were also, as it turned out, the last three-funnelled destroyers Britain ever built, which is why the ones in photographs look so distinctly of their moment.

Sceptre was laid down at Linthouse on 10 November 1915 and did not go down the ways until 13 April 1917, which is a long time for a destroyer in a year when yards were turning them out in months. What she produced when she finally ran her trials makes up for it: an average of nearly 36 knots in a force 6, which is a fast ship in a rough sea and would still be respectable in a fleet destroyer forty years later.

The Harwich Force deserves a sentence, because "one of the busiest commands" undersells a thing that was permanently at four hours' notice for six years. It was an independent striking force of light cruisers and destroyers based at the mouth of the Stour and the Orwell, answering to the Admiralty rather than to the Grand Fleet, and its patch was the shallow, crowded, heavily mined water between the Thames estuary and the Dutch coast, the Broad Fourteens, the approaches to the Dover Strait and everything German coming out of the Ems and the Scheldt. It went to sea more often than any other formation in the Royal Navy, saw its ships mined and torpedoed steadily throughout, and spent most of the war being told that whatever it had just chased had got away.

In January 1918 Sceptre's pennant number changed from F79 to F60, which she carried for the remainder of her service.

A Chase That Nearly Caught the Raiders

In October 1917, Sceptre took part in a major operation deploying some thirty cruisers and fifty-four destroyers in an attempt to intercept German naval forces, only for the fast German light cruisers Bremse and Brummer, chosen for the raid partly because their silhouettes could pass for British ships at a distance, to slip through the patrols entirely undetected and fall on the Lerwick to Bergen convoy in the early hours of 17 October. In barely an hour they sank both escorting destroyers, Mary Rose and Strongbow, along with nine of the twelve merchant ships in the convoy, then sailed home without a scratch despite the huge British force, Sceptre included, that had been put to sea specifically to stop something like this happening. It remains one of the more humbling episodes of the Royal Navy's North Sea war, a reminder of just how difficult it was to guard against a fast, well-disguised raider that simply refused to be where anyone expected it.

The humiliation had a consequence, and it is a striking one. Two destroyers had been put out to guard twelve merchant ships against whatever came, and what came was two brand-new light cruisers, which is not a fight so much as an execution. The Admiralty concluded that the Scandinavian route could not be held with light escorts at all, and began covering it with heavy ships: cruiser squadrons, and in due course battleships and battlecruisers detached from the Grand Fleet to sit in the North Sea minding a convoy of colliers and timber ships. Using capital ships as convoy escort was very nearly unthinkable in 1914 and it was the direct result of that hour on 17 October. When the Germans tried the same trick again that December they caught another convoy, and the covering force still could not get there in time.

Sinking Two German Vessels

Sceptre had better fortune the following year. On 4 October 1918, in the war's final weeks, she joined the destroyers Montrose, Starfish and Sylph in sinking the German armed vessels Bremerhaven and Ober Burgermeister Adickes, a concrete combat success, and a small measure of redress for a navy still smarting from Lerwick, achieved just weeks before the Armistice brought the fighting to an end.

The two ships she and her consorts sank on 4 October are worth a moment for their names alone. Bremerhaven and Ober Burgermeister Adickes are not warship names: one is a port and the other commemorates a Lord Mayor of Frankfurt. They were armed auxiliaries, civilian ships taken up and given a gun, which by the autumn of 1918 was most of what the German navy still had at sea in those waters. That is not a criticism of the four destroyers who sank them. It is what the last months of the war looked like from a Harwich bridge: the enemy fleet was in harbour and refusing to come out, and what was left to fight was whatever had been requisitioned.

Quiet Interwar Service

Sceptre transferred to the 5th Destroyer Flotilla in February 1919 as the fleet reorganised for peacetime, and her complement was reduced that October as demobilisation took hold. By December 1919 she had settled into service with the local defence flotilla at Devonport, a routine posting reflecting her transition from wartime front-line duty to the quieter demands of interwar naval life.

Scrapped After a Decade of Service

Sceptre was sold to the shipbreaker Ward on 16 December 1926 for scrapping at their Briton Ferry yard, a routine end for a First World War-era destroyer as the Navy trimmed its fleet through the interwar years, closing out a career that had, in its final weeks of active combat, delivered a genuine and tangible success against the German navy she had spent the whole war watching for.

Her sisters make her ending look premature. Eight R-class destroyers were lost in action, and most of the rest went the way Sceptre went, sold off in the 1920s as the treaty reductions bit. Two dodged it. HMS Radiant was sold to Siam in September 1920, renamed Phra Ruang, and was still fighting under that flag in 1941. And HMS Skate (H39) hung on to become the oldest destroyer in the Royal Navy in the Second World War and was off the Normandy beaches in June 1944. Sceptre, sold for scrap at Briton Ferry in December 1926, missed all of that by eighteen years, on no better grounds than that somebody had to go.