HMS Scourge (1910): The Destroyer That Rescued 339 Survivors of the Titanic's Sister Ship

Hawthorn Leslie for Speed-Built

HMS Scourge was built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company, launched on 11 February 1910, an 84-metre Beagle-class destroyer powered by three propellers capable of driving her to 27 knots. She transferred to the Third Destroyer Flotilla in 1913, taking her place among the modern destroyer force the Royal Navy was steadily building in the years before the First World War.

She was one of sixteen Beagles, and they are worth knowing about for one reason above all: they were the last destroyers the Royal Navy ever built to burn coal. That decision, and what it cost, is set out in the article on her sister HMS Savage, and it is the reason the whole class spent the war in the Mediterranean, where coaling was still convenient. Scourge and Savage tracked each other almost exactly from beginning to end, which makes the pair of them a decent sample of what a Beagle's war looked like.

It started badly for everybody. In August 1914 the class was in the Mediterranean with the 5th Destroyer Flotilla and was thrown into the hunt for the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau, which got clean away to Constantinople and helped bring the Ottoman Empire into the war on the German side, which is arguably the single most consequential escape in naval history. Then in November 1914 the Admiralty decided the Beagles were more use at home and brought the class back to escort troop transports across the Channel; Scourge spent that winter working out of Portsmouth. By the following spring she was back in the eastern Mediterranean, and on 25 April 1915 she was off Anzac Cove supporting the landings on the first morning of the Gallipoli campaign, four months before the Suvla work the article begins with.

Towing Troops Ashore at Suvla Bay

Scourge saw extensive action during the Gallipoli campaign, assisting with troop transport operations at a landing that would go on to become one of the war's most costly and controversial.

On 6 and 7 August 1915, at Suvla Bay, she worked alongside five other Beagle-class destroyers and a Portuguese destroyer to tow troop landing craft to the shore, exactly the kind of unglamorous but essential work that made the amphibious assault possible in the first place. That same day off the Suvla beaches, she was hit by a Turkish shell, killing one of her crew, a stark reminder that even this "unglamorous" ferrying work still put her well within range of enemy guns.

Worse followed that November: on the 19th, a boiler explosion aboard Scourge killed six of her stokers, a grim reminder that a destroyer's own machinery could prove just as lethal as anything the enemy fired at her.

The boiler explosion deserves a moment, because six men in one compartment is a terrible number for a ship of that size and because of where they were. A stokehold in a coal-fired destroyer is a hot steel box below the waterline containing several men, a great deal of coal, and boilers working at pressures that will strip flesh off bone if they let go. There is nowhere to go and no warning. Six stokers died on 19 November 1915 without an enemy anywhere near, and it is worth setting that against the class as a whole: the Beagles lost three ships in the course of the war and not one of them to enemy action. One went in a collision and two were wrecked. The sea and the machinery got them, and the Germans and the Turks never did.

Rescuing Survivors of the Titanic's Sister Ship

Scourge's most significant humanitarian moment came in the aftermath of one of the war's most poignant maritime disasters.

HMHS Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic and pressed into service as a hospital ship, struck a mine laid by the German submarine U-73 near the Greek island of Kea on the morning of 21 November 1916 and sank in just 55 minutes, taking 30 of the 1,066 people aboard down with her. Scourge was among the vessels that raced to the scene, helping rescue 339 survivors from the water, a properly substantial rescue effort that undoubtedly saved many lives. Among the day's survivors, pulled from the water by one of the ships on the scene, was the stewardess Violet Jessop, who had already lived through the Titanic's sinking and a serious collision aboard the Olympic, making Britannic the third disaster involving one of the three Olympic-class sister ships that she survived.

The timings are worth having, because they show what a rescue actually consists of. Scourge picked up Britannic's distress signal at a quarter past eight in the morning. Twenty minutes later she was calling up HMS Foxhound, on patrol in the Gulf of Athens, to come and help. The auxiliary cruiser Heroic, which had passed Britannic earlier that morning, turned round at twenty-eight minutes past eight. Scourge sighted the first lifeboats at ten o'clock and stopped ten minutes later, and by the time she had finished she had 339 people on her upper deck. Heroic, arriving first, had taken 494.

Then came the part nobody puts in the story. Two destroyers and an auxiliary cruiser had between them recovered 833 people from a ship carrying 1,066, and Scourge and Heroic physically had nowhere left to put anybody: a Beagle-class destroyer is 84 metres long, and 339 survivors is more than three times her own ship's company standing on her deck. So they left, for Piraeus, signalling as they went that there were more survivors ashore at Korissia. Foxhound got there at a quarter to twelve and anchored in the little harbour at one o'clock to take off the rest and give them medical help.

And the thirty who died deserve saying properly, because Britannic sank in fifty-five minutes with more than a thousand people aboard and lost fewer than three per cent of them, and almost all of those went the same way. The ship still had way on her and her bow was going down, which lifted her enormous propellers clear of the water while they were still turning. Two lifeboats were lowered anyway, by their own occupants using the automatic gear and without orders, and drifted straight into the blades. A third came within moments of the same thing and was saved when the engines were stopped, its occupants shoving themselves off the propellers by hand. Almost every one of Britannic's dead was in one of those two boats. What Scourge and the others pulled out of the Kea Channel was, in every other respect, a whole ship's company.

A Steady Service, Then Retirement

Scourge continued her wartime service through the Gallipoli campaign and beyond, her wartime record defined by exactly this combination of hard amphibious support work and genuine, life-saving rescue operations. She was sold on 9 May 1921 and scrapped at Briton Ferry, a routine end reflecting the broader pattern of disposal that claimed so many First World War-era destroyers through the interwar years.

Her last two years were the ones nobody writes about. By late 1917 Scourge was back in home waters with the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla, based in Ireland and then at Devonport, on anti-submarine and convoy escort work in the Western Approaches, which was where the war was actually being lost and won by then. She carried one battle honour out of it, Dardanelles 1915, which is one more than her sister Savage was given for standing off the same beaches. Both of them were sold for scrap on the same day, 9 May 1921, twelve years after they were laid down and two and a half years after the Armistice, which is roughly how long it took the Royal Navy to work out how many destroyers it was going to be allowed to keep.

A Destroyer Remembered for Saving Lives

HMS Scourge's connection to the loss of HMHS Britannic gives her a notable place in maritime history, a destroyer whose crew helped pull hundreds of survivors from the Aegean after the sinking of a ship whose sister vessel's tragedy remains one of the most famous maritime disasters in history.

It is a fitting legacy for a ship whose broader wartime record was built on exactly this kind of essential, often overlooked support work.