HMS Scout (H51): The Oldest Destroyer in the Fleet, Evacuating Singapore as It Fell

Clydebank in the War's Final Year-Built

HMS Scout was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down in October 1917, launched in April 1918 and completed that June, one of thirty-three S-class destroyers ordered as a development of the earlier R-class design. She joined the 12th Destroyer Flotilla of the Grand Fleet shortly before the Armistice, arriving just in time to see the war's final weeks.

She was the fifteenth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, which was first used in 1577, and she inherited a set of battle honours that no destroyer earned: Armada 1588, the Pei-Ho Forts in 1859 and South Africa 1900 to 1901. Her badge was a gold fleur-de-lys on a field of wavy white and blue bars, and her motto was Be prepared, which will be familiar to anybody who was ever in the Scouts and is not a coincidence in either direction: the fleur-de-lys and the motto were both old naval and heraldic property long before Baden-Powell got hold of them. In December 1941 the people of Leatherhead in Surrey adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign.

On the class, she was one of the fortunate ones. Sixty-seven S-class destroyers were built from 1917 and only eleven were still in the Royal Navy in 1939, the rest sold for scrap in the 1930s to bring Britain under the destroyer tonnage limit of the London Naval Treaty. Two of the other survivors were HMS Scimitar (H21) and HMS Sardonyx (H26), both of whom spent the war in the Atlantic. Scout went the other way and had a considerably stranger one.

A Long, Quiet Interwar Career

Scout spent much of the interwar period in reserve with a reduced complement, serving as emergency destroyer at Plymouth until 1925 and later at the Nore from 1932. She took part in a 1934 exercise with sister ship Scimitar testing the defences of the north-east coast, and ran aground briefly departing Sheerness in January 1938, refloated with only minor damage.

That September she recommissioned and was dispatched to Singapore, arriving that December via the Suez Canal, a posting that would place her directly in the path of one of the war's most consequential Allied defeats.

Her war began on the second day of it. Scout had been converted for minelaying at Hong Kong, and on 3 September 1939 she was already on passage to Singapore; on the 4th, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, she laid a defensive minefield off Singapore. Six days later she was converted back into an anti-submarine ship, which is a fair summary of how clear anybody was about what the Far East fleet was for. She then spent two years on the Hong Kong Local Flotilla doing contraband control and convoy work, waiting for the war that everyone knew was coming and nobody would say so.

Commanding the Perak Flotilla in the Straits of Malacca

After Britain declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941, Scout evacuated Hong Kong that same day alongside her sister ship HMS Thanet, reaching Singapore five days later to join the Eastern Fleet as the Japanese invasion of Malaya gathered pace. Scout joined the Perak Flotilla at Port Swettenham, on the Malayan side of the Straits of Malacca, as the Japanese advance swept rapidly down the peninsula, a difficult assignment against an enemy whose speed and coordination caught Allied forces across the region badly off guard.

Rose Force, and the Raids in the Straits of Malacca

What she was actually doing in December 1941 is a good deal more interesting than a defensive posting. On the 18th, ten days after Japan came into the war, Scout joined the Perak Flotilla at Port Swettenham on the Malayan coast, and the flotilla's job was to support Rose Force: a small clandestine raiding organisation put together in a hurry to land parties behind the advancing Japanese and cut their communications along the west coast. The Straits of Malacca are narrow and shallow and full of islands, and the Japanese were using them to move troops and supplies down the coast faster than they could be moved by road. Somebody had to go and interfere with that, and the somebodies went in small boats put ashore by ships like Scout.

It lasted about a month. By January 1942 Japanese aircraft had made further operations impossible and Scout was back at Singapore on local convoy escort. Rose Force is one of those efforts that reads as futile from a distance and was not: the men who did it were buying days, and days were what the garrison did not have. Her sister HMS Thanet (H29) was doing the same kind of desperate arithmetic on the other side of the peninsula, and it killed her.

Thanet did not survive to see Singapore's fall. On the night of 26 to 27 January 1942, she and the Australian destroyer HMAS Vampire were sent to intercept a Japanese invasion convoy off Endau, ran into a far stronger covering force, and were driven off with Thanet disabled and sinking; thirty of her survivors were later handed over to Japanese troops and executed. It was a stark reminder, weeks before Scout's own escape from Singapore, of exactly how badly the campaign in Malaya was going.

Evacuating Singapore

As Singapore's fall became inevitable, Scout took part in the evacuation of naval personnel from the island on 14 February 1942, just before its surrender, one of the most humiliating defeats in British military history and a moment that shattered the myth of the fortress's invulnerability.

Getting personnel safely off the island in the chaotic final days before capitulation was dangerous, urgent work, and Scout's part in it stands as one of the more consequential episodes of her entire career.

The Week the Rest of the Fleet Died

After Singapore she went to Batavia with the evacuation convoys and then into the ABDA command's Western Striking Force at Tanjong Priok. On 25 February 1942 she was moved again, to the Eastern Striking Force at Soerabaya, joining the Australian cruiser HMAS Hobart and the British cruisers Danae and Dragon and the destroyer Tenedos. On the 26th the force went out to intercept a Japanese invasion convoy heading for western Java and did not find it. On the 27th, after refuelling, Scout escorted Hobart, Dragon and Danae out of the Java Sea and away to Colombo.

The 27th of February 1942 is the date of the Battle of the Java Sea, in which the other half of the ABDA striking force was destroyed almost to the last ship and its Dutch admiral went down with his flagship. Scout's group survived because it had already been ordered out. There is no valour in that and it is not luck either; it is the single most consequential thing that happened to her, and it is the reason she was still afloat five weeks later.

Five weeks later she was in the middle of the next one. In March she joined Force B with the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes and the cruisers Caledon and Dragon, and on 31 March the whole of it put to sea to cover HMS Warspite and the carriers Indomitable and Formidable while the Eastern Fleet went looking for a Japanese force reported to be coming for Ceylon. They did not find it either. On 4 April Scout refuelled at Addu Atoll and then stayed at sea while Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Colombo and Trincomalee. Hermes, sent out of harbour to avoid exactly that, was caught in the open on 9 April and sunk by dive bombers in twenty minutes.

Steady Escort Work to the War's End

Even Singapore's fall did not end the retreat. Scout went on to help evacuate Allied personnel from Java as that island fell in turn in early March 1942, before finally withdrawing to Colombo and on to Trincomalee in Ceylon, where she settled into escort work for the remainder of the war, primarily on the route between Ceylon and India, unglamorous but essential work protecting the shipping that kept the wider Allied war effort in the region supplied.

The last two years were quieter than the article suggests, and the reason is that she stopped. Scout went into Bombay for refit in January 1944 and the dockyard opened her up and concluded that the extent of the repairs was not worth doing. She was placed under care and maintenance in June 1944 and moved to Trincomalee, where she spent the rest of the war as an accommodation ship, housing the people of the destroyer depot ship HMS Woolwich. A twenty-six-year-old destroyer that had laid mines off Singapore, put commandos ashore in the Malacca Strait and got three cruisers out of the Java Sea finished her war as a floating dormitory in Ceylon, which is not a sad ending so much as an honest one.

The Fleet's Oldest Destroyer, Retired at Last

By the time she was finally retired, Scout held the distinction of being the oldest destroyer in the Royal Navy, a remarkable achievement for a ship built in the final year of the First World War that had gone on to serve through the entirety of the Second. She was sold to Thos. W. Ward for breaking up at Briton Ferry on 29 March 1946, closing out a career that spanned two world wars and one of the most dramatic Allied defeats of the entire conflict.

She sailed for home in December 1945 and was sold on 11 February 1946, arriving in tow at Briton Ferry on 2 March. As to being the oldest destroyer in the Royal Navy, it depends how you count: HMS Skate (H39) was launched in January 1917, fifteen months before Scout, and was not disposed of until 1947. What is beyond argument is that both of them were ordered to fight the Kaiser and were still being sent to sea against Japan and Germany a quarter of a century later, which says more about the Royal Navy's interwar budgets than about either ship.