HMS St James: The Destroyer That Sank a Friendly Tug

A Name From the Seventeenth Century, Not the Twentieth

It would be reasonable to assume that a Battle class destroyer, a class whose names were deliberately chosen to commemorate British victories, took her name from some engagement of the Second World War in which she herself might plausibly have fought. HMS St James did nothing of the sort.

Her name instead reaches back to the Battle of St James's Day, fought in July 1666 off the North Foreland during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a rather less celebrated affair today than Trafalgar or Jutland but one the Admiralty clearly still thought worth commemorating nearly three centuries later.

The Battle She Was Named After, and What Came of It

The St James's Day Fight deserves better than a passing mention, because the year it belongs to is the most extraordinary in the Royal Navy's early history. In June 1666 the English and Dutch fleets had fought the Four Days' Battle, one of the longest naval actions ever recorded, and the English had lost it badly. Seven weeks later, on 25 July, they came out again: Prince Rupert of the Rhine and George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, jointly commanding, met Michiel de Ruyter in the wide mouth of the Thames between Orfordness and the North Foreland, and the two flagships lay alongside one another firing without a pause as they closed. It was an English victory, though not the annihilating one Rupert wanted, and by the second morning the Dutch had got away behind their own shoals.

What happened next is the part worth knowing. A fortnight later, on 8 August, Sir Robert Holmes took a squadron into the Vlie, the channel behind the Frisian islands where the Dutch merchant fleet was sheltering, and burned about a hundred and fifty of the hundred and sixty ships he found there before sacking the town on Terschelling. It is remembered as Holmes's Bonfire and it was an economic catastrophe for the Netherlands. It was also, in the judgement of most historians since, the reason the Dutch came up the Medway the following June, burned the English fleet at its moorings and towed away the Royal Charles, the very flagship from which Rupert and Albemarle had fought this battle. That is the worst defeat in the history of the Royal Navy, and it is the direct consequence of the victory this ship is named after.

So the name is a good deal more interesting than the Admiralty probably intended. Every Battle-class destroyer carries a victory; this one carries a victory that led to a disaster, awarded to a ship that was completed too late to fight anybody. The rest of the class had much the same experience, and where they ended up is set out in HMS Sluys (D60) and HMS Armada (D14).

The ship herself was ordered either on 12 August 1942 or 24 March 1943 depending on which record one consults, a discrepancy that has never been fully resolved and is worth flagging honestly rather than picking a date arbitrarily. What is better agreed is that she was built at Fairfield's yard in Govan on the Clyde, laid down in May 1943 and launched on 7 June 1945.

Built Too Late for the War She Was Named to Echo

Like so many of her Battle class sisters, HMS St James was laid down, launched and commissioned too late to see meaningful action in the conflict her class's naming convention nodded back towards.

She was completed in July 1946, more than a year after VE Day, and joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet; her career settled instead into the unglamorous but essential rhythm of trials, exercises and training duties that occupied so many otherwise capable destroyers built in the war's final years, arriving just as the fleet that needed them was already being run down.

It is worth saying what "trials, exercises and training duties" really meant, because it was not idleness. A fleet that had been at war for six years had to work out, quickly, how to fight the next one, and that required ships to fire at things, tow things, be shot at by aircraft, run trials of new radar and new gunnery systems, and take thousands of national servicemen to sea and teach them their trade. Ships like St James did that work for fifteen years and were then scrapped without ever having fired at an enemy, which reads like waste and was not. It is the same reason HMS Camperdown (D32) spent her whole life doing much the same thing.

The Day She Sank HMS Buccaneer

The single incident for which HMS St James is best remembered came on the morning of 26 August 1946, barely a month after her own commissioning, while she was carrying out live-firing calibration trials against a target under tow in Lyme Bay. One of her 4.5-inch shells found the towing vessel instead of the target: the Portland-based rescue tug HMS Buccaneer, struck and sunk before her captain and crew were hauled from the water, at which point, according to one diving historian's account, they treated their rescuers to a thoroughly high-explosive outburst of language. A subsequent inquiry confirmed the Buccaneer's own skipper had correctly identified which of St James's four guns was responsible, for whatever small consolation that was worth.

There was a particular irony to Buccaneer's fate. Built in 1937, she had spent the entire war doing precisely this kind of unglamorous, essential work, towing damaged ships to safety and standing by for gunnery exercises just like this one, and had survived it all unscathed, only to be sunk by an ally's shell in peacetime a little over a year after the war she had served throughout had actually ended. Her wreck still lies in around 43 metres of water off Weymouth and remains a popular dive site today.

Buccaneer is worth a paragraph in her own right, because of what she was rather than how she died. She was a rescue tug, and the rescue tug was very nearly a British invention of the late 1930s: a purpose-built, ocean-going, powerfully engined vessel whose entire job was to go out into the Atlantic in bad weather, find a merchant ship that had been torpedoed or bombed or had simply broken down, and drag her home. Before them, a damaged ship that could not steam was usually a lost ship. The tugs saved an enormous tonnage over the following six years and their crews, many of them merchant seamen, spent the war going towards trouble at eight knots.

That is what makes the Lyme Bay accident hard to read about. She had come through all of it. And the target-towing job she was doing that morning was not an afterthought either; somebody has to pull the target for a new destroyer to shoot at, and the vessel doing it is by definition the only other thing in the area with the same rough size, heading and speed as the thing being aimed at. It is a job with an obvious hazard built into it, and on 26 August 1946 the hazard arrived.

A Pennant Change and a Quiet End

At some point in her service HMS St James's pennant number changed from R65 to D65, part of a wider Royal Navy reclassification that saw destroyer pennants across the fleet switched over from the wartime "R" prefix to "D" as the postwar navy settled into its new numbering system, rather than anything specific to her own history. Her career, however, remained a short one.

HMS St James was broken up at Newport in 1961, closing the book on a ship whose name recalled a seventeenth century victory but whose own service is remembered today chiefly for an accident involving a tug rather than any battle at all.