HMS Toreador (H55): The Destroyer That Became Canada's Longest-Ever Cruise

Built by Thornycroft, Just Too Late

HMS Toreador was built by Thornycroft, launched on 7 December 1918 and completed the following April, an S-class destroyer that arrived just after the First World War had ended, and was placed in reserve at Portsmouth by May 1919, seeing no wartime service at all.

The Navy That Was Nearly Abolished

To understand why a British destroyer ended up flying a Canadian flag, it helps to know how small the Royal Canadian Navy was. Founded in 1910, it had spent the 1920s being cut to the bone: by 1922 it had been reduced to a couple of destroyers, a handful of trawlers and a few hundred permanent personnel, and as late as 1933 the Chief of the General Staff formally proposed abolishing the navy outright to pay for the army and the air force. It survived that with a strength of well under two thousand people.

In that context, two loaned British destroyers were not a modest addition, they were a substantial proportion of the fleet. Toreador and Torbay, which became Vancouver and Champlain, gave Canada something to train seagoing officers and ratings in on both coasts, and everything the Royal Canadian Navy did over the following decade was built on them. It is worth holding that against what happened next: the service that could not decide whether to keep two elderly destroyers in 1930 finished the Second World War with more than three hundred and fifty ships and nearly a hundred thousand people, the third largest navy among the Allies. Her sister Torbay, which became HMCS Champlain, went the same way.

Loaned to Canada, Renamed for an Explorer

In 1927, Toreador and her sister ship Torbay were loaned by the British government to Canada, and Toreador was renamed Vancouver, honouring the explorer George Vancouver, whose surveys had charted much of the Pacific Northwest coastline the ship would go on to patrol.

George Vancouver is worth a sentence in his own right, because he is one of the great surveyors and is not much celebrated in the country he came from. He was born at King's Lynn in Norfolk, went to sea at fourteen and sailed with Cook on both the second and third voyages, which means he was present at the mapping of the Pacific and at Cook's death in Hawaii. Between 1791 and 1795 he took his own expedition round the north-west coast of America, charting from California to Alaska in such detail that his surveys were still in working use a century later, and finished by circumnavigating the world. He died at forty, exhausted and in debt, with his account of the voyage unfinished.

A Training Ship on the West Coast

Commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy on 1 March 1928, Vancouver arrived at Esquimalt, British Columbia, in May 1928 and spent the 1930s as a training vessel operating out of Canada's west coast, visiting numerous ports and giving Canadian sailors valuable experience aboard a genuine front-line destroyer.

The Longest Cruise the RCN Had Attempted

Vancouver's most notable deployments included a 1932 mission to El Salvador and, in 1934, a Caribbean cruise described at the time as the longest the Royal Canadian Navy had yet attempted, a truly significant undertaking for a still-young naval service working to build up its operational reach and experience.

The Acajutla Incident

The 1932 mission to El Salvador was not a goodwill visit. On 22 January the Communist Party of El Salvador and Pipil peasants in the west of the country rose against the military government, seized several towns and killed a number of people; the government's response, over the following weeks, was the mass killing remembered as La Matanza, in which many thousands of rural Salvadorans, overwhelmingly indigenous, were shot. Estimates of the dead run from several thousand to tens of thousands and it remains the defining trauma of modern Salvadoran history.

Vancouver and her sister Skeena were the nearest warships and were sent to Acajutla to protect British and Canadian nationals, which was a reasonable thing to do. What happened when they arrived was not. The British charge d'affaires in San Salvador, David Rodgers, got through to the ships on the railway telephone line and asked for a show of force. The senior Canadian officer, Commander Victor Brodeur, was advised to be cautious and refused. Rodgers then signalled again, asking for a landing party to come ashore and march inland on the capital. A platoon under Lieutenant Horatio Nelson Lay was duly put ashore at Acajutla, where a Salvadoran official waved it back to the boats, and that was the end of it.

It is worth sitting with. A junior navy, in somebody else's civil war, being asked by a diplomat to march on a foreign capital, and declining. Brodeur went on to become a rear admiral and one of the architects of the wartime Royal Canadian Navy; Lay ended up a rear admiral too. The killing in the countryside went on without them, and there is no version of the story in which two destroyers off the coast could have stopped it, but the episode is remembered in Canada as the moment its navy declined to be used as an instrument of somebody else's policy.

Scrapped at Vancouver

HMS Toreador, by then long known as HMCS Vancouver, was paid off on 25 November 1936 and broken up the following year, arriving in the city she was named for on 24 April 1937 specifically for scrapping, her armament retained in Canadian stockpiles even as her hull was cut apart, a fitting final homecoming for a ship that had spent her working life helping build the young Royal Canadian Navy's confidence and reach.