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.

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.

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.

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.