HMS Tourmaline (H00): Patrolling the Black Sea During the Russian Civil War

Laid Down at Woolston

HMS Tourmaline was built by Thornycroft at Woolston in Southampton, laid down in January 1918, launched on 19 April 1919 and completed that December, a Modified Rosalind-class S-class destroyer with enhanced seakeeping features and Brown-Curtis geared turbines capable of 36 knots at light load.

Guarding Constantinople

After joining the Fourth Destroyer Flotilla with the Atlantic Fleet, Tourmaline deployed to Constantinople in 1920 as part of a fleet led by HMS Iron Duke, supporting British interests during the turbulent aftermath of the Russian Civil War, a period of genuine uncertainty and shifting alliances across the collapsing Ottoman and Russian empires.

What Was Happening on That Coast

November 1920 on the Black Sea coast is not simply chaos, it is the end of something, and it is worth knowing what Tourmaline was patrolling past. The Russian Civil War in the south was finishing. General Wrangel's White army had been pushed back into the Crimea and had nowhere else to go, and in the second week of November everything that would float was gathered at Sevastopol, Yalta, Feodosia, Kerch and Yevpatoria to take off whoever wanted to leave. Some 145,000 people went, soldiers and their families and anybody else who could get aboard, in a hundred and twenty-six ships and small craft, sailing for Constantinople.

That is the Russian emigration: the community of exiles that ended up in Paris, Belgrade, Harbin and New York, and it left in a week. The Royal Navy was present throughout, partly to keep order, partly to cover the withdrawal and partly because Britain had been supporting the Whites and was now getting out of it. Novorossiysk, the port at one end of Tourmaline's patrol, had seen an earlier and far worse version of the same scene in March, when the evacuation collapsed and thousands were left on the quay. A destroyer steaming between Novorossiysk and Tuapse that November was watching the last act of the Russian Empire from a mile offshore.

Patrolling a Dangerous Coastline

That November, Tourmaline patrolled the Black Sea coast between Novorossiysk and Tuapse, a hazardous assignment given the chaos of the ongoing civil war ashore. Her sister ship HMS Tobago struck a mine during the same patrol, a sharp reminder of just how dangerous these waters remained even after the wider conflict had officially ended.

The mine that caught Tobago is worth following up, because most accounts leave her floating. She struck it shortly after leaving Trebizond and was damaged badly enough that she never went back into service; she was towed away, laid up, and sold for scrap in 1922 at four years old. The Black Sea was full of mines laid by the Russians, the Turks, the Germans and the British over six years of war, nobody had a complete record of where any of them were, and there was no international authority left to clear them. Ships were still being lost to that legacy a decade later.

A Collision, and a Rescue

Tourmaline collided with HMS Turquoise while departing Portland in January 1921, requiring repairs at Portsmouth, before transferring to the Mediterranean Fleet and patrolling the Sea of Marmara during the Greco-Turkish War. On 24 September 1922, she rescued survivors from her sister ship HMS Speedy, a notably valuable act of seamanship amid the ongoing tensions of the period.

The Crisis Nobody Remembers

The Speedy rescue is dated to the day, and the date is the point. On 24 September 1922 Speedy collided with a Turkish tug in the Sea of Marmara and sank, taking ten of her people with her. What she was doing there was the Chanak crisis, which almost nobody in Britain has heard of and which came closer to a general war than anything between 1918 and 1939.

The short version: the Greek army in Anatolia had been destroyed by Mustafa Kemal's forces that summer, the Turkish advance was heading for the neutral zone around the Dardanelles that British troops were holding, and Lloyd George's government decided to stand and fight rather than withdraw. It asked the Dominions for troops and, to its considerable surprise, Canada, Australia and South Africa declined, which is one of the moments the Empire quietly stopped being a single thing. In the end the local British commander ignored an order to deliver an ultimatum, an armistice was negotiated instead, and nobody fired. The government fell three weeks later over the whole affair, and Lloyd George never held office again.

So a small destroyer sank in a collision with a tug, in a confrontation that ended a premiership, in a war that was formally over. Two other ships were in the same waters: HMS Temeraire (1907) had led the fleet into Constantinople four years earlier, and HMS Iron Duke (1912) was the flagship Tourmaline went out with.

Broken Up Under the London Naval Treaty

After recommissioning at Gibraltar in 1926 to lead the Local Defence Flotilla, Tourmaline was sold to Thos. W. Ward on 28 November 1931 and broken up at Grays, one of many older destroyers scrapped as Britain reduced its fleet under the tonnage restrictions of the London Naval Treaty.