HMS Trafalgar (D77): A Storied Name for a Quietly Steady Career

Built on the Tyne

HMS Trafalgar was built by Swan Hunter on the Tyne, launched on 12 January 1944 and commissioned on 23 July 1945, a Battle-class destroyer that arrived just as the Second World War was drawing to its close, carrying one of the Royal Navy's most historically resonant names into an era of peace rather than the fighting it evoked.

The name is worth a moment, because the Royal Navy has used it far less than you would expect. Trafalgar is the most famous victory in its history and there have been only a handful of ships to carry it: a first rate of 1841, an ironclad of 1887, this destroyer, and the nuclear submarine that gave her name to a whole class in 1981. Four ships in two hundred and twenty years, for a battle the Navy has otherwise commemorated on every possible occasion. Part of the reason is simple superstition about names that are too large for the ship carrying them, and her career is really a study in exactly that problem: a name that promises a great deal, attached to a hull that arrived a fortnight before the war ended.

East to the Far East

Under Captain Anthony Pugsley, Trafalgar deployed east through the Mediterranean in August 1945 as part of the 19th Destroyer Flotilla, carrying out operational duties in the Far East before returning to British waters via the Mediterranean the following year.

The Captain Who Took Her East

Anthony Pugsley is named in one clause and deserves rather more, because by the time he took Trafalgar to the Far East he had already had one of the more remarkable wars of any destroyer officer. He was in command of the destroyer HMS Javelin at the outbreak of it, was mentioned in despatches for fighting his ship against aircraft off Norway, and took some fourteen hundred men off the beaches at Dunkirk.

What he did afterwards is larger. On D-Day he was the naval officer responsible for landing the 3rd Canadian Division on Juno beach. Then, in September 1944, he was given a problem: the island of Walcheren, at the mouth of the Scheldt, was held by the Germans and their guns closed the river, which meant Antwerp could not be used, which meant the Allied armies in Belgium could not be supplied. Pugsley, still a junior captain, planned and commanded the amphibious assault that took it. It was one of the bloodiest operations of the campaign in north-west Europe, fought across flooded polders and a beach swept by concrete batteries at point-blank range, and he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath for it. The wider Scheldt clearance is described in HMS Stevenstone.

He wrote it all up afterwards in a memoir called Destroyer Man, produced with Donald Macintyre, another escort captain turned naval historian, and finished as a rear admiral. So the first commanding officer of the ship named after Nelson's victory was a man who had commanded an assault landing and who, by 1945, had rather less to prove than most.

Reserve, and the Coronation Review

Trafalgar spent much of the following decade in reserve, a common fate for many of her sister ships during the 1950s as the Royal Navy adjusted its postwar priorities, though she did take her place in the Fleet Review celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a proud moment amid an otherwise quiet stretch of service.

Leading the 7th Destroyer Squadron

Following a 1958 refit and recommissioning, Trafalgar became leader of the 7th Destroyer Squadron, alternating between deployments with the Home Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet.

On 13 December 1960, she suffered a collision in Sliema Creek, Malta, when rammed by her own sister ship HMS Solebay, an accident that delayed her return home to the following year, before a final Mediterranean deployment in 1962 involving exercises and diplomatic visits.

The Sliema collision is the sort of thing that happens in a crowded harbour and it is worth picturing. Sliema Creek is a narrow inlet on the north side of Marsamxett harbour in Malta, and in 1960 it was one of the standard destroyer berths of the Mediterranean Fleet: ships lay to buoys in lines, bow and stern, close enough together that going alongside meant threading between them. Being rammed by Solebay, a sister of the same class and dimensions, in that space, is a manoeuvring accident rather than a navigational one, and it cost Trafalgar the best part of a year. The Battle class had a habit of it; the same fleet, the same creek and the same kind of ship turn up in several of these accounts.

Broken Up at Dalmuir

HMS Trafalgar returned to Britain in 1963, was decommissioned and placed in reserve at Portsmouth Dockyard, and was eventually broken up for scrap at Dalmuir, arriving there on 8 June 1970, closing out a steady if unspectacular career for a ship whose name promised rather more drama than her service ultimately delivered.