HMS Tyne (A194): Thirty-Two Years Supporting the Fleet, Not Fighting It

The Build: Greenock

HMS Tyne was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock, laid down on 15 July 1938, launched in February 1940 and commissioned a year later, a Hecla-class destroyer depot ship built for the essential, unglamorous work of keeping the Royal Navy's destroyer flotillas fuelled, supplied and repaired far from any dockyard.

Fed, Clothed, Paid, Doctored and Entertained

Nobody has ever described the job better than the caption an Imperial War Museum photographer filed with a set of pictures taken aboard her in September 1941. HMS Tyne, it says, is the headquarters for the destroyer men in the Home Fleet, and from her the destroyer men of the destroyer flotillas of the fleet are fed, clothed, paid, medically attended, trained and entertained.

That is the whole of it. A destroyer of 1941 was a machine for going fast and carrying weapons, and almost everything else had been left out of her: she had no proper workshop, very little cold storage, a sick bay the size of a cupboard, no bakery worth the name and accommodation that a modern prison inspector would close. She could keep the sea for perhaps ten days. What kept her going was the ship she came back to, and Tyne was that ship for the whole Home Fleet destroyer force. Machine shops, a foundry, a coppersmith, torpedo and gunnery workshops, an operating theatre and a dentist, a laundry, a bakery, cold rooms, a canteen, a chapel, a cinema, mail, pay, spare torpedoes, spare men and somewhere dry to sleep. A destroyer alongside her could be repaired, restored and re-crewed without going anywhere near a dockyard, which in the Arctic was the difference between a flotilla existing and not existing.

The same logic on a smaller and more portable scale is set out in HMS Berry Head (A191), built four years later for precisely the same reason at the other end of the world.

Flagship for the Arctic Convoys

Tyne conducted exercises off Scapa Flow from June 1941 and went on to serve as flagship for Rear-Admiral R. L. Burnett through 1942 and 1943, a period that placed her at the heart of the Royal Navy's demanding Arctic convoy operations, supporting the destroyers that provided close escort to convoys running the gauntlet of German air, surface and submarine attack on the route to northern Russia.

Two Admirals, and What They Are Remembered For

She was the flagship of Rear-Admiral (Destroyers), Home Fleet, from 3 March 1941 until August 1944, and Burnett was not the first man to fly his flag in her. The admiral aboard in 1941 and into 1942 was Louis Hamilton, and in July 1942 he was given the cruiser covering force of convoy PQ 17.

What happened to PQ 17 is the worst thing that happened to the Royal Navy in the Arctic. The Admiralty in London, believing on thin evidence that the Tirpitz was at sea and closing, ordered the cruisers to withdraw and the convoy to scatter. Hamilton withdrew, as ordered. The thirty-five merchant ships spread out across the Barents Sea alone and unescorted, and the Germans killed twenty-four of them over the following week. Hamilton spent the rest of his life carrying an order he had not given and could not have refused. The convoy's own escort, left behind to watch it happen, is described in HMS Keppel (D84).

Robert Burnett, who followed him, had one of the more unusual careers on the flag list. He was a physical training specialist, a branch that in the Royal Navy of the 1920s was very nearly a guarantee of never getting near a fleet command, and he was reputedly not much loved by the intellectuals of the service. He then went out and fought two of the three big British surface actions of the war. At the Battle of the Barents Sea on the last day of 1942 he brought HMS Sheffield and HMS Jamaica out of the snow at the right moment; a year later, on Boxing Day 1943, he handled the cruiser force in HMS Belfast that held the Scharnhorst until the battleship arrived. Very few admirals of any navy commanded in two of those. The destroyer he was in the business of supporting when he was aboard Tyne is well represented by HMS Achates (H12), who died in his battle.

Deploying to the Pacific

In the final months of the war, Tyne deployed to the Far East with the British Pacific Fleet between January and June 1945, undertaking transit operations between Trincomalee, Fremantle and Sydney, supporting the fleet's destroyer squadrons as they extended their operational reach across the vast expanse of the Pacific theatre.

The Pacific Was Not Transit Operations

She left Scapa on 18 August 1944 for her first refit since she had commissioned, three and a half years earlier, which tells you something in itself. Six weeks on the Clyde fitted her for the tropics and improved her guns, and in mid-November she sailed for Ceylon, reaching Trincomalee on 11 December to join the Fleet Train as flagship of Rear-Admiral (D) of the British Pacific Fleet.

From there she went forward with the fleet. Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, which the Americans had turned from jungle into the largest anchorage in the Pacific; San Pedro Bay in the Philippines, where through April and May 1945 she had eighteen destroyers and escorts on her books at once; and then Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands from July, sitting in an atoll lagoon two thousand miles from anywhere as a headquarters and repair ship. That is where she was when the war ended. She came home in September 1946.

An Exceptionally Long Career

HMS Tyne served under no fewer than eleven different commanding officers across her career, a reflection of just how long she remained in continuous service. She was finally sold in 1973, having served the Royal Navy for over three decades, a truly exceptional span for any ship and a testament to just how valuable a well-built depot ship could be to a fleet that depended on her for its own operational reach.

A Second Career Nobody Records

She was in service a very long time, and what she was doing in it is worth having. After a long refit at Devonport she came back in October 1950 and went to the Mediterranean Fleet as flagship of Flag Officer Flotillas, holding that job until February 1953. She then sailed for Japan, and spent the last months of the Korean War as flagship of the Flag Officer Second in Command, Far East Fleet, which put a 1938 depot ship at the centre of the British naval effort in a war fought fifteen years after she was designed.

Home in 1957, refitted, and in April 1958 she came out again as flagship of the Home Fleet and depot ship for the Second Submarine Squadron: destroyer men and submariners on the same messdecks, which cannot have been restful. Flag Officer Flotillas hoisted his flag in her in July 1960 after her last refit, and she paid off at Portsmouth on 27 March 1961.

She was not sold then. She sat in Portsmouth harbour as an accommodation ship, went on the disposal list in 1964, and was not finally sold for breaking up until 11 August 1972, eleven years after her last commission ended. A depot ship is a difficult thing to throw away, because the day after you scrap her is the day somebody asks where the fleet is supposed to get its bread, its torpedoes and its dentist.