HMS Vanity (D28): From the Russian Civil War to the English Channel

Constructed at Dalmuir

HMS Vanity was built by William Beardmore and Company at Dalmuir, laid down on 28 July 1917, launched on 3 May 1918 and commissioned on 21 June 1918, an Admiralty V-class destroyer that arrived just in time to see service in the final months of the First World War.

Intervention in the Russian Civil War

In the aftermath of the war, Vanity took part in the Baltic campaigns of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, a lesser-remembered but truly dangerous chapter of British naval history in which Royal Navy warships found themselves fighting Bolshevik forces in the confined and mine-strewn waters of the Baltic.

Two Decades in Reserve

Vanity remained in active service through the 1920s before being decommissioned and placed in reserve during the 1930s, part of the substantial pool of older destroyers kept in mothballs as Britain's naval strength was gradually rebuilt in the years before the Second World War.

Recommissioned as an Anti-Aircraft Escort

Recommissioned in August 1939 as war loomed, Vanity was converted into an anti-aircraft escort between October 1939 and June 1940, going on to perform convoy escort and patrol duties in the North Sea and taking part in Operation Performance in January 1942, before finishing the war on convoy escort and patrol duty in the English Channel from February 1945 through to Germany's surrender.

Scrapped at Grangemouth

Decommissioned in mid-1945 after more than a quarter century of intermittent service across two world wars and a foreign intervention in between, HMS Vanity was sold for scrapping at Grangemouth in Scotland on 4 March 1947.