HMS Versatile (I32): From a Tragic Peacetime Collision to the D-Day Beaches

Built on Tyneside

HMS Versatile was built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company on Tyneside, laid down on 31 January 1917, launched on 31 October 1917 and completed and commissioned on 11 February 1918, an Admiralty V-class destroyer that saw service in the last year of the First World War with either the Grand Fleet or Harwich Force.

The Admiralty gave her the best matched badge and motto in the whole class. On a black field, a gold weather vane; and underneath it, Omnibus eadem, which the Navy translated as the same in all winds. A weather vane is the one object in the world whose entire purpose is to be versatile, and a motto insisting that she was constant in every wind is the joke completing itself. Tipton, in what was then Staffordshire, adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign in February 1942.

A Tragic Collision Off Gibraltar

During peacetime manoeuvres off Gibraltar in March 1922, Versatile was involved in a collision with the British submarine HMS H42, which sank with the loss of all thirty of her crew.

Twenty Seconds Off Europa Point

What happened on 23 March 1922 is worth setting out properly, because a single sentence makes it sound like an act of God and it was not.

H42 was carrying out practice torpedo attacks on a line of destroyers steaming off Europa Point at the southern tip of Gibraltar: the submarine goes deep, works into a firing position on the noise of the propellers, fires a dummy and then stays down and clear until the ships have passed. Versatile was doing twenty knots. H42 came up ahead of her, and the accounts differ over whether it was thirty yards or a hundred and twenty. Either way there was no time.

Her captain went full astern on both engines and put the helm hard over to port. A destroyer of that period at twenty knots has enormous momentum and very little immediate response to her rudder, and Versatile had not begun to answer her helm when she struck H42 just abaft the conning tower and very nearly cut her in half. The submarine went down at once, in deep water, with everybody aboard her.

The incident prompted questions in Parliament and remains a sobering reminder of how dangerous peacetime training could be for submarine crews of the era.

The number is not settled. Thirty is what the newspapers of the day reported and what a good many later accounts repeat; most modern records of the loss give twenty-six officers and men. Either figure is the whole ship's company. The inquiry that followed found that H42 had surfaced where she had been ordered not to, which exonerated Versatile and did nothing whatever for the twenty-six or thirty families.

The reason it reached Parliament is that it was not an isolated case. The submarine service of the early 1920s was losing boats in peacetime exercises often enough to trouble the House, and was widely felt to be taking risks in training that nobody would have accepted in any other branch. A hundred years later, in March 2022, a plaque was unveiled at Gibraltar to the men of H42.

Between the Wars

Versatile went through several pennant number changes during the interwar years, serving with the 1st Destroyer Flotilla in the Atlantic Fleet and taking part in a Baltic Sea cruise in 1931, before entering reserve at the Nore by October 1936, part of the gradual run-down of older destroyers as newer classes entered service.

Convoy Escort Through the Darkest Years

Recommissioned in 1939, Versatile took on extensive convoy escort duties, suffering bomb damage in May 1940 while supporting evacuation operations near the Netherlands, and spending 1940 to 1942 defending North Sea and Channel convoys against near-constant German air and E-boat attack, precisely the grinding, dangerous work that defined so much of the destroyer war.

The Hook of Holland, 13 May 1940

Supporting evacuation operations near the Netherlands is a mild description of one of the strangest weeks the Royal Navy has ever had. On 10 May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands; within three days the Dutch army was collapsing, and the Navy sent destroyers into the Hook of Holland to take out what could be got out. Versatile went in on 13 May, under Operation Ordnance.

What came out over those few days was the Dutch royal family, the Dutch government, a large part of the national gold reserve, several hundred British and Allied personnel, and a number of German prisoners; the destroyers also landed demolition parties to wreck the oil installations at Rotterdam before the Germans reached them. Queen Wilhelmina's own passage, in HMS Hereward, is one of the better-known episodes of that fortnight.

It was done under continuous air attack in a confined waterway with no fighter cover worth the name. Versatile was hit, damaged badly enough that she could not get herself home, and was towed back across the North Sea by HMS Janus. That was three days into the campaign in the west, three weeks before Dunkirk, and she was twenty-two years old.

Supporting D-Day

In 1943, Versatile was converted into a long-range escort vessel, and went on to support the D-Day landings in June 1944 before resuming general convoy protection duties through to Germany's surrender, a long and demanding war for a destroyer already a quarter of a century old.

Her battle honours are seldom listed and they are the summary of the rest of it: Atlantic 1939 to 1945, North Sea 1941 to 1945, Normandy 1944, English Channel 1944 to 1945. There is no Mediterranean, no Arctic, nothing exotic. She spent six years going up and down the eastern and southern coasts of her own country and across the Western Approaches, in a ship laid down in the middle of the previous war, being shot at by aircraft and E-boats, and she was still doing it on the day Germany surrendered.

Scrapped After the War

HMS Versatile was decommissioned soon after VE Day, sold on 7 May 1947 for scrapping, and arrived at the breaker's yard on 10 September 1948, closing out a career that spanned both world wars and one deeply sobering peacetime tragedy in between.