HMS Vigo (D231): From Egyptian Unrest to the First Cod War

Laid Down at Govan

HMS Vigo was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, launched on 27 September 1945 and commissioned on 9 December 1946, a Battle-class destroyer that arrived just too late to see action in the war that had shaped her design.

The name is worth a moment because it commemorates something almost nobody remembers. On 23 October 1702 an Anglo-Dutch fleet under Sir George Rooke went into Vigo Bay in north-west Spain, broke a boom across the harbour entrance under fire from batteries on both sides, and destroyed or captured the entire Spanish treasure fleet and its French escort at anchor. Every French warship present was taken or burned. It is one of the most complete single-day victories in the history of the Royal Navy, and it is why the word ended up on the bow of a 1945 destroyer, alongside Cadiz, Sluys and the rest of a class named entirely after British victories.

Mediterranean Service Amid Egyptian Unrest

After an initial period in reserve, Vigo joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean in 1949, taking part in regional operations during a turbulent period that included unrest in Egypt, exactly the kind of tense, watchful presence that so much of the postwar Royal Navy's Mediterranean deployment involved.

What Unrest in Egypt Meant

A turbulent period that included unrest in Egypt covers the slow, ugly end of Britain's position on the Suez Canal, and a destroyer in the Mediterranean between 1949 and 1952 was there because of it.

Britain had kept a garrison in the Canal Zone since 1882 and, by treaty, was entitled to keep it there until 1956. By 1951 Egypt had had enough. In October the Egyptian government unilaterally abrogated the treaty, the police stopped cooperating, Egyptian labour walked out of the British bases, and a guerrilla campaign began against British troops in the Zone. In January 1952 British forces surrounded the police headquarters at Ismailia and demanded the surrender of the auxiliary police inside; the police refused, the British opened fire, and around fifty Egyptian policemen were killed. The following day, 26 January 1952, Cairo burned. Mobs destroyed several hundred foreign-owned buildings and killed a number of Europeans, and six months later the monarchy was gone and Nasser was on his way to power.

The Royal Navy's role in all that was to be present, to be visible from Alexandria and Port Said, and to be ready at any moment to take British nationals off if it came to that. It never quite did, which is the sort of outcome that leaves no record beyond a line about a turbulent period.

Two Fires and a New Role

Vigo suffered fires aboard in both 1953 and 1954, incidents that speak to the ever-present hazards of naval service even away from combat, before settling into a new role from 1954 onward as a gunnery training vessel at Portsmouth, also serving as Captain (D) of the Portsmouth Squadron.

Beyond Economic Repair at Thirteen

Scrapping a destroyer thirteen years old looks like waste, and it is worth explaining because it happened to a great many ships of her generation.

Three things were true at once by 1959. The later Battles had been built at speed at the end of the war, and the standard of the work varied; hull defects that a peacetime yard would have caught went to sea and got worse. Two fires aboard, in 1953 and 1954, will not have helped, and fire damage in a warship is rarely confined to what burned: heat distorts structure and ruins wiring runs a long way from the seat of it. And the Navy of the late 1950s had been told to shrink, had far more gun destroyers than it could man, and was spending everything it had on guided missile ships and nuclear submarines.

In that arithmetic a hull with problems does not get repaired. She was laid up in October 1959 and lay about for five years before anybody got round to breaking her up, which is a fair summary of how much of a hurry the Navy was in about her.

Patrolling During the First Cod War

In 1958 and 1959, Vigo conducted patrols off Iceland during the opening rounds of the first Cod War, the long-running dispute over fishing rights that would eventually draw the Royal Navy into repeated confrontations with Icelandic gunboats, while also taking part in NATO exercises and visiting a number of European ports.

Scrapped at Faslane

By 1959, Vigo's hull was considered beyond economic repair, and she was decommissioned that October, eventually being scrapped at Faslane in 1964. Her final commanding officer, Captain Michael Pollock, went on to reach the very top of the service as Admiral of the Fleet, a fitting footnote for a destroyer whose own career had spanned Mediterranean tension and the earliest skirmishes of the Cod Wars.

Her Last Captain

A fitting footnote undersells him considerably. Michael Pollock took command of Vigo in February 1958, when she was on her last commission and Iceland was about to extend her fishing limits, and by then he had already had one of the more remarkable wars of any gunnery officer in the Navy.

On the night of 26 December 1943 he was the gunnery officer of the cruiser HMS Norfolk at the Battle of North Cape. Norfolk was one of three cruisers that twice put themselves between the Scharnhorst and an Arctic convoy in the Arctic winter dark, holding her off until the battleship Duke of York could get up. Pollock's eight-inch guns put two shells into the Scharnhorst. She replied with eleven-inch, hit Norfolk and knocked out one of her turrets and her radar. He got a Distinguished Service Cross for it.

Fifteen years later he had this destroyer, and after her the carrier HMS Ark Royal. He was Flag Officer Submarines from 1968, First Sea Lord from 1971 to 1974, and finished as an Admiral of the Fleet, which is a rank held for life and not many hold. He died in 2006 at eighty-nine.

It is worth holding those two pictures together: a lieutenant laying eight-inch guns onto a German battleship in the dark off North Cape, and the same man thirty years later sitting at the Admiralty deciding what sort of navy Britain was going to have. Both of them commanded HMS Vigo.