HMS Waveney (1903): Patrolling the Humber Through the First World War

Built at Hebburn-on-Tyne

HMS Waveney was built by Hawthorn Leslie at their Hebburn-on-Tyne shipyard, laid down on 20 October 1902, launched on 16 March 1903 and completed on 1 June 1904, the first Royal Navy ship to carry the name, joining the East Coast Destroyer Flotilla based at Harwich.

A Collision and a Reclassification

Waveney was involved in a collision with HMS Garry off Sandown on 26 July 1907, before transferring to the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in 1909, and was formally assigned to the E class following an Admiralty reclassification directive in 1912, a designation she carried through into the following year.

The Class That Made Destroyers Seaworthy

The River class are among the most important ships in the history of the type, and the reason is dull and enormous: they were the first British destroyers built to stay at sea.

Everything before them had been designed around a single number, which was speed. The result was the turtleback: a rounded, whale-decked forecastle intended to shed water, which in practice buried the bow in any sea at all, drowned the bridge, and made the ship unusable in exactly the weather in which a destroyer is most needed. The early boats could do thirty knots on the measured mile in the Solent and were dangerous in the North Sea in February. The type is described in HMS Hornet (1893).

The Rivers threw that away. They were given a proper raised forecastle, more freeboard, more beam and a stronger hull, and the price was paid in speed: about twenty-five and a half knots instead of thirty. The Admiralty was criticised for it at the time. It was the correct decision, and every destroyer built anywhere since has had a raised forecastle, because a ship that cannot keep station on a fleet in a gale is not a warship, it is a fair-weather torpedo boat. Waveney's sister HMS Exe has the fuller account of what the class then did with that seakeeping.

The reclassification of 1913 is a bookkeeping story with the same moral. The Admiralty had ordered destroyers piecemeal for twenty years under builders' names and speeds, and by 1912 nobody could say what anything was; so the whole lot was sorted retrospectively into lettered classes by date and capability. The Rivers became the E class. A ship that had been in commission for eight years acquired a letter she had never been designed to have, which is a very Edwardian solution to a very Edwardian problem.

Patrols During the Hartlepool Raid

In early 1914, Waveney joined the 9th Destroyer Flotilla at Chatham, conducting anti-submarine and counter-mining patrols in the Firth of Forth. During the German raid on Hartlepool in December 1914, an attack that killed dozens of civilians ashore, Waveney took part in patrol operations at sea and emerged undamaged with no casualties among her own crew.

What Really Happened Off Hartlepool

Took part in patrol operations at sea, on the morning of 16 December 1914, means something very specific and it deserves to be told properly.

Hartlepool was the only defended port the Germans attacked that day, and its defences were two scout cruisers, four destroyers of the 9th Flotilla and one submarine. Waveney was one of the four, with Doon, Test and Moy. They went out at half past five in the morning into a heavy swell; the swell was in fact bad enough that the two cruisers could not get over the bar to follow them, so the destroyers were on their own.

At about eight o'clock, in mist, they sighted three large ships to the south-east and closed to identify them. What they had found was the battlecruisers Seydlitz and Moltke, with eleven-inch guns, and the armoured cruiser Blucher, with 8.2-inch. Four destroyers of five hundred and fifty tons apiece, armed with four twelve-pounders and two torpedo tubes each, at close range, in the dark before dawn.

The Germans opened fire immediately and had the range at once. The destroyers were still well outside torpedo range, which meant there was nothing whatever they could do; the only option was to turn north and run, zigzagging, while eleven-inch salvos came down around them. Not one of them took a direct hit, which is a considerable piece of shiphandling by four captains at the same time. Three of the four were hit by splinters. All four got back into the mist.

Behind them, the German ships shelled the town for about forty minutes. The official history gives eighty-six civilians killed and four hundred and twenty-four wounded, along with seven churches, ten public buildings, five hotels and more than three hundred houses damaged. Among the dead were children in their homes. It was the first time in that war that British civilians had been killed in any number on British soil, and the phrase Remember Scarborough, which recruiting posters used for the rest of the war, comes from the same morning.

Emerged undamaged with no casualties is therefore true and is not the whole of it. She was one of four small ships that went towards three capital ships in the dark because there was nobody else to do it.

The Humber Patrol

Following a flotilla merger in 1915, Waveney transferred to the 7th Destroyer Flotilla on the River Humber, where she remained employed on Humber Patrol duties, carrying out counter-mining operations and anti-submarine patrols for the remainder of the war, precisely the kind of steady, unglamorous coastal defence work that occupied so many older destroyers while newer ships took on the more celebrated fleet actions.

The Humber Patrol she spent the rest of the war on was one of the least visible and most necessary jobs in home waters. The Humber is the outlet for the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire coalfields, the approach to Hull, Grimsby and Immingham, and one of the busiest estuaries in Britain, with a wide shallow approach that a submarine could mine from seaward in an hour. Counter-mining and anti-submarine patrol there meant going out every day, in a fifteen-year-old destroyer, into the same water, and finding either nothing or something extremely unpleasant. There is no battle honour for it and no monument to it, and it went on for four years.

Sold for Breaking

HMS Waveney was sold to Thos. W. Ward of Sheffield for breaking at Grays in Essex on 20 February 1920, closing out a career built almost entirely on the quiet, essential coastal patrol work that kept Britain's home waters safer throughout the First World War.