HMS Winchester (L55): The Destroyer That Fulfilled a King's Dying Wish

Cowes-Built

HMS Winchester was built by J. Samuel White and Company at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, her keel laid on 12 June 1917, launched on 1 February 1918 and completed on 29 April that year, entering service just as the First World War drew to a close, in time to take part in operations against Bolshevik forces in the Baltic Sea.

Destroyers From a River on the Isle of Wight

J Samuel White and Company is worth a paragraph, because a fleet destroyer built on the Isle of Wight sounds improbable and was in fact routine for the best part of a century.

White's yard stood on the Medina at Cowes, on a river narrow enough that ships had to be launched at an angle and swung immediately, and from that awkward site it turned out some of the fastest small warships in the world. The company built destroyers for the Royal Navy from the 1890s to the 1960s, along with lifeboats, seaplanes and, later, hovercraft, and it was for a long time the largest employer on the island. Winchester was laid down there in June 1917 and was in commission ten and a half months later, which is the kind of pace a war produces.

She was too late for the sea fighting, and then got a war anyway. British forces spent 1918 and 1919 in the Baltic supporting the new Estonian and Latvian republics against the Bolsheviks, in a campaign nobody at home was told much about, in ice, without a declaration of war, against submarines, mines and shore batteries. The Royal Navy lost the better part of twenty vessels and around a hundred and thirty men doing it. Two other ships in this fleet have accounts of the same campaign: HMS Caesar (1896) and HMS Cardiff (D58).

A King's Final Request

In one of the more poignant episodes in Royal Navy history, HMS Winchester, under the command of Captain W. N. T. Beckett, fulfilled King George V's dying wish in 1936 by sinking his beloved royal yacht HMY Britannia at St Catherine's Deep near the Isle of Wight, a duty he had set down in his own will.

What Britannia Actually Was

His beloved royal yacht undersells her by a very wide margin. Britannia was not a pleasure boat with a crown on it. She was one of the greatest racing yachts ever built, and by 1936 she had been winning for longer than most of the people watching her sink had been alive.

She was designed by George Lennox Watson, built by D and W Henderson on the Clyde in wooden planking over steel frames, and launched on 20 April 1893 for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. In her first season she won twenty-four of forty-three starts. Over the next forty years she raced six hundred and thirty-five times and won two hundred and thirty-one of them, under three owners and across the reigns of Victoria, Edward VII and George V.

George V is the part people forget. He did not simply inherit her; he sailed her, hard, and he minded about it. When he came to the throne in 1910 she was used for cruising, and in 1920, with British big-boat racing more or less dead after the war, he had her refitted to race again and effectively restarted the Big Class single-handed by turning up in her. In 1931, at sixty-six, he had her converted to Bermudan rig with a silver spruce mast weighing three tons, designed by Charles Nicholson, because the American J-class boats had moved the game on and he intended to keep up. She raced her last against the American Yankee in the summer of 1935. He died the following January.

That is why the instruction in his will was what it was. A man who had raced the same boat for a quarter of a century, in an era when yachts were routinely sold on, cut down and left to rot in a mud berth, decided that she should not be. Her spars, her fittings and her furniture were taken out and sold. The bare hull was towed out from Cowes to St Catherine's Deep, off the southern tip of the island, on 10 July 1936, and Winchester put her down there. A garland of flowers was laid on her stem-head first.

Ceremonial duty of that kind falls to very few ships and to almost none twice. The only comparable job given to a V and W destroyer went to HMS Verdun (L93), who brought the Unknown Warrior across from Boulogne in 1920.

The officer who did it deserves his full name. Captain Walter Napier Thomason Beckett, MVO and DSC, was born in India in 1893, the son of a brigadier general, and came out of the First World War with a Distinguished Service Cross earned in coastal forces. He is better remembered now for something else entirely: in 1930 he wrote A Few Naval Customs, Expressions, Traditions and Superstitions, a slim volume explaining why the Royal Navy does the things it does, which is still quoted whenever anybody asks why the loyal toast is drunk sitting down. The man who wrote the book on naval ceremony was, six years later, the obvious choice to carry out the most delicate piece of ceremony the navy was asked to perform that decade. He was dead by March 1941.

Damaged Off the Dutch Coast

Reconstructed for escort duties in April 1940, Winchester supported evacuation operations from Dover that May, operating off Flushing during the night of 14 and 15 May 1940 as German forces overran the Netherlands, sustaining damage during air attacks before repairs were completed by mid-June.

Rebuilt to Shoot at Aircraft

Reconstructed for escort duties in April 1940 is a very quiet way of describing a rebuild that changed what she was. Winchester was one of fifteen V and W destroyers put through the WAIR conversion: the old low-angle 4-inch guns taken out, a twin 4-inch high-angle mounting and a fire-control director put in, and the ship turned from a twenty-year-old torpedo boat into a dedicated anti-aircraft escort for the East Coast convoys. What that programme was and why it was needed is explained in HMS Vimiera.

The timing was tight. She finished the conversion and within weeks was off Flushing on the night of 14 and 15 May 1940, in the middle of the fastest military collapse of the war. The Netherlands had been invaded on the 10th; Rotterdam was bombed flat on the 14th; the Dutch army surrendered that evening. The Royal Navy's job in those five days was to get out whatever and whoever could be got out of a country falling apart under them, and to do it from harbours already under air attack. She was hit and damaged doing it, and was back at sea by the middle of June.

What else was being lifted out of Holland in those days, including the Amsterdam diamond stocks, is in HMS Walpole (I41).

Escorting Cruisers and Training Crews

Through the following years, Winchester carried out a range of escort duties, accompanying the heavy cruiser HMS Norfolk to Scapa Flow in September 1941 and HMS Cumberland to Sheerness in February 1942, before turning to anti-submarine training exercises in the Firth of Forth alongside Allied vessels through 1942 and into 1943, changing command five times over the course of the war.

Scrapped After the War

HMS Winchester had dropped from the active Navy List by January 1945, and was sold to be broken up for scrap on 5 March 1946, closing out the career of a destroyer whose most memorable moment had come not in battle but in the quiet, solemn duty of laying a king's own yacht to rest at his final request.

Her ending was undramatic and worth stating plainly. She came off the Navy List early in 1945, spent her last months as an accommodation ship at Rosyth, and was sold to BISCO in March 1946 and broken up at Inverkeithing on the Forth. Twenty-eight years old, three separate wars in her record, and best remembered for an evening off St Catherine's Point with a wreath of flowers on somebody else's bow.