23 August 1914

HMS Kennet engaged the German torpedo boat S-90 at Tsingtau on 23 August 1914, and came off second best. The 625-ton River-class destroyer was built by John Thornycroft at Chiswick and commissioned on New Year’s Day 1905. Her first service was on the east coast of England, based at Harwich, during which time she was damaged by the somewhat smaller destroyer HMS Leopard while she was visiting Plymouth – Leopard manoeuvred to avoid a buoy and in doing so damaged Kennet’s rudder, which holed the smaller ship’s hull. By 1910 Kennet was assigned to the China Station, and shortly afterwards she and her River-class sisters were reclassified as E-class ships by the Admiralty. Kennet remained in China on the outbreak of war, and she was with the China Squadron blockading German treaty ports in China, including Tsingtao (now Qingdao) on the Yellow Sea, in the first weeks of the conflict. On 23 August 1914 Kennet took on the combined might of the 380-ton high-speed torpedo boat S-90, the rather more formidable 1,050 ton gunboat Jaguar and a 4in gun shore battery. Kennet was attempting to cut off the passage of S-90 into Tsingtao but she was thoroughly outpaced, and in the course of the action Kennet lost five men and a gun was put out of action. Shortly after the Allied forces, including Japan, besieged Tsingtao until the port city fell on 7 November. By that time Kennet was back in the European theatre, joining the war in the Mediterranean and supporting the Dardanelles campaign, including patrols and direct support of the ANZAC landings. She remained in the Mediterranean until the end of the war and was sold for scrap in December 1919.

24 August 1810

HMS Nereide was taken by the aggressive French ship Bellone in Grand Port, Mauritius, on 24 August 1810, suffering a great many casualties. The 42-gun frigate was something of a yoyo ship. She was built in St Malo in 1779 and saw some success with the French Navy throughout her first 17 years under the Tricolour, including the capture of a British privateer, the ten gun Prince of Wales, off Madeira in 1780. However, she met her match on 20 December 1797 when she encountered the smaller but superior frigate HMS Phoebe off the Isles of Scilly. The two ships exchanged broadsides for 90 minutes before Nereide struck her colours, having suffered 20 dead and 55 wounded – Phoebe lost three men and ten were wounded. Nereide entered service under the White Ensign and re0enteerd the fray with a vengeance – literally, as the first ship she took in British colours was the French privateer Vengeance, on 2 March 1800, which she followed up the next day by taking American ship Perseverance, with its valuable cargo, then retook Lord Nelson on 17 March and Eagle on 5 June. Over the following decade she continued to enjoy success in the Caribbean and the North Atlantic, but her career came to an end at the disastrous week-long Battle of Grand Port on Isle de France (now Mauritius), when a squadron of British frigates took on a French equivalent. The British sought to blockade the port and draw out the French warships on 22 August 1810, but in subsequent manoeuvring in narrow channels between shoals most of the British ships grounded and were lost; all of the French ships also grounded and were badly damaged, but as they held a strong defensive position and used it well, the battle is viewed as a disaster for the Royal Navy, and is the only French naval victory recorded on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Nereide was the unfortunate victim of the worst punishment. She had anchored overnight on 22-23 August 1810 to protect the grounded British flagship HMS Sirius, but on the 23rd she came under intense fire from three French ships, including the 44-gun frigate Bellone, which managed to cut Nereide’s stern cable, which swung the British ship round and presented Bellone with an unprotected stern into which the French ship poured cannon fire. By 10pm Nereide was a wreck with more than 220 casualties in her ship’s company of 281, more than 70 of whom died. Still she refused to surrender as her buccaneering captain, Nesbit Willoughby (whose poor reading of the French situation was largely to blame for the defeat) explored all options before deciding to end his crew’s suffering with an offer to surrender which was finally passed to the French the following morning, 24 August. Nereide was subsequently attached to the French squadron, but was so battered that she never sailed again. Ironically, she was to be recaptured by the British later that year, when the island was invaded in early December. All Nereide’s surviving Royal Navy officers and ratings were found in prison ships in Grand Port and were released, but the Royal Navy, like the French Navy, could find no use for the shattered frigate and she was sold in 1816 for breaking up.

25 August 1707

24-gun sixth rate HMS Nightingale was captured by six French privateers off Harwich on 25 August 1707. The Chatham-built ship was commissioned shortly after Christmas 1702 and went on to serve in the North Sea. On 25 August 1707 she was escorting a convoy of more the 30 ships when she encountered a flotilla of French privateer galleys off the coast of East Anglia, and while the warship was captured, most of the merchant ships escaped. Nightingale was put into service with the French navy as Le Rossignol (French for ‘nightingale’). Her service under the Tricolour was brief – she was recaptured by HMS Ludlow Castle on New Year’s Eve the same year, and commissioned into the Royal Navy a month later, this time under the name HMS Fox, once again in the North Sea, though she later went on to undertake a voyage to Newfoundland and also served in the Mediterranean. She underwent a total rebuild at Deptford in 1727, going on to serve in the Americas, based first in South Carolina and then in Barbados. She was broken up for good in January 1738.

26 August 1799

HMS Tamar captured the French warship Republicaine some 80 miles north-west of Surinam on 26 August 1799 after a lengthy chase. The 38-gun frigate, launched at Chatham in 1796, was a successful privateer-hunter, taking ten French ships between 4 April and 10 August 1797 alone, all of them in the Caribbean or east coast of the Americas. On the evening of 25 August 1799 Tamar spotted the 28-gun French corvette Republicaine off the island of Surinam, but could not follow the smaller ship into the shallow water of the island’s coast in the hours of darkness. However, the following morning Tamar again spotted Republicaine and immediately resumed the chase. The French skilfully managed to evade their opponents for nearly 12 hours, but some time before 6pm on 26 August Tamar drew alongside and opened fire. The unequal battle lasted no more than ten minutes, by which time Republicaine was in a poor state and had lost nine men killed and 12 wounded – Tamar, which had sustained only minor damage to her masts and rigging, suffered just two men wounded. Tamar took the French warship under tow, but because of her age and the damage she sustained, Republicaine was not added to the Royal Navy’s fleet. Tamar continued to serve until she was paid off in 1802, and she was broken up in 1810.

27 August 1834

Excise cruiser Camelion was run down and sunk by HMS Castor off Dover on 27 August 1834. The 85 ton vessel, whose name was also spelled Cameleon, operated in the Channel out of Portsmouth from around 1816. She met her unfortunate end in the Strait of Dover in the early morning of 27 August 1834 when she was struck by the 36-gun fifth rate frigate Castor. The cutter sank immediately with the loss of 13 men and boys; four sailors were rescued by Castor. The subsequent court martial, on 6 September, could not exonerate either crew as both vessels have been keeping a good lookout, but in the end the finger of blame was pointed at Castor’s Officer of the Watch, who was dismissed the service. Castor went on to serve in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the China Station, and she lost several of her sailors when she took part in the conflict with the Maori in New Zealand in early 1846. She was tasked as a training ship in 1860, and became the Royal Naval Reserve training ship at North Shields from April 1862. She was sold at Sheerness on 25 August 1902 for breaking up at Woolwich.

28 August 1918

HMS Ouse and an RAF patrol aircraft combined to sink submarine UC-70 in the North Sea. Ouse was something of a veteran River-class destroyer by the time World War 1 began, having been launched onto the Mersey by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 7 January 1905 and commissioned in September the same year, though the 635-ton warship was actually a repeat of the destroyers built under the Lairds 1901-2 programme. After commissioning she was allocated to the East Coast Destroyer Flotilla, running out of Harwich, before moving to Chatham in late 1910. After a spell in reserve, and by now assigned to the E class of destroyers, Ouse began World War 1 based on the River Tyne, patrolling between the Scottish border and North Yorkshire. Her main task was preventing the sowing of mines outside East Coast ports and stopping raids on towns along the coast. She later switched base to the Humber, and in May 1917, along with destroyer HMS Bat, was involved in a blue-on-blue attack on HMS C10 off Blyth; although the submarine survived, one sailor died and a second was wounded. On the afternoon of 28 August 1918 the 500-ton German minelaying submarine, which was responsible for the sinking of more than 30 merchantmen, was spotted three miles off Whitby in North Yorkshire by a Blackburn Kangaroo, one of only eight such aircraft in the RAF at that time, all of which were stationed near Hartlepool. The aircraft type had carried out 11 attacks on submarines, but this was the first to draw blood. The pilot, Plt Lt Arthur Waring of 246 Squadron RAF, noticed a trail of oil on the surface of the sea, and following it he quickly spotted the German submarine on the sea bed in relatively shallow water. Waring dropped a 520lb bomb on top of the submarine, and the explosion caught the attention of HMS Ouse, which raced over and, guided by flares from the circling aircraft, dropped a series of ten depth charges which destroyed the boat, killing her crew of 31. Just over two weeks later a Navy diver, PO ‘Dusty’ Miller, entered the wreck and retrieved documents, code books and other material that identified the boat as UC-7o of the Flanders Flotilla. It is thought she was lying on the sea bed to repair damage sustained in a recently laid British minefield off the coast of Yorkshire, which caused the oil leak. UC-70 had already been sunk once before – she was truck by gunfire from British monitors off Ostend in June the previous year, but had been raised and repaired. She had sailed from Zeebrugge on 21 August on her final patrol. HMS Ouse managed one more kill before the end of the war – on 29 September 1918, long with destroyer HMS Star, she depth-charged UB-115 off Sunderland, sinking the submarine with her crew of 39. Ouse was broken up at Dover in late 1919 or early 1920.

29 August 1791

HMS Pandora, a 24-gun sixth rate post ship searching for the Bounty mutineers, was lost on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia on 29 August 1791. Pandora was built at Deptford and launched on 17 May 1779, seeing service in the Channel then as an escort for transatlantic convoys. She captured at least 11 ships, either alone or in company with other warships, before she was placed in ordinary at Chatham in 1783, and there she languished for seven years until reactivated in June 1790 as war loomed with Spain. However, on hearing news of the mutiny on HMS Bounty, the Admiralty decided to end a ship to round up the mutineers, and Pandora was chosen. HMS Bounty, commanded by Lt William Bligh, had been seized by disgruntled members of her ship’s company in the southern Pacific on 28 April 1789. Bligh and loyal shipmates were set adrift in a ship’s boat, while Bounty, under Fletcher Christian, returned to Tahiti, where some mutineers remained, while the other nine (with a group of Tahitians, mainly women) travelled on to the uncharted Pitcairn Island, and were not discovered until 1808, when all but one had died, often in violent circumstances. Their descendants still live on the island. Pandora sailed from Portsmouth on 7 November 1790 under Capt Edward Edwards with a ship’s company of 134, reaching Tahiti via Cape Horn on 23 March 1791. Some of the Bounty mutineers handed themselves in, others fled for the hills and were hunted down, and by the time Pandora sailed on 8 May 1791 she had 14 suspected mutineers locked in a makeshift brig on her quarterdeck, nicknamed Pandora’s Box. She then scoured the southern Pacific for three months, searching for the Bounty and her mutineer crew, though by that time Bounty had been stripped of all useful material and destroyed by fire on Pitcairn Island. She then headed for the Dutch East Indies, but on sailing for the Torres Strait north of Australia Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef on 29 August 1791, and sank the following morning, taking the lives of 31 crew and four of the mutineers. The survivors spent a couple of nights on a small sand cay then made an arduous journey in open boats to Kupang on the island of Timor, though 16 more men died en route. Only 78 of the original 134 ship’s company of Pandora eventually returned to England, where Capt Edwards and his officers were exonerated at a court martial. Three of the ten mutineers were hanged for their part in the taking of the Bounty, four were acquitted, two received a Royal pardon and one avoided punishment on a legal technicality. The wreck of Pandora was found in 1977, 33 metres deep, and is one of the best-preserved wrecks in the Southern Hemisphere.

30 August 1943

Flower-class corvette HMS Stonecrop and Bittern class sloop HMS Stork sank U-634 in the North Atlantic on 30 August 1943. Stonecrop, built on Teesside at Smith’s Dock, was commissioned on 30 July 1940 and had already destroyed one U-boat, U-124, on 2 April 1943 off the Portuguese coast, alongside HMS Black Swan. On 30 August she and HMS Stork were escorting Convoys SL 135 and MKS 22 in the Atlantic when they spotted U-634, a relatively-new 860-ton Type VIIC U-boat with one merchant ship to her name. After a protracted hunt, the two ships attacked U-6345 with depth charges, and the German vessel sank with all 47 hands on board. Stonecrop survived the war and was sold on 17 May 1947, when she was converted to the merchant ship Silver King. HMS Stork, which was a pre-war Denny Brothers ship built at Dumbarton on the Clyde, saw action in the Norwegian Campaign of 1940, and in 1941 served as Cdr Johnnie Walker’s lead ship in the36th Escort Group, helping to sink two U-boats in December that year. She continued to play a leading role in the Battle of the Atlantic, and was damaged during the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in 1942. Stork was part of the protective screen for the D-Day Landings in the summer of 1944, and was then earmarked to serve in the Far East but the Japanese surrender came before she was ready and she went into reserve. She served two years as Senior Officer’s ship in the Fishery Protection Squadron in the mid-1940s, then went back into reserve. She was broken up in 1958.

31 August 1940 The 20th Destroyer Flotilla, the Royal Navy’s only offensive minelayer force, lost HM Ships Esk and Ivanhoe in one disastrous mission off the Dutch coast on the night of 31 August 1940, while a third (HMS Express) was put out of action for a year. Esk was an E-class destroyer, designed in the early 1930s to be easily converted to a fast minelayer, which is what happened on the outbreak of World War 2. Esk had by that time already seen action with the Mediterranean Fleet during the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935-6 and the Spanish Civil War, when she helped enforce the arms blockade on the warring factions. Converted in September 1939, Esk laid mines for the Norwegian Campaign in April and May 1940, then returned to home waters. HMS Express was a sister to HMS Esk, and was also converted to minelaying duties early in the war. She helped evacuate troops from Dunkirk in May and June 1940, and after losing her bows off the Texel in August that year she was under repair for more than a year. Assigned to the Far East, Express escorted Force Z – battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse – to Singapore, and was one of the ships that rescued survivors from the two big warships when they were sunk by Japanese bombers in December 1941. She returned to the UK in 1943 and took up convoy escort duties with the Royal Canadian Navy under the name Gatineau. She was paid off in 1946 and is now part of a breakwater off the coast of British Columbia. I-class destroyer HMS Ivanhoe was also quickly converted to a minelayer as war loomed and, like Express, also helped evacuate troops from Dunkirk, carrying more than 2,000 men to safety. She was badly damaged by a German bomb on 1 June 1940 and had only returned to operational duties on 31 August 1940. On that day HM Ships Esk, Express, Intrepid, Icarus and Ivanhoe set off from Immingham to lay a new minefield off the island of Texel, off the northern coast of the Netherlands. While laying mines, the Admiralty received intelligence suggesting an invasion force may be gathering, and the flotilla was ordered to intercept it. As they closed on the supposed invasion fleet (which turned out to be a small German minelaying unit moving from Cuxhaven to Rotterdam) they ran into a newly-laid German minefield. Express lost her bows in an explosion, killing 90 of her ship’s company of 175, while Ivanhoe, closing to assist her, struck another mine, killing a further nine sailors. Esk was next to detonate a mine, and around 15 minutes later she struck a second, which broke her back and caused her to sink rapidly, killing 127 of her ship’s company of 145. The incident resulted in the death of more than 200 British sailors, while another 100 or so were either wounded or drifted ashore in the Netherlands in liferafts, where they were taken prisoner by the Germans. Ivanhoe was scuttled the following day by destroyer HMS Kelvin, while Express was towed back to England. There was one further casualty in the so called ‘Texel Disaster’ – light cruiser HMS Galatea, one of two cruisers sent to cover the rescue operation, also struck a mine and was slightly damaged.