8 October 1884

HMS Rodney was launched on 8 October 1884 – the last Royal Navy battleship built with a figurehead. One of six Admiral-class ironclad battleships, the 10,300 ton Rodney was built at Chatham Dockyard and commissioned on 20 June 1888 when she took up her place in the Home Fleet. The battleship had four 13.5in guns, six 6in guns, 12 six pounders and four above-water torpedo tubes – her main armament was capable of firing a 570kg shell which could penetrate almost 70cm of iron plate at just under 1,000 metres. She went on to serve in the Channel and Mediterranean Fleets, serving with the International Squadron in 1897 to protect Ottoman troops and Turkish civilians during the Greek uprising against Ottoman rule in Crete. She finished her service as a coastguard ship in the Firth of Forth, when she sailed to Chatham for a refit then a final spell in reserve before being sold in 1909. Her figurehead is now on display at the Historic Dockyard in Chatham.

9 October 1943

HMS Panther was sunk by German dive bombers in the Scarpento Channel on 9 October 1943 – the last British warship to fall victim to the much-feared Stuka in World War 2. Light cruiser HMS Carlisle was also damaged beyond repair during the attack. Panther was a 2,290 ton P-class destroyer, launched at the Fairfields yard on the Clyde on 28 May 1941 and commissioned two weeks before Christmas the same year. She roamed far and wide during the early part of her career, first sailing to Iceland with battleship HMS King George V then escorting a British convoy to India. In April 1942 she rescued the survivors of two cruisers sunk in the Indian Ocean, then took part in the invasion of Vichy French Madagascar, sinking a French submarine on 8 May in company with destroyer HMS Active. After a refit at the end of the year she escorted ships involved in the Allied landings in North Africa, but sustained serious damage in the process; three of her sailors were killed and ten wounded in air attacks, and while her ship’s company managed to douse the fires she was forced to limp back to Gibraltar for repairs. In late 1942 and early 1943 Panther was again escorting capital ships and convoys in the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, and then helped screen warships from attack during the Allied invasions at Sicily, Salerno and Taranto. After the surrender of Italy she was switched to the Aegean, and on 9 October was sailing in the Scarpento Channel with light cruiser HMS Carlisle and Hunt-class destroyer HMS Rockwood, aiming to intercept German convoys in the vicinity of the Greek Dodecanese islands. Shortly before midday the three ships were attacked by Junkers Ju-87 Stuka dive bombers. Two bombs struck Panther, breaking her in two and causing her to sink in under ten minutes; 33 sailors died in the attack. Carlisle was seriously damaged, losing 24 sailors, and although she was towed back to Alexandria by Rockwood she was beyond repair and was instead converted for use as a base ship in harbour. She was listed as a hulk in 1948 and broken up the following year.

10 October 1957

Minesweeper HMS Gavinton was towed for two miles at 5kts off the Isle of Wight by a Whirlwind helicopter on 10 October 1957. Gavinton, built by Doig at Grimsby and completed on14 July 1954, spent her first six years as Senior Officer with the HMS Vernon Squadron at Portsmouth, and it was during this period that she took part in the somewhat unusual towing exercise. On 10 October 1957 the 360-ton ship was hooked up to a Westland Whirlwind helicopter during trials to see how effective such aircraft could be in salvage operations. The Whirlwind, part of the Special Trials Flight of 705 Naval Air Squadron, towed Gavinton around two miles in ideal conditions, reaching around 5kts, but the practice was considered somewhat risky (particularly to the helicopter and to those sailors dealing with the tow rope) and was never introduced into the Royal Navy.

11 October 1960

Submarine depot ship HMS Forth returned to Devonport from Malta on 11 October 1960 after 13 years of service in the Mediterranean. The Maidstone-class vessel was built by John Brown and Co on Clydebank and launched on 11 August 1938, commissioning shortly before the outbreak of World War 2. She began the war supporting submarines in home waters, including Holy Loch on the Firth of Clyde, and later crossed the Atlantic to Canada to carry out her duties at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Shortly after the war she moved to the Mediterranean and spent much of that time in Malta, where she was a familiar sight moored in Msida Creek. She left Malta on 11 October 1960 and supported NATO exercises on the eastern seaboard of North America the following year. From 1962-6 she was upgraded at Chatham to support the Royal Navy’s fleet of nuclear-powered of submarines, and in 1966 she was sent to Singapore to relieve HMS Medway, spending almost five years as depot ship for the 7th Submarine Squadron. In 1972 she was renamed HMS Defiance and spent six years as depot ship for the Fleet Maintenance Base of the same name at Devonport Naval Base. The 9.050-ton ship was sold for scrapping in July 1985.

12 October 1944

L-class destroyer HMS Loyal was badly damaged by an acoustic mine in the Mediterranean on 12 October 1944, and subsequently written off as a total loss. The 2,700-ton destroyer was built at Scotts in Greenock and launched on 8 October 1940, though she wasn’t completed for another two years because of design changes and the need to prioritise other work. She sailed from Greenock for the Mediterranean on Boxing Day 1942, joining her flotilla on Algerian convoy escort duties based out of Algiers and Bone, as well as interception patrols. She also provided protection for fast minelayer HMS Abdiel on several occasions. She was damaged by an air raid while in Bone on 1 March 1943, with two of her sailors later dying of their injuries. Later that year she took part in Operation Corkscrew, the Allied invasion of the Italian island of Pantelleria in June, when she bombarded shore defences, and then moved on to Operation Husky, the landings in Sicily in July, and Operation Avalanche, the landings at Salerno in September. She was hit by 88mm shellfire during the latter, damaging a boiler room but she remained operational until steaming to Malta briefly for repairs on 10 September. In early 1944 she took part in the Anzio landings, providing naval gunfire support, and later rescuing survivors of HMS Spartan, sunk by a radio-controlled bomb at the end of January. She was again hit by shore-based artillery on 9 February 1944, and this time repairs at Taranto took around six weeks to complete. No sooner had she returned to the heat of battle at Anzio than she was damaged in air attacks, and was back at Taranto for further six weeks of repairs. By September that year she was on operations in the Adriatic, carrying out shore bombardments, but on 12 October she detonated a mine which damaged her hull, causing flooding, with the shock knocking machinery off-line. She was towed to Ancona by sister ship HMS Lookout, then towed on to Taranto for docking and inspection. This determined that extensive repairs would be needed to her hull to bring her back into action, and she was paid off into care and maintenance in December 1944. She remained in the Italian port for the rest of the war pending a tow to Malta, which did not materialise until 1946, after which she was repaired sufficiently to act as an accommodation ship. She was declared a Constructive Total Loss in 1947, and the following year was towed to Milford Haven where she was broken up during the summer.

13 October 1996

HMS Scott, the largest survey ship ever built for the Royal Navy, was launched at Bideford in Devon on 13 October 1996. She was built by Appledore under contract from BAeSEMA to replace the ocean-going survey ship HMS Hecla, which was something of a minnow by comparison – Hecla displaced 2,800 tons while Scott, a one-off design, weighed in at almost 15,000 tons, making her the fifth-largest vessel in the Royal Navy fleet at the time she was built. Named after the polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, the ship was a huge leap forward in terms of technology and capability. While she is the only ocean survey vessel on the Navy’s books she can remain at sea for up to 300 days a year, with two-thirds of her ship’s company of almost 80 on board at any time through a rotation system. Capable of exploring deep into the great oceans, Scott’s capability was demonstrated when she surveyed the sea bed around the site of the 2004 Indian Ocean Boxing Day earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, which killed a quarter of a million people. The earthquake, which triggered the deadly tsunami, radically altered the shape of the sea bed up to 5,000 metres deep. Scott was originally earmarked to leave service in the early 2020s, but has now been retained and is likely to continue in service until at least 2033.

14 October 1941

Flower-class corvette HMS Fleur de Lys was sunk in the Strait of Gibraltar by U-206 on 14 October 1941. The escort ship was launched at the Smith’s Dock Co on the Tees near Middlesbrough on 21 June 1940, originally for the French Navy as La Dieppoise but renamed before she commissioned on 26 August 1940. One of a large class of cheap, rugged and dependable escorts, Fleur de Lys and her sisters were originally designed for work in the North Sea, but their capabilities and range saw them also play a significant role in protecting Atlantic convoys, meeting the merchant ships far out at sea and bringing them in to British ports or escorting them out to the limit of their range. On 14 October 1941 Fleur de Lys, which had already escorted more than 30 convoys, was escorting Convoy OG-75 (Outbound to Gibraltar) some 50 miles west of Gibraltar when she was hit by three torpedoes fired by U-206. The torpedoes detonated the 925-ton corvette’s magazine, breaking the ship in two; she sank with 70 of her ship’s company, while the remaining three were picked up by a Spanish freighter.

15 October 1942

Destroyer HMS Viscount sank submarine U-661 on the boat’s first patrol – and a very thorough attack it was too. The encounter, south-east of Cape Farewell, was a prime example of a seasoned war machine against inexperience. Viscount was a veteran of World War 1, having been launched at Woolston by John Thornycroft on 29 December 1917 and commissioned on 4 March the following year. Despite her late entry into the Great War the 1,120-ton V-class destroyer made her mark – she was regarded as an extremely fast ship, and while serving with the Grand Fleet claimed at least one U-boat kill, steaming in to depth-charge a boat that crash-dived after she caught it on the surface. Between the wars Viscount served with the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets, including a major cruise in the Baltic in 1921. On the outbreak of World War 2 the destroyer was based at Plymouth on convoy escort and patrol duties in the Channel and South West Approaches, moving to Liverpool when Western Approaches Command moved north in April 1940. After joining the Norwegian Campaign later that year she resumed her convoy escort duties, undergoing conversion to Long-Range Escort status in June 1941. In October 1942 Viscount was part of the escort for Convoy SC 1 CW, from Nova Scotia to Liverpool, when the formation came under attack from the ten-strong Wotan submarine wolf-pack. On 15 October Viscount picked up the submarine U-607 and attacked, but the U-boat escaped. U-661 was not so lucky. The German submarine had only been commissioned eight months earlier and was on her first war patrol – she claimed her first and only victim the previous day when she sank the 3,700-ton Yugoslav cargo ship Nikolina Matkovic with the loss of 14 of her crew of 35 sailors. On 15 October she was spotted by Viscount as the wolf-pack carried out its attack hundreds of miles south of Greenland, and the destroyer did not hesitate. The destroyer charged in and rammed U-661, following up with gunfire and, when the submarine slipped below the waves, a fierce depth-charge attack, sinking the boat with her entire crew of 44. Viscount was sufficiently damaged in the ramming to require immediate repairs, so left the convoy and headed straight to the UK. She was back on duty by February 1943 and joined Convoy ONS 165 (Outbound Slow to Nova Scotia) but repeated her actions of October by ramming and depth-charging U-201 in roughly the same area that she sank U-661. Once again the submarine sank with all hands, and Viscount was sufficiently damaged to take her out of the front line, this time for a couple of months. Later that year she took part in anti-submarine operations in the Bay of Biscay and in Operation Alacrity, the creation of Allied air bases in the Azores. Her war service ended in early 1945 with coastal convoy escort work, but she was withdrawn in February that year to free up manpower for more modern warships, and decommissioned in March. She was sold for scrap the same month, and broken up on the Tyne in May 1947.