- Author
- Mountbatten, Lord Louis, Earl of Burma
- Subjects
- Ship design and development
- Tags
- None noted.
- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- December 1979 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
One of the most brilliant innovations of all was solely Cole’s idea. Instead of going for transverse frame sections being unnecessarily strong, held together by weak longitudinals, he went for extra strong longitudinals and weaker transverse frames. This was to prove an absolute winner and there is no doubt whatever that the Kelly owed her survival to this when she was torpedoed.
We also went into the question of living accommodation for the sailors, producing hot and cold water supplies, and every officer had a basin with hot and cold water in his cabin.
I got a proper little space provided to hold the portable cinema projector and it enabled them to rewind films. This was a complete innovation.
So far as the Captain’s cabins were concerned in the Flotilla leader I, of course, did nothing about suggesting alterations until I actually found myself, to my own great surprise and delight, appointed in command of the Kelly and of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, the K class.
At the same time I was delighted to hear that the King and Queen wished to use a modern destroyer to take them on their State visit to Belgium. I must confess I suggested to the King that he should use the Kelly. His Majesty agreed. Once that was known I had carte blanche to make alterations to improve the ‘Royal quarters’.
Cole immediately agreed to cut out the enormous lobby which had been provided outside the Captain’s day and sleeping cabins and use that space in the cabins themselves so that it was possible to sit down at table, have twelve people to dinner and still have room to have drinks and sit round on the far side.
Incidentally, Hawthorne Leslie, our builders, decided at their own expense to enamel the ship’s side and superstructure with a light grey Mediterranean enamel so that the whole ship shone.
They also agreed to chromium plate the WT door clips and other fittings, which would normally have had to be polished each day. They thus looked absolutely wonderful. The whole ship looked like a miniature Royal Yacht when she was completed. This was another grievance I had against Hitler when we had to repaint in dark grey war paint.
I must say I thought the dark grey war paint was not the best for invisibility and I was greatly struck one day when picking up the Sierra Leone convoy (SL2) at 0500 on the morning of the 7th October 1939 that although there were supposed to be thirteen ships in the convoy we could only really count twelve rather faint shapes. The thirteenth ship we couldn’t see at all at first and finally we discovered it was a Union Castle liner with their mauve pink paint.
I managed to get the formula that the Union Castle ships were painted with, altered it a bit to suit naval conditions and introduced it for painting the Kelly and the 5th Destroyer Flotilla. It appeared to be a great success and we kept the paint in the Flotilla for the rest of my time in command, and I believe the paint continued to be used until 1943 or 1944.
The Dockyard gave it a Pattern number and christened it ‘Mountbatten Pink’.
And now I must deal with the question of ‘Damage Control’. I first came across this expression from my brother, George (Second Marquess of Milford-Haven), who after retiring from the Navy became the Chairman and Managing Director of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in the UK. Their parent company was in New York and on one of his visits there he came across the whole theory of damage control as practised by the US Navy. I had never heard of it before nor did I meet anybody who had heard of it before.
I discussed this with Cole who became enthusiastic to help me and with his advice I drew up a little handbook on Damage Control procedure in the K class destroyers. As time went on Cole improved the instructions as a result of his calculations and further experience. One of the main things he pointed out to me was that if the ship was damaged and had a list, it was fatal to try and correct the list. What was essential was to try and stabilize the ship at the list she then had and above all get rid of all possible top weight as quickly as possible.
The result of these instructions were that when the Kelly was torpedoed off the German minefield in the North Sea on the evening of the 9th May 1940 she was so badly holed in No. 1 boiler room that if I had not acted quickly she would certainly have sunk lower and lower in the water and gradually lost our positive metacentric height and turned over. As it was I got all ten torpedoes fired quickly. set to safe, and the same with all our depth charges.
All the boats were lowered and cut adrift and all moveable top weight was cleared off the upper deck.
The ship then settled down with a very heavy list to starboard and, indeed, the starboard gunwale was awash. We were towed back first by the destroyer Bulldog and later on by a tug from the Tyne to our builders, Hawthorne Leslie at Hebburn on Tyne.
We were some ninety-three hours in tow altogether which was quite a strain on me as I was on the bridge pretty well the whole time.
However on the third evening her roll began to become very sluggish and it seemed to me that our metacentric height was gradually fading away and I knew that when the metacentric height became negative we should go over. The only solution was to get rid of more top weight. I had already buried some twenty-seven dead but there were still onboard over 230 officers and men. I then cleared off all except six officers and twelve men needed to handle the tow whenever it parted and to man the close range weapons against our frequent air attack.
This steadied the sluggishness of the roll and, in fact, one could feel the ship becoming a little bit more stable.
When we finally got back into the Tyne, Cole came up and took measurements and announced that if I hadn’t got the additional men off the upper deck on the third day she would have turned over that night. Incidentally, I couldn’t put the men below because practically everything below was flooded and nobody wanted to be down below if she was going to turn over.
This is another thing that Cole and I were able to introduce into the Royal Navy, thanks to my brother having alerted me about Damage Control.
In fact the Admiralty issued a poster to all ships showing the enormous hole in the Kelly’s side and bottom when in dry dock, and explained what we had done in the way of Damage Control to save the ship. I have one of the posters in my archives.
And now we come to Cole’s letter to Commander Robin Bousfield of the 15th May 1962 in which he very justifiably and properly complains about the wrong descriptions of our relationship which appeared in a garbled version in two books, The Last Viceroy by Ray Murphy and The Kelly by Kenneth Poolman.
The letter finally reached my hands on the 21st May and I immediately wrote a letter to Bousfield with an extra copy for him to send on to Cole. Thus the very slight possibility of friction between us was completely removed as I agreed with every word that Cole had written.
I remember how interested King George VI became when I showed him the photographs of the damage to the Kelly and gave an account of our adventures. He could not understand how a small destroyer could take such punishment and survive and I told him that this was really entirely due to the brilliance of the constructor, A. P. Cole, in going for the first time for longitudinal strength instead of transverse strength and also the fact that we both worked on Damage Control so that I was able to take the necessary steps to make sure the ship did not go right over.
His Majesty on his own immediately sent a message to the First Lord of the Admiralty that he wished Cole to have a Knighthood in recognition of his brilliant breakthrough in destroyer design, as proved by the adventures of the Kelly.
However, the ‘Establishment’ was too strong and the First Lord sent back a typical reply to say that Cole was not sufficiently senior for a Knighthood and this would cause great heartburning among people more senior to him!
I had hoped that when I became First Sea Lord he would be in the right position to become the Director of Naval Construction under me but, alas, this was not possible.