Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger
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Warship Wednesday (on a Tuesday) 31 March 2026: Good Luck Sometimes Runs Thin
Admiralty photo by LT Sidney James Beadell, Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve (Sp), Imperial War Museum catalog A 1725
Above we see the twin 5.25″/50 QF Mark II DP gun turrets A, B, and Q forward of the very open bridge of the Royal Navy’s Dido-class light cruiser HMS Bonaventure (31), circa 1940. Note the compass platform and the canvas-covered rangefinder in the foreground.
Often credited with helping to spoil the attack of the much larger German super heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper on Convoy WS 5A– firing 438 rounds from the above three forward turrets in the space of only 24 minutes– Bonaventure gave her last full measure some 85 years ago today, just a short ten months after she was rushed into service.
The Didos
The Didos were very light cruisers indeed, designed in 1936 to weigh just 5,600 tons standard displacement, though this would later swell during wartime service to nearly 8,000 tons. Some 512 feet long, they were smaller than a modern destroyer, but, on a powerplant of four Admiralty 3-drum boilers and four Parsons steam turbines, each with its own dedicated shaft, they could break 32.5 knots on 62,000 shp.
They were intended to be armed with 10 5.25″/50 (13.4 cm) QF Mark II DP guns in five twin mounts, three forward and two over the stern, although most of the class failed to carry this layout.
Bow 5.25″/50 turrets on HMS Hermione as she enters Malta Harbor in September 1941. The muzzles of her third forward “Q” turret can just be seen above the crane at the upper left. She, along with Euryalus, Naiad, and Sirius, was the only Dido that completed with the full battery of five twin 5.25-inch mounts, largely due to a shortage of such guns. IWM A 5772.
The Dido class had provision for up to 360 rounds for “A”, “B” and “Q” turrets, 320 rounds for “X” turret and 300 rounds for “Y” turret and a properly trained crew could rattle them off at 7-8 shots per minute per gun out to a range of 23,400 yards or a ceiling of 46,500 feet when used in the AAA role. The fact that one of these cruisers could burp 70-80 shells within a 60-second mad minute gave them a lot of potential if used properly. However, this didn’t play out in reality, at least when it came to swatting incoming aircraft.
Gunnery booklet laying out the general plan of a Dido-class cruiser
As noted by Richard Worth in his Fleets of World War II, “Often referred to as AA cruisers, the 16 Dido-type ships shot down a total of 15 enemy planes. The entirety of British cruiser-dom accounted for only 97 planes, while enemy planes accounted for 11 British cruisers.”
Nonetheless, these vessels carried a decent (for the era) secondary AAA batteries as well.
Originally fitted with two quad .50-caliber Vickers guns, these were augmented with five single 20mm Oerlikons, whose numbers were further expanded until the ship carried over a dozen in twin mounts by the end of the war.
She was also equipped with a variety of quadruple 2 pdr 40mm MK VIII pom-pom guns on Mk.VII mountings.
Meet Bonaventure
Our subject is at least the 10th RN warship to carry the Latin term for “good fortune” since 1489, giving her nine battle honors carried forward (Lowestoft 1665, Four Days’ Battle 1666, Orfordness 1666, Solebay 1672, Schooneveldt 1673, Texel 1673, Beachy Head 1690, Barfleur 1693, and China 1900).
The immediately preceding ninth Bonaventure was an Astraea-class second-class cruiser commissioned in 1894 and used mostly as a submarine depot ship until broken up in 1920.
“HMS Bonaventure and submarines” circa 1911 by William Lionel Wyllie. RMG PW2083. Inscribed, as title, and signed by the artist, lower right. The ‘Bonaventure’ (1892) was a second-class protected cruiser converted to a submarine depot ship in 1907. This finished watercolor shows the ship in her 1911-14 condition. Both the ‘Bonaventure’ and the trawler tender on the left are flying large red flags, advising other vessels to keep clear of a submarine operating area.
Ordered from Scotts of Greenock on 21 March 1937 under the 1937 Programme, our future Dido-class Bonaventure was laid down on 30 August the same year as Yard No. 575 and launched on 19 April 1939, officially having a peacetime hull.
Bonaventure shared the same armament fit as class leader Dido and sister Phoebe, with her four twin 5.25″/40s (as opposed to five mounts as seen on Naiad, Euryalus, Hermione, Sirius, Cleopatra, and Argonaut), a single 4″/45 QF Mk V starshell gun in the position of her “X” turret (only ever seen on these three cruisers and Charybdis due to a shortage in the supply of the new 5.25s), two quad Vickers 40/39 2pdr QF Mk VIII pom poms, two quad Vickers 50 cals (guns just seen on the first six Didos, replaced on the latter vessels by Oerlikons) and the univesal torpedo tube fit of two triple 21-inch tubes.
On 24 May 1940, amid the evacuation from Dunkirk, Bonaventure was commissioned for Contractor’s Trials and accepted on 19 June, just days before the Fall of France.
Her plankowner skipper was Henry Jack Egerton, a 48-year-old Mountfield-born Englishman listed in the peerage (grandson of 1st Earl Brassey) who started “taking the king’s shilling” as a Mid in 1909. Serving as a junior officer during the Great War, he shipped aboard the battleship HMS Agincourt, the cruiser Caledon, and the battlecruiser Repulse. Interwar, he passed out of the Senior Officers’ War Course at Greenwich and the Imperial Defence Course before moving into the captain’s cabin of the destroyer Bridgewater, his first command, in 1936. When WWII began, he was commanding officer of the Emerald-class light cruiser Enterprise with the 4th CS on Atlantic escort duties.
War photographer LT Sidney James Beadell, RNVR, captured a series of images of “Britain’s latest light cruiser” and her skipper and XO, CDR Edward Francis Disbrowe, RN.
IWM A 1733
IWM A 1732
IWM A 1739
IWM A 1731
Note her two H-aerial (separate transmitting and receiving antennas) 70kW Type 279 A-band radar atop her mainmast, good for a theoretical 60nm for high altitude targets and about 2-6nm for surface targets. IWM A 1730
Note her missing “turret. IWM A 1734
Left: Captain E J Egerton, RN, and (Right) Commander E F Disbrowe, RN. Disbrowe, 39, had joined up in 1919 and had previously commanded the Acacia-class sweeping sloop HMS Laburnum out of Singapore. IWM (A 1735)
War! (Already in progress)
After just a couple weeks of trials and exercises in the Clyde followed by a short yard period to address defects, Bonaventure sailed out on 5 July to escort the liners Monarch of Bermuda, Batory, and Sobieski for Halifax– all loaded with £25 million in gold from the Bank of England, sent abroad for safekeeping in Canada should Mr. Hitler cross the Channel as part of Operation Fish. The little convoy was joined at sea by the battleship HMS Revenge and three destroyers.
On her return from the Canada run, Bonaventure was assigned to the 15th Cruiser Squadron, Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, and she shipped out with HMS Naiad to patrol the Faeroes for German blockade runners in late August.
HMS Bonaventure as seen from the destroyer HMS Javelin, August 1940, in the Firth of Forth. Note her four-turret arrangement. Photo by Reginald George Guy Coote, IWM (A 443).
By 6 September, she was part of Operation DF, a carrier raid built around HMS Furious on German shipping in the occupied Trondheim area.
The next month saw Operations DN 2/DNU which aimed to bag a group of 20 German fishing vessels and a patrol ship that were reported off Egersund. Only the 300-ton weather ship WBS 5 (ex-Adolf Vinnen) was found and sunk north of Iceland, sent to the bottom by detached destroyers.
November saw Bonaventure scrabbled to join the unsuccessful hunt (alongside Hood and Repulse) for the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer after the latter attacked convoy HX 84, with our new cruiser sustaining weather damage to her foc’sle in the rough North Atlantic.
Nominated for duty in the Mediterranean Fleet with the rest of the 15th CS, Bonaventure put in for repair at Rosyth and was then assigned to escort the slow Middle East military Convoy WS (Winston Special) 5A, its 18 transports packed with 40,000 troops, from UK ports to the Suez. WS5A started leaving on 18/19 December and by Christmas Eve was some 700 miles West of Spain’s Cape Finisterre, where they stumbled across the bruising 18,000-ton German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper on her Operation Nordseetour raid.
Not what you want to see chasing you if you are a British light cruiser.
While the convoy had two carriers attached (Furious and Argus), they only had a bare handful of two Swordfish of 825 NAS and three Skuas of 801 NAS available for ASW duties; the rest of their hangars and decks were packed with aircraft being ferried to Takoradi in Ghana.
That left the primary line of defense against Hipper in the hands of the County-class heavy cruiser HMS Berwick, our Bonaventure, and the old 4,000-ton Danae-class light cruiser Dunedin. While Berwick carried eight 8″/50s and went some 13,000 tons, her armor was thin. Likewise, Dunedin carried slow 6″/45 Mk XIIs, which had been all but replaced in RN service.
Hipper had made contact with the convoy with her DeTe radar at some 23km out late on Christmas Eve. Closing to 6,600 meters unseen, she attempted an unsuccessful three-fish long-range night torpedo attack at 0153 on Christmas, then closed for a gun action at 0639 in a heavy gale with whitecaps. Over the next 36 minutes, Berwick and Bonaventure fought Hipper at long range, with Dunedin laying smoke and the convoy dispersed, the weather dropping visibility to less than a mile. The Brits used Hipper’s gun flashes as an aiming point, with the German boogeyman turning to retire.
Berwick got the worst of the encounter, hit by at least four of Hipper’s 8-inch AP shells (which, for the most part, passed right through the ship), knocking out her X turret, killing four of her crew, and sending her to the yard for seven months. Hipper also landed an 8-inch shell on the liner/transport Empire Trooper (ex-German Cap Norte, 13,994 GRT), having fired 174 shells in the encounter, and a 4.1-inch DP shell hit on the freighter Arabistan (5,874 GRT). Hipper made Brest on 27 December.
For Bonaventure’s part, she fired a “prodigious amount of 5.25in shell,” some 438 rounds, from her forward six guns in 24 minutes at Hipper, who came away with no damage. I mean, that is probably understandable for the low visibility and heavy seas of the encounter, and her performance was mirrored by sisters Cleopatra and Euryalus, who fired 868 and 421 5.25-inch shells at the Battle of Second Sirte in 1942 and hit as many Italian ships as Bonaventure did Germans on Christmas ’40.
Sent to look for the damaged Empire Trooper-– which she located– Bonaventure got something of a consolation prize by encountering the 8,300-ton German blockade runner Baden on Boxing Day, sending the HAPAG freighter to the bottom via torpedo– as the weather conditions did not allow boarding– about 325 nautical miles northeast of Ponta Delgada in the Azores. All 39 crew members were rescued and taken to Gibraltar, with their skipper, Capt. Max Schaefer, reporting on the three-day ride on the cruiser: “The accommodation on board was very primitive, but the food was plentiful and good.”
The HAPAG steamer Baden was sent to the bottom by Bonaventure while coming from Tenerife and bound for occupied France.
January 1941 saw Bonaventure outbound from Gibraltar and involved in the periphery of Operation Ration, the interdiction of a four-ship Vichy convoy off Oran. Then came convoy ops in the Med to Malta (Operations Excess and Operation MC 4) with our cruiser generally credited with shooting down at least one (and up to three) attacking Italian Savoia bombers on the 9th.
By February, she was operating from Suda Bay with other cruisers of CS15 and took part in Operation Abstention, the failed commando raid on the Italian island of Casteloriso (Castelelorizo).
Dido-class cruiser HMS Bonaventure steaming at high speed in the Med, early 1941
March saw her with Force C, supporting Convoy MW 6 to Malta, where she survived a near miss from a German bomber, just narrowly missing the Battle of Cape Matapan.
Returning to Alexandria, Bonaventure joined Force A at sea on the 29th to escort another convoy, GA 8, from Piraeus, Greece. The convoy heading from Greece to Alexandria with the transports HMS Breconshire and Cameronia, along with the destroyers HMAS Stuart, HMS Griffin, and HMS Hereward, was soon being bird-dogged by Italian submarines.
Bonaventure came away from a night attack mounted by the Italian Adua-class submarine Dagabur (TV Domenico Romano) at 2037 on 30 March, with both of the sub’s fired torpedoes missing at 3,000 meters.
Our cruiser was not as lucky, just six hours later, when the Italian Perla-class coastal submarine Ambra (TV Mario Arillo) came across her while about 100 nm south-south-east of Crete.
Via Uboat.net:
At 0237 hours, Ambra was proceeding on the surface when, from the bridge, S.T.V. Ignazio Spinale observed a shadow in the mist at a distance of 2,000 meters, followed by another at about 1,000 meters.
At 0244 hours, three torpedoes were fired from bow tubes at 4-second intervals. After a lapse of time, T.V. Arillo thought the torpedoes had missed. He was about to order the firing of more torpedoes when a double explosion was observed. He immediately gave orders to crash-dive. ASDIC pings (described as “Hastings” in the Italian report) were heard, and many depth charges followed, but the submarine escaped.
Bonaventure sank in six minutes, taking 139 souls with her, including her XO, CDR Disbrowe. Stuart and Hereward heaved to and picked up 310 survivors. She was the third of HM’s cruisers taken out of action in the last week of March in the region.
The cruiser is often billed as the largest warship sunk by Italian submarines in WWII.
She was in the first batch of a staggering 206 Allied vessels lost in the Eastern Med during the Greek/Crete campaign and its follow-on evacuation between 28 March and 1 June.
Bonaventure’s slayer: the 600-ton. 197-foot Italian Perla-class coastal submarine Ambra. She was knocked out of service by RAF Wellingtons in 1943 and sent to the bottom for good by USAAF B-17s the following year
Of Bonaventure’s sisters, Charybdis, Hermione, Spartan, and Naiad were all lost during the conflict. Classmate HMS Scylla was badly damaged by a mine in June 1944 and was never repaired.
Epilogue
Our ship and her lost men are remembered by The Wartime Memories Project in the UK and For Posterity’s Sake in Canada, as at least two of her final complement hailed from the RCN/RCNVR.
Bonaventure’s only skipper, Jack Egerton, survived his ship. He continued in the cruiser trade, going on to command the familiar Berwick from Admiral Hipper fame while escorting convoys to North Russia, was named an ADC to the King, and ended the war as Senior British Officer in Russia then later became Captain in Charge, Singapore/Malaya with a CB on his chest before moving to the Retired List in 1948, capping 39 years in uniform. VADM Henry Jack Egerton, C.B., RN, passed in Coxwold in 1972, aged 80, and is buried in St Helen and the Holy Cross Churchyard in North Yorkshire with his wife. His eldest son. LT Edward Gervase Egerton, RN, was killed in action at Dieppe in 1942, aged 22. His younger son, Col. Christopher Charles “Kit” Egerton, M.C., passed in 1970, a former commander of the 15th/19th Hussars.
Captain E J Egerton, RN, as seen aboard Bonaventure, May 1940. By Beadle, IWM (A 1737).
The final Bonaventure (F139), the command and depot ship for the newly formed X/XE-craft of the 14th Submarine Flotilla, entered service in 1943 and, by extension, went on to be the most decorated ship in the fleet, her submariners earning no less than 4 VCs, 3 CBEs, 11 DSOs, a OBE, 10 MBEs, 17 DSCs, 6 CGMs, 12 BSMs, 4 BEMs, and over 100 MiDs from her deck during WWII. She returned to commercial service in 1948 and was scrapped in 1963.
HMS Bonaventure, Xcraft mothership, IWM 30564
Somehow, the RN has not seen fit to recycle the name.
Thanks for reading!
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
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