On October 26, 1916, a force of German torpedo boats crossed the English Channel and attacked the Dover Barrage, the line of drifters and mines that blocked the Strait of Dover to German submarines. The Royal Navy scrambled destroyers to intercept.
HMS Nubian, a Tribal-class destroyer of the 6th Flotilla, Dover Patrol, was one of them. During the engagement — known as the Battle of Dover Strait — a torpedo from the German torpedo boat S50 struck Nubian forward. The explosion destroyed her bow completely. The entire section ahead of the bridge was gone.
Nubian didn’t sink. The after bulkheads held, and the crew kept the remaining hull afloat long enough for her to be towed back to port. But as a fighting ship, she was finished. What was left was a destroyer with no front end.
Thirteen days later
On November 8, 1916, HMS Zulu — another Tribal-class destroyer from the same flotilla — struck a mine in the English Channel off the Belgian coast. The detonation ripped her stern apart. The entire after section, including her propellers and rudder, was wrecked.
The crew of Zulu managed to keep the forward section afloat. She was towed to Calais, then eventually back to England. Like Nubian, she would never fight again in her present state. She was a destroyer with no back end.
Now the Royal Navy had two ships from the same class, in the same dockyard, damaged at opposite ends.
The obvious solution
Someone at Chatham Dockyard looked at the two wrecks and did the arithmetic. Nubian had a good stern. Zulu had a good bow. Both were Tribal-class ships, built to the same general specifications.
The idea was straightforward: cut the intact stern section from Nubian and weld it onto the intact bow section from Zulu. One working destroyer from two broken ones.
It wasn’t quite that simple. The two hulls didn’t match exactly. There was a 3.5-inch difference in beam between Zulu’s forward section and Nubian’s after section — about 89 millimeters. Tribal-class destroyers were built by different yards to Admiralty specifications, but individual ships varied in their construction details. The shipwrights at Chatham had to fair the two sections together, tapering the hull plating to bridge the gap.
They managed it. The join was made, the hull sealed, the machinery connected, and the ship refitted.
HMS Zubian
The composite ship was commissioned in June 1917. The Admiralty named her HMS Zubian — a portmanteau of Zulu and Nubian. The crew called her other things. The press called her a “Frankenship,” though that term came later.
Zubian displaced approximately 1,000 tons, carried two 4-inch guns and two torpedo tubes, and could make around 25 knots. She was assigned back to the Dover Patrol, the same command her two parent ships had served.
She wasn’t a curiosity kept in reserve. She was sent straight back to the war.
She sank a U-boat
On February 17, 1918, HMS Zubian and other Dover Patrol vessels detected and attacked the German submarine UC-50 in the English Channel. UC-50 was a Type UC II minelaying submarine operating out of Flanders. Zubian depth-charged the submarine and was credited with the kill. UC-50 went down with her entire crew of 36.
A ship welded together from two wrecks had just killed a submarine.
Ostend and after
In April 1918, Zubian participated in the First Ostend Raid, one of the Royal Navy’s attempts to block the Belgian port of Ostend to deny it to German submarines and torpedo boats. The raid failed to block the harbor — the blockships were sunk in the wrong positions — but Zubian performed her escort duties without incident.
She continued patrol and convoy duties in the Channel for the remaining months of the war. The Armistice came on November 11, 1918. By that point, the composite destroyer had served for a year and a half of active operations.
Sold for scrap
With the war over, the Royal Navy had no use for a hybrid destroyer built from salvaged halves. HMS Zubian was sold for breaking in December 1919 and scrapped. She had served approximately 18 months.
No other Royal Navy ship was ever built this way. The idea of joining two damaged vessels into one was a product of wartime necessity and the specific coincidence of two ships from the same class losing opposite ends within two weeks of each other. The conditions never lined up again.
The name Zubian was never reused by the Royal Navy. Both parent names — Zulu and Nubian — went on to serve on later ships. HMS Zulu and HMS Nubian both appeared again as Tribal-class destroyers in World War II, where both were sunk in the Mediterranean.
Zubian’s hull number was F89. She cost considerably less than a new destroyer and was ready months faster. The 3.5-inch gap in her beam was invisible by the time Chatham was done with her.
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