HMS Colne
1905 River-class destroyer
HMS Colne was a Thornycroft Type River class destroyer ordered by the Royal Navy under the 1903–1904 Naval Estimates. Named after the River Colne in eastern England, north east of London, she was the first ship to carry this name in the Royal Navy.
Construction
She was laid down on 21 March 1904 at the John I. Thornycroft & Company shipyard at Chiswick and launched on 21 May 1905. She was completed in July 1905. Her original armament was to be the same as the Turleback torpedo boat destroyers that preceded her. In 1906 the Admiralty decided to upgrade the armament by landing the five 6-pounder naval guns and shipping three 12-pounder 8 hundredweight (cwt) guns. Two would be mounted abeam at the fo'c's'le break and the third gun would be mounted on the quarterdeck.
Pre-War
After commissioning she was assigned to the East Coast Destroyer Flotilla of the 1st Fleet and based at Harwich.
On 11 April 1907, Colne and the destroyer Falcon collided in the Channel, badly damaging both ships.
On 27 April 1908 the Eastern Flotilla departed Harwich for live fire and night manoeuvres.
The public source identifies “HMS Colne” as 1905 River-class destroyer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Colne, River-class and destroyer.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5631921. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1903, 1904, 1905 and 1906.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Colne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.