Peter Schofield’s North Wales listing of Warship Week adoptions throws up a real mystery – namely, the question of what happened in Merionethshire. The Imperial War Museum has a Welsh-language poster encouraging fund-raising for a Warship Week in 21-28 March 1942, the aim being to raise £500,000 for a destroyer to be named HMS Meirionydd – although in reality, this would presumably have had the English spelling, Merioneth. However, no such ship was ever built; the poster shows one of the fifty old ‘four stack’ destroyers transferred from the US Navy in 1940, but these had all been named and commissioned long before. Merionethshire actually seems to have sponsored HMS Celt, a new destroyer ordered in 1942, but this ship was later renamed Sword as part of the new Weapon-class, and was never actually completed, being scrapped on the slipway at the end of the war without even being launched. So the question of what happened to the money raised in Merionethshire remains a mystery.

HMS Montgomery, one of the ex-US Navy ‘four stacker’ destroyers transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend Lease in 1940