Three previous commanding officers will attend the 60th birthday party laid on for HMS Cavalier, Britain’s sole surviving World War II destroyer, at Chatham Historic Dockyard on May 2.

Capt John Hope (CO 1959-60), Rear Admiral Gwynedd Pritchard (1960-61) and Rear Admiral John Hervey (1966-67) will join Countess Mountbatten of Burma on the dais for the salute on what is set to be a ‘mini Navy Days’.

This will begin with a performance by the RN Lynx (Black Cats) helicopter display team and climax with a separately-ticketed Tattoo at 6pm, with the combined Bands of the Royal Marines and Royal Engineers.

Cavalier Association guests, also including First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Alan West, will first attend a special Sunday Service in the Royal Dockyard Church.

Launched at J. Samuel White’s Cowes yard, Cavalier was not commissioned until the end of 1944, and so saw only a few months of active service in European waters.

That included escorting Arctic convoy RA64, which was generally reckoned to have met with the worst weather experienced on the Murmansk run, and led to her sole Battle Honour – Arctic 1945.

Despatched to the Far East at the end of the war, she became involved in the political upheavals which followed the Japanese surrender, though there were no Battle Honours to be awarded in the vital but thankless tasks of helping to restore order in places where a British presence was not always welcome.

All Cavalier’s later commissions, except her last, were spent in the Far East – using the bases of Singapore and Hong Kong – with occasional trips elsewhere, mainly to Australia and New Zealand, and participation in the controversial nuclear bomb tests at Christmas Island in the Pacific.

The greater part of her last tour of duty was spent in home waters.

Over the decades her appearance changed substantially from that of her wartime design, and although by the 1960s she was getting long in the tooth, she showed she was not past it when she took part in a much-publicised, full-power race against the frigate HMS Rapid, winning by a short head to be acclaimed as the fastest major warship in the Fleet.