Two ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Laforey, after Admiral Sir Francis Laforey:
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by the English kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years War against the Kingdom of France. The modern Royal Navy traces its origins to the early 16th century; the oldest of the UK's armed services, it is known as the Senior Service.
Admiral Sir Francis Laforey, 2nd Baronet, KCB was an officer of the British Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, whose distinguished service record included numerous frigate commands in Home waters and in the West Indies. He is best known however for his service in command of the ship of the line Spartiate at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. During the action, Laforey was heavily engaged and his ship suffered heavy casualties. Five years after Trafalgar, Laforey was promoted to rear-admiral and commanded the Leeward Islands squadron, before retiring in 1814.
- HMS Laforey (1913) was a Laforey-class destroyer. She was previously named HMS Florizel, but was renamed before being launched in 1913. She was sunk by a mine in 1917.
- HMS Laforey (G99) was an L-class destroyer, launched in 1941 and sunk in 1944.
HMS Laforey was the lead ship of her class of destroyer built for the Royal Navy. Launched a year before the First World War began, she was attached to the Dover Patrol. Laforey saw action in several engagements with German torpedo boats, including the Battle off Noordhinder Bank and the Action of 17 March 1917. Laforey was sunk in 1917 by a British mine after escorting several freighters to France. She was named for Francis Laforey, captain of HMS Spartiate at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The Laforey class was a class of 22 torpedo boat destroyers of the Royal Navy, twenty of which were built under the Naval Programme of 1912–13 and a further two under the War Emergency Programme of 1914. As such they were the last pre-war British destroyer design. All served during World War I during which three were lost; the survivors were all scrapped in 1921-23.
In naval terminology, a destroyer is a fast, maneuverable long-endurance warship intended to escort larger vessels in a fleet, convoy or battle group and defend them against smaller powerful short-range attackers. They were originally developed in the late 19th century by Fernando Villaamil for the Spanish Navy as a defense against torpedo boats, and by the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, these "torpedo boat destroyers" (TBDs) were "large, swift, and powerfully armed torpedo boats designed to destroy other torpedo boats". Although the term "destroyer" had been used interchangeably with "TBD" and "torpedo boat destroyer" by navies since 1892, the term "torpedo boat destroyer" had been generally shortened to simply "destroyer" by nearly all navies by the First World War.
  | This article includes a list of ships with the same or similar names. If an internal link for a specific ship led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended ship article, if one exists. |
