After completion was sent to the China station where she was deployed on the Yangtse River to relieve the Insect-class gunboat HMS Gnat.

Near the end of the Battle of Singapore, she evacuated the base on 11 February together with her sister ship HMS Dragonfly.

Grasshopper was laid down on 29 December 1937[1] by John I. Thornycroft & Company at Woolston, Southampton,[3] and launched on 19 January 1939.

Part of Gnat's crew transferred to Grasshopper, including the ship's mascot, a dog called Judy.

On 8 February, the Japanese launched an amphibious assault across the Strait of Johore and following heavy fighting, many ships began evacuating from the harbour.

[14] The crew were ferried across to the nearby island of Sebayer by the ship's boats while the Japanese aircraft strafed them,[16] where they joined some survivors from the Dragonfly.

[18] Whilst on board, Petty Officer George White found Judy, who would later find a source of fresh water for the crew on the island.

[19] On 19 February, the remaining crew managed to commandeer a Chinese tongkang and using that and the ship's boat,[17][20] they reached Singkep in the Dutch East Indies.

After two days, the crew departed for Sumatra on a Chinese junk, leaving their injured in the care of the Dutch Empire.

They were Petty Officer George White and Able Seaman "Tancy" Lee, who were joined by one of the evacuees from the Royal Naval Reserve and two British Army soldiers who were already on Singkep.

[23] They were subsequently offered a boat by the island's administrator, and a map of the Indian Ocean torn from a child's atlas.

[29] This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.