HMS Abelia (K184): The Flower Class Corvette Named After a Shrub

Someone in the Admiralty had a sense of humour, or possibly none at all, when they decided that the Royal Navy's new class of anti-submarine escorts would be named after flowers. Not battles, not admirals, not fearsome mythological beasts: flowers. 

HMS Abelia, commissioned in 1941, was named after a small flowering shrub, and spent the next four years being shot at, depth-charging U-boats, and shepherding merchant convoys through some of the worst weather the North Atlantic could produce. It is hard to imagine a less floral way to spend a war.

The shrub has a suitably nautical backstory of its own. Abelia is named for Clarke Abel, the naturalist who sailed with Lord Amherst's embassy to China in 1816 and came home with a substantial collection of Chinese plants, very nearly all of which went to the bottom on 18 February 1817 when HMS Alceste struck an uncharted reef in the Gaspar Strait. Abel and the other survivors then spent a fortnight ashore holding off some sixty boatloads of Malay pirates while the wreck burned. The only specimens that lived were a duplicate set he had handed to Sir George Staunton before sailing, which were returned to him afterwards and described by the botanist Robert Brown, who named the genus in his honour. The Royal Navy therefore ended up naming a warship after a plant that only bears that name because a Royal Navy frigate was wrecked. Naval nomenclature rarely repays this much digging.

The Flower class corvette itself was never meant to be glamorous. These were small, cheap, mass-producible corvettes, built quickly and in large numbers to plug an urgent gap in convoy escort capacity, and Abelia was very much a working example of the type: unremarkable to look at, thoroughly unpleasant to serve on in heavy seas, and quietly indispensable to keeping Britain fed and supplied.

Built by Harland & Wolff

Abelia was ordered on 8 April 1940 and laid down on 19 August that year at Harland & Wolff's yard in Belfast (yard number 1095), the same yard that had built the Titanic a generation earlier, though nobody involved seems to have drawn the comparison at the time. She was launched on 28 November 1940 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 3 February 1941.

She displaced 925 long tons on a hull 205 feet long, with a 33 foot beam and an 11 foot 6 inch draught.

Under the bonnet, Flower class corvettes were charmingly old-fashioned even by 1941 standards: Abelia was driven by a single shaft powered by a four-cylinder triple-expansion reciprocating steam engine, essentially the same technology found in a merchant trawler, producing 2,750 indicated horsepower from two coal-fired Scotch boilers. 

This was entirely deliberate. The whole point of the class was that shipyards without experience of building sophisticated warships could turn them out quickly using well understood, unglamorous engineering.

She carried a complement of around 85 officers and ratings, and had an operational range of roughly 3,500 nautical miles at 12 knots.

For weapons, she carried a single 4-inch gun forward, a scattering of .50 and .303 calibre machine guns, and the tools of her actual trade: two depth charge throwers and rails carrying up to 40 depth charges, backed up over time by SW1C/2C radar and Type 123A and 127DV sonar to help her actually find something to drop them on.

The North Atlantic Grind

Commissioning is one thing; being any use is another. Abelia went from Belfast to Tobermory, the Hebridean anchorage where the Royal Navy worked up its new escorts under Commodore Gilbert Stephenson, a man remembered by a generation of reservists as the Terror of Tobermory. On 17 and 18 February 1941 she was out in the Sound with her sister corvette HMS Azalea, exercising against the elderly training submarine HMS H 50 and learning the one skill that actually mattered: finding something that did not want to be found.

Under her first commanding officer, Temporary Lieutenant Frank Ardern RNR, who held command from her commissioning until May 1943, HMS Abelia's war was, for the most part, not made of dramatic single actions but of relentless, exhausting repetition: shepherding convoys back and forth across an ocean that wanted to kill everyone involved, with or without help from the Germans. 

Through 1941 she worked convoy after convoy, including HG 57 from Gibraltar to the UK, the large Halifax convoy HX 121, which lost three tankers and a transport to U-boat attack, HX 132 and the merged SC 34, and HX 148, a convoy of more than sixty merchant ships that ran into thick fog and suffered collisions and casualties without a single U-boat needing to fire a shot.

By the autumn of 1941 she had a berth in the 2nd Escort Group at Londonderry, alongside the destroyers Douglas, Leamington, Saladin, Sherwood, Skate and Veteran and the corvettes Anemone and Veronica. Derry stayed her home for most of the war, and the logs of the Navy's training submarines record her turning up off Lough Foyle over and over again to practise: against HMS H 44 in June 1941 and again that October, H 50 in September, H 43 the following February, H 32 in August 1942, H 34 that December, and on through 1943 and 1944. Anti-submarine work was a perishable skill. A corvette that stopped practising was a corvette that missed.

This was the unglamorous reality of corvette life: long stretches of grinding boredom and violent seasickness, punctuated by moments of real terror, all in a ship barely large enough to keep her crew dry. Nobody wrote adventure novels about escorting HX 148 through fog.

But convoys like it were the entire reason Britain stayed fed, fuelled and in the war, and ships like Abelia were the reason the convoys got through at all.

Not all of it was convoy work either. A Royal Navy official photographer caught her lying at Hvalfjord in Iceland in 1942, and the Imperial War Museum's caption for the picture records exactly what she had been doing: she had just come in from a patrol in the North Atlantic in search of the German battleship Tirpitz. What a 925-ton corvette with a single 4-inch gun was supposed to do had she actually found her is a question best left politely unexamined.

South to the Mediterranean

Before that, in December 1942 and January 1943, she escorted the convoy HX 220 across the Atlantic, one more transatlantic crossing before her posting changed for good. By the summer of 1943, HMS Abelia's war had moved south, escorting convoys through the Mediterranean rather than across the grey Atlantic.

She worked the combined convoy OG 91 and KMS 22 from Gibraltar through to Alexandria, then MKS 21G and MKS 25G running back and forth between Gibraltar and the UK, and KMS 30, another substantial Mediterranean convoy that autumn, followed by OS 60/KMS 34 and SL 142/MKS 33 as the year drew to a close.

It was, in its own way, no less demanding a posting, trading Atlantic gales for Axis aircraft and a considerably more crowded stretch of water.

1943 was a year of changing faces on her bridge. Frank Ardern, who had commissioned her and held command for over two years, handed over on 5 May to Lieutenant Francis Everett RNR, who lasted until 27 July, when Lieutenant Robert Floris of the Royal New Zealand Naval Reserve took her on, before Acting Lieutenant Commander Orme Stuart of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve arrived on 24 November. Across her entire war Abelia had six commanding officers and not one of them was a regular Royal Navy officer: three RNR, one RNZNR, one RCNVR and one RNVR. That is not a footnote. That is the Battle of the Atlantic in miniature, fought in very large part by merchant seamen, weekend sailors and Commonwealth volunteers, in ships nobody in the peacetime Navy had particularly wanted to build.

The Night the Torpedo Doctrine Failed

HMS Abelia's sharpest brush with disaster came on 9 January 1944, while escorting the convoy OS 64/KMS 38 and under the command of Acting Lieutenant Commander Orme Gordon Stuart of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, who had taken command the previous November and would remain in post until the following July.

The convoy had already been in a fight. OS 64 and KMS 38 had assembled off Oversay on 4 January, and by the 6th the escorts knew a U-boat was in company. On the evening of the 8th the frigate HMS Bayntun and the Canadian corvette HMCS Camrose ran down U-757 and sank her with eight depth charge attacks over two hours, at 50 degrees 33 minutes north, 18 degrees 03 minutes west. Abelia was hit the next day at roughly 50 north, 18 west, which is to say within about thirty miles of the same patch of empty ocean. Killing one shadower had not meant there was only one.

She detected a U-boat and closed in to attack with depth charges, and Stuart, following standard doctrine, increased speed and turned away at a range of around 950 yards to avoid any torpedo the U-boat might fire back at him.

The trouble was that the doctrine he was following had been designed for straight-running torpedoes, and the U-boat he was up against carried the newer T5 acoustic homing torpedo, nicknamed Zaunkönig by the Germans and Gnat by the Allies, which needed evasive action at a much closer range, around 700 yards, because it simply steered itself toward the loudest propeller noise it could hear.

Stuart's manoeuvre, entirely correct against the previous generation of torpedo, left HMS Abelia's propellers churning away at exactly the wrong moment. 

She was hit, lost her rudder, and had to be taken in tow by the rescue tug HMRT Stormking, arriving at Cardiff on 13 January 1944 for repairs, while the U-boat that had done the damage slipped away untouched.

Not every source agrees on the detail. The acoustic torpedo is the explanation most often repeated, but uboat.net, which keeps the standard record of these attacks, still lists the boat that hit her simply as unknown, noting only that U-757 had been shadowing the convoy until she was sunk on the 8th, and that U-731 was attacked by an escort on the 10th and was fortunate to get away.

It is a small but telling illustration of how the underwater war kept shifting the rules faster than the tactics manuals could keep up, and how being correct by the book was sometimes not the same as being safe.

Out of the Convoys and Into the Hunt

By the summer of 1944 her war had changed shape entirely. On 17 August she sailed from Loch Foyle as part of Force 32, a hunting group built around the escort carrier HMS Fencer with the frigates HMS Moorsom and HMS Anguilla and the Norwegian corvettes Acanthus and Rose, to patrol the central North Atlantic between 52 and 55 degrees north and 30 and 34 degrees west, and afterwards the waters off Cape Wrath and the North Minches. Fencer topped her up with fuel at sea on the 19th. This was the other half of the Atlantic war and the half that finally won it: instead of waiting beside a convoy for U-boats to arrive, going out to look for them, with an aircraft carrier to do the looking.

Her last recorded job of any note was about as far from the mid-Atlantic as it is possible to get. On 4 December 1944, under Temporary Lieutenant Roy Parker RNVR, she escorted the submarine HMS Una the short hop from Tobermory round to Oban. She had begun her war at Tobermory, learning to hunt a submarine. She ended it at Tobermory, walking one home.

Life After the Navy

HMS Abelia survived the war, serving out her final months under two more commanding officers, Temporary Lieutenant Donald Hutton RNR and Temporary Lieutenant Roy Parker RNVR, and remained in service until late 1945, after which she went the way of many surplus Flower-class corvettes: sold off rather than scrapped outright, since their simple, seaworthy hulls made them attractive for civilian conversion. 

She was sold in 1947 and re-emerged the following year as the merchant vessel Kraft, before being renamed Arne Skontorp in 1954. She worked under that name for more than a decade before being broken up at Grimstad in Norway in December 1966, a quarter of a century after she first slid down the slipway at Harland & Wolff as a warship named, of all things, after a shrub.