HMS Amaranthus (K17): The Corvette That Guarded West Africa's Convoy Routes

Built on the Clyde

HMS Amaranthus was built by Fleming and Ferguson at Paisley, ordered on 21 September 1939, laid down on 4 May 1940, launched that October, and commissioned on 12 February 1941, a fairly typical Flower-class corvette of just under a thousand tons, armed with a single 4-inch gun and depth charges, and built for the unglamorous, essential work of keeping merchant convoys safe from U-boats.

The yard is worth a paragraph, because it was not a warship builder and it shows. Fleming and Ferguson were set up at Paisley in 1877 by William Fleming and Peter Ferguson to build marine steam engines, took over the Phoenix yard there in 1885, and over the next eight decades put well over five hundred vessels into the water. Almost none of them were fighting ships. Their trade was dredgers, hoppers, lighters and floating cranes, the unloved plant that keeps harbours open, and they had a particular speciality in what were called kit ships: vessels built at Paisley, taken apart, shipped out in pieces and reassembled wherever they were wanted. Hold on to that, because it has a bearing on the strangest job Amaranthus was ever given.

The firm has an odd afterlife too. In 1903 the Ferguson family walked out of the partnership and set up on their own at Port Glasgow as Ferguson Brothers, which is the direct ancestor of the yard that is still there and still, at intervals, in the newspapers. The Paisley works went on building corvettes, frigates and landing craft right through the Second World War, was bought by an American firm in 1964 and closed in 1969. Its last ship was a suction dredger, which is a fittingly unromantic full stop for a yard that spent ninety years making the things nobody photographs.

A War Spent on the West African Run

After working up off Tobermory in early 1941, Amaranthus spent the bulk of her war on the long, often overlooked convoy routes connecting Britain to West and southern Africa, a theatre that saw less glamour than the North Atlantic but no less genuine danger.

Freetown deserves explaining, because it was one of the great hinges of the war at sea and almost nobody has heard of it. Ships carrying cargo home from South America, Africa and the Indian Ocean sailed independently as far as Sierra Leone, and there they were gathered into an SL convoy for the last three and a half thousand miles to Liverpool. At the peak there could be two hundred ships lying in that harbour at once. Outbound convoys, the OS series, ran the other way, and an escort group would take one south and bring the next one north, which is why Amaranthus's record reads as an endless alternation of the same two letters.

The resources for it were thin to the point of comedy. The whole South Atlantic Command had one destroyer flotilla, five sloops and something like two dozen corvettes to cover an ocean. And the station itself did a good deal of the damage without any German help at all. The heat and humidity were relentless, the fresh water ashore was polluted, and tropical disease was endemic to the point that the depot ship Edinburgh Castle and the hospital ship were anchored as far out in the harbour as could be managed simply to keep clear of it. The three men from Phoebe who died of malaria after she was torpedoed tell you more about the West African station than any convoy number does.

She escorted Convoy OG 58 to Gibraltar in April 1941, through May and June that year worked the Freetown convoys SL 74 and SL 76, escorted Convoy SL 80 that July, and took part in the substantial troop convoys WS 10X and WS 12 bound for Suez and Africa later that year.

The WS convoys need explaining, because those two letters cover one of the largest and least celebrated logistical efforts Britain made in the whole war. The initials are generally taken to stand for Winston's Special, the first of them having been put together on the Prime Minister's explicit instructions after France fell in June 1940. The problem they answered was brutally simple: Egypt and India had to be reinforced, the Mediterranean was shut, and Britain was expecting to be invaded herself. The only route left was round the Cape, and it was thirteen thousand miles long.

So they assembled on the Clyde, the only anchorage in the country big enough to hold them, and went south. Freetown was where they took on fuel and water, which is precisely why a West Africa corvette kept finding herself alongside a column of ocean liners full of soldiers. From there the convoys split between Cape Town and Durban, the Suez ships dispersing at Perim and the India ships carrying on east. Each converted liner held between two and four thousand men, and whole divisions went that way with their guns and vehicles. Somewhere well over two million servicemen made the passage in the WS convoys and their successors between 1940 and 1945. The historian who catalogued them, Arnold Hague, gave the verdict that matters: the most startling fact about the troop convoys of the Second World War is what a non-event they were. Almost nothing got at them. That is not because the ocean was safe. It is because ships like Amaranthus were in the way, and the same run is followed from another Flower's deck in the article on HMS Anchusa (K186).

In 1942 she continued in much the same vein, escorting Convoys WS 21 and WS 23 from the UK to East Africa, and taking part in Convoy CF 7 that October.

Coming to a Cruiser's Defence

Amaranthus's sharpest moment of action came on 23 October 1942, off Pointe Noire on the Congo coast, when the German submarine U-161 struck the cruiser HMS Phoebe with two torpedoes, tearing a hole some 60 feet by 30 feet in her hull and killing around 60 of her crew, with three more later dying of malaria as Phoebe nursed her way roughly 10,000 miles to New York for repairs that were not finished until the following June.

Amaranthus, then under the command of Lieutenant Walter Smith Thomson, came up from harbour and attacked U-161 in Phoebe's defence, preventing the U-boat from finishing the cruiser off entirely, a properly useful intervention even though the corvette's own small size meant she was never going to be the one delivering the decisive blow in such an engagement.

It is worth being clear about what a corvette could and could not do, because it is a point that is very easily undersold. A Flower made sixteen knots, which is fractionally slower than a Type VII on the surface. She was therefore never going to run one down and sink it. What she could do was force it under, hold it there with asdic and depth charges, and make it impossible for the submarine to get into a firing position again. U-161 had put two torpedoes into Phoebe and needed only to stay where she was to finish the job. Amaranthus came out and made staying where she was impossible. That is the whole trade.

The submarine had a reputation, and it was for exactly this sort of impudence. Under Kapitänleutnant Albrecht Achilles, U-161 had spent early 1942 making a nuisance of herself in the Caribbean in a way nobody thought a submarine could. On 19 February she went in through the narrow Bocas at periscope depth in daylight, sat on the bottom of the Gulf of Paria all day, surfaced after dark and torpedoed two merchant ships lying at anchor off Port of Spain. Three weeks later she did much the same thing inside the harbour at Castries in St Lucia. Attacking a cruiser off the Congo coast was the same habit exercised on a different continent. Her luck ran out on 27 September 1943, when an American Mariner flying boat of squadron VP-74 caught her in the South Atlantic and sank her with all fifty-three men aboard.

The following month she was assigned to anti-blockade runner patrol duties in the mid-Atlantic, and in 1943 escorted the floating dock AFD 24 from Trinidad to Freetown, an unusual but practically important towing job, before rounding out her war with anti-submarine exercises off Lough Foyle that September.

The floating dock deserves more than a clause, because of what it was for. A floating dock is a dry dock you can tow: flood it, float a damaged ship into it, pump it out, and the ship is high and dry with her bottom exposed, anywhere you have managed to put the dock. Freetown had nothing of the kind, which is precisely why Phoebe had to crawl ten thousand miles to New York with a hole sixty feet long in her side rather than being repaired where she was hit. Bringing AFD 24 down from Trinidad to Freetown fixed that, and it is quietly one of the more consequential things Amaranthus did, even if towing a dock across an ocean sounds like the least warlike job in the Navy.

Four different officers held command of Amaranthus over the course of the war: Lieutenant Nicholas Bryan John Stapleton from her commissioning until August 1941, Walter Smith Thomson through the Phoebe action and beyond until June 1943, William Godfrey Pardoe-Matthews until November 1944, and finally John Maurice Baldry, who saw her through to the end of her active service.

A Quiet Retirement

Amaranthus was sold in 1946 and converted into a merchant vessel, continuing in commercial service for several more years before finally being scrapped at Hong Kong in 1953, closing out a career built almost entirely around the patient, unglamorous business of keeping distant convoy routes safe, punctuated by one sharp moment coming to a cruiser's aid off the West African coast.

There is a small joke buried in her name that the Admiralty almost certainly did not intend. The amaranth of the classical world was the flower that never withers; the Greek amarantos means unfading, and Milton put an immortal amarant in Paradise Lost as the flower that grows in heaven and does not die. The Admiralty was simply working through a list of plants, having decided that corvettes would be named after flowers so that a merchant captain could tell the escort was British without being told. What it produced, in this case, was a ship named for immortality that fought a war on the least fashionable convoy route in the world, escorted a floating dock across an ocean, saved a cruiser, spent seven years as a merchantman and was cut up at Hong Kong in 1953. The flower does not fade. The corvette very much did, and the work she did lasted rather longer than she did.