HMS Anchusa (K186): Four Years on the West African Convoy Run

One of Belfast's Wartime Fleet

HMS Anchusa was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, part of a wave of 34 Flower-class corvettes constructed in Northern Ireland under the Royal Navy's crash wartime building programme. Ordered on 8 April 1940, laid down that September, launched on 15 January 1941, and commissioned on 1 March 1941, she was a fairly typical example of the class, just under 1,000 tons, carrying a 102mm gun, six 20mm cannon, and the anti-submarine tools of her trade, including a Hedgehog mortar capable of launching contact-detonating projectiles at a submerged U-boat well ahead of the ship itself, rather than having to pass directly overhead as older depth charge attacks required.

The Long West African Run

Anchusa spent much of her war on the demanding, unglamorous convoy routes linking Britain to West Africa and the Mediterranean. In May 1941 she escorted HMS Severn from Freetown to Gibraltar and took part in the Convoy SL 74 escort, and that autumn worked as part of the escort for the substantial troop convoy WS 12, including local escort duties out of Freetown and protecting detached vessels such as HMS Royal Ulsterman.

In early 1943 she took on the more specialised task of escorting submarines, including the Polish submarine ORP Dzik and HMS Trident, between Holy Loch and Lerwick, before returning to major convoy work through the middle of that year: Convoy OS 50 and KMS 17G toward Gibraltar and Freetown in June, the large Convoy SL 133 from Freetown in July, and the combined Mediterranean-bound Convoy OS 53 and KMS 23 that August. She closed out 1943 with further convoy escort duty on SL 141 and OS 61/KMS 35 between Gibraltar and Freetown, a genuinely relentless schedule of exactly the kind of patient, essential convoy protection that defined most corvettes' entire wartime careers.

A Restless Retirement

Anchusa was decommissioned by October 1945 and sold the following year, going on to a merchant career under two separate names, Silverlord from 1949 and Sir Edgar from 1954. Her civilian life ended on 18 January 1960, when she was lost, though her wreck was later salvaged and finally scrapped in Mauritius, bringing an unusually far-flung close to a career that had begun in wartime Belfast and spent years shuttling along the West African coast before eventually settling, in pieces, on the other side of the Indian Ocean.