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.

Belfast is worth a moment. Harland and Wolff was a yard built for ocean liners, the firm that had produced Olympic and Titanic, and the war turned it into a factory for very small escorts, thirty-four Flowers among a great deal else. It was also a target. Within weeks of Anchusa commissioning the Luftwaffe came to Belfast in the raids of April and May 1941, which fell heavily on the docks and the yards as well as the city, and killed around a thousand people. She got out of the Lagan just ahead of all that.

The scale of what that yard did in those years is difficult to take in. Alongside the thirty-four Flowers, Harland and Wolff delivered six aircraft carriers, two cruisers, one of them HMS Belfast, and a hundred and thirty-one other warships: destroyers, minesweepers, tankers, landing craft, whatever was needed that month. On top of the new building, more than twenty-two thousand naval and merchant vessels passed through the yard for repair or modification over the course of the war. Something like thirty-five thousand people worked there. Queen's Island in 1941 was not a shipyard so much as an industrial city with a war to fight, and Anchusa was one small product of it, laid down in September 1940 and at sea by the following March.

She got out just in time, and the ships that did not are worth naming. The docks raid on the night of 7 and 8 April 1941 put parachute mines directly over the yard; the Easter Tuesday raid a week later was the worst night Belfast had; and the fire raid of 4 and 5 May did more physical damage to Harland and Wolff than any single raid did to any other British shipyard in the entire war. Ships lying alongside and on the slips were hit. One of them was another Flower-class corvette, HMS Bryony, struck on 15 April while fitting out and left effectively sunk at her own berth a month after her launch; she was salvaged and rebuilt, and her story is in the article on HMS Bryony (K192). Anchusa had commissioned on 1 March and was already gone. Five weeks either way and her story would have been a very short one.

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. She carried a crew of around 96.

The Hedgehog is the detail in that list that deserves explaining, because it solved a problem that had been quietly losing the Royal Navy submarines for two years. Asdic looks forward and downward. A depth charge attack means running over the top of the submarine and rolling charges off the stern, which means that for the last few hundred yards of the run-in the ship has lost contact and is attacking a position rather than a target, and the charges then take further time to sink to the set depth. That gap is called blind time, and a good submarine commander spends it turning hard and changing depth.

Hedgehog got round it by throwing the weapons forward instead. Twenty-four bombs fired from a bank of spigots, landing in a circle roughly three hundred yards ahead of the ship, while the asdic operator still has the target squarely on his set. They were contact-fused, so nothing happened unless one of them actually hit, which had the further virtue that a miss left the water clear rather than filled with bubbles and false echoes that blinded the ship for the next twenty minutes. The figures at the end of the war were stark: something like one Hedgehog attack in five produced a kill, against fewer than one in eighty for depth charges.

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.

The alphabet soup in her record is worth decoding, because it maps her whole war. SL meant a homeward convoy from Sierra Leone, OS an outward one going the other way, KMS a convoy running into the Mediterranean, and WS a Winston Special, one of the heavily escorted troop convoys that carried whole formations of the British Army round the Cape because the Mediterranean was too dangerous to use. Freetown, the assembly point at the middle of all of it, is described in more detail in the account of HMS Amaranthus, another Flower on the same run. The short version is that the station was hot, unhealthy and thinly resourced, and that a great deal of the war depended on it.

One entry stands out as genuinely odd. Escorting HMS Severn from Freetown to Gibraltar meant escorting a submarine, and not a small one: Severn was a River-class boat, among the largest the Royal Navy ever built, designed to run on the surface at high speed with the fleet. A submarine on passage is at its most vulnerable on the surface and cannot easily prove to anybody that it is friendly, which is why one occasionally travelled with a corvette in company. A ship built to hunt submarines spending a fortnight looking after one is the sort of thing that happens in a real war and never in a diagram of one.

She closed out 1943 with further convoy escort duty on SL 141 and OS 61/KMS 35 between Gibraltar and Freetown, and carried the same routine into the new year with OS 65/KMS 39 in January and February 1944 and Convoy SL 149 that same month, a remarkably relentless schedule of exactly the kind of patient, essential convoy protection that defined most corvettes' entire wartime careers.

Five different officers held command of Anchusa in turn over her four years in commission, from her first captain, Temporary Lieutenant Philipp Everett-Price, through to Temporary Lieutenant Raymond Archilles Baker, who saw her through from October 1943 until she paid off in the middle of 1945, a turnover typical of a wartime corvette fleet that was constantly training up new escort commanders as the Battle of the Atlantic ground on.

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 two merchant names are worth setting side by side with her naval one. Anchusa is a garden plant, alkanet, chosen because the Flower class took the names of its ships from flowers, which reads as charming until you notice how well a modest name sits in a casualty list. Silverlord and Sir Edgar are the names of a working cargo ship with an owner to impress. The hull underneath was the same one throughout, and it kept going for nineteen years after she was launched, which for a vessel designed and built in a hurry in 1940 is a considerable compliment to the men at Queen's Island.

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.