HMS Bigbury Bay (K606): From Hong Kong Patrols to the Amazon River

A Frigate Built for Air Defence

HMS Bigbury Bay was ordered in January 1943 as a Loch-class frigate under the name Loch Carloway, before the order was changed and she was completed instead as an anti-aircraft frigate of the Bay class.

Built by Hall Russell at Aberdeen, laid down on 30 May 1944, launched that November, and completed on 12 July 1945 under Acting Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Penrose Dickinson, she carried four 4-inch guns alongside Bofors and Oerlikon cannon, a Hedgehog mortar and depth charge rails, a well-armed general-purpose escort for the war's final months.

Hong Kong, and a Difficult Patrol Off Palestine

After sea trials, HMS Bigbury Bay joined the British Pacific Fleet, based in Hong Kong from December 1945 to conduct coastal patrols in the immediate postwar period, returning there in February 1947 with an unusual cargo of thirteen Japanese war-crimes suspects for trial.

She transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet that April, based at Haifa with the 5th Frigate Flotilla to intercept vessels attempting to carry immigrants into British Mandate Palestine outside the restrictive quotas then in force, a truly difficult and politically fraught duty during one of the most contested periods of the region's modern history, in the years immediately preceding the end of the British Mandate itself.

The posting was not without its own quiet tragedy: two of her sailors drowned in a sailing accident at Mudros that November.

Nine Years With the West Indies Squadron

From March 1948, HMS Bigbury Bay began nine years of service with the West Indies Squadron, a particularly long and varied posting that took her to some remarkable places: she visited the Amazon River as far as Manaos in 1951, rounded Cape Horn in 1954 to call at Chile and Peru, called at Havana in 1957, and in May that year took part in celebrations marking the 350th anniversary of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, a separate occasion from the Queen's own more famous visit to the same festival five months later.

Woven through all this travel was three separate stints as Falkland Islands guardship, the first beginning in December 1949 with her arrival at Port Stanley the following January, and a second in 1953 that the records describe only as involving "incidents with Argentinian warships", a full three decades before anyone outside the Navy had cause to think much about the Falklands at all.

She also turned her hand to disaster relief and diplomacy in roughly equal measure, providing hurricane relief to Dominica and standing by for civil unrest in Trinidad in 1956, escorting Princess Margaret in February 1955, and standing off Bermuda in March and April 1957 during Harold Macmillan and Dwight Eisenhower's conference to patch up Anglo-American relations after Suez.

She later served in the South Atlantic and Red Sea, rounding out a career that had, by this point, taken her to virtually every ocean the Royal Navy operated in.

A Decade Under a Portuguese Flag

Her last operational deployment for Britain came in July 1958, patrolling the Red Sea alongside HMS Loch Ruthven in response to the Iraqi revolution of that year, before she paid off at Devonport that November.

HMS Bigbury Bay was sold to Portugal on 12 May 1959 for £748,130 and recommissioned as NRP Pacheco Pereira, going on to serve the Portuguese Navy for over a decade before finally being sold for breaking up on 6 July 1970, closing out a properly globe-spanning career that had carried her from Hong Kong to the Amazon and finally into more than ten years of further useful service under a second flag.