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.

The change of order tells you a good deal about where the war had got to. The Loch class had been designed for one purpose, killing U-boats in the Atlantic, and designed above all to be built quickly: the hulls were prefabricated in sections by structural engineering firms inland, bridge builders and boilermakers who had never laid down a ship in their lives, and then assembled on the slipway by yards that could concentrate on putting them together. By 1944 the Atlantic was won and the war that remained was in the Pacific, where the thing trying to sink you was not a submarine but an aeroplane, very often flown by somebody with no intention of pulling out. So a number of Lochs still on the stocks were completed instead as Bays, with four 4-inch anti-aircraft guns in place of the anti-submarine outfit. Bigbury Bay went down the ways as an Atlantic escort and came off it as an air defence ship.

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.

It is worth noting that she reached Hong Kong as part of the British Pacific Fleet just as it was being wound up, arriving for the peace rather than the war. Carrying thirteen Japanese war crimes suspects back to Hong Kong in February 1947 is about as literal an illustration of that transition as a ship could manage.

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 Palestine patrol deserves to be set out properly, because the phrase outside the restrictive quotas covers something very hard. The people trying to reach Palestine in those years were, overwhelmingly, survivors of the Holocaust living in displaced persons camps in Europe with nowhere else to go, and the quota they fell outside of was the one set by the British White Paper of 1939. Between 1945 and 1948 something over a hundred thousand people attempted the passage in about a hundred and forty voyages. The Royal Navy stopped rather more than half of them. Forty-nine ships were arrested and some sixty-six thousand people taken off them, and because the camps in Palestine were full they were shipped on to internment camps in Cyprus, at Karaolos, Nicosia, Dhekelia and Xylotymbou, and held behind wire again.

The worst of it happened in the summer Bigbury Bay was there. In July 1947 an old American excursion steamer renamed Exodus 1947 sailed for Palestine with about four and a half thousand people aboard. The boarding was fought: it took two hours, the destroyers were damaged getting alongside, and a crewman and two of the passengers were killed. She was taken into Haifa, and the passengers were then put aboard transports and sent back, first to France, which would not take them off, and finally to Germany, where they were landed and interned in the country most of them had spent the war trying to survive. The affair was reported around the world and did more damage to the British position in Palestine than any single thing in the last years of the Mandate.

It is worth saying what that was like for the ships' companies as well, because they had no say in the policy and every share of the job. Boarding meant going over the side onto a crowded, unlit vessel full of civilians who had every reason to resist, being met with bottles, tins and steam hoses, and then getting several thousand exhausted people ashore without anybody being killed. Sailors who had spent the war being told what the enemy was for found themselves in a floodlit harbour in front of the world's press doing something a great many of them plainly hated. Very few accounts of the Palestine patrol written by the men who did it are cheerful ones.

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.

Those incidents with Argentinian warships were not trivial, and the South Atlantic in the early 1950s was a good deal tenser than the standard 1982 narrative allows. On 1 February 1952 an Argentine shore party at Hope Bay, on the Antarctic Peninsula, fired machine-gun bursts over the heads of a British survey team attempting to land and rebuild a station, which remains the only occasion on which shots have been fired in anger on the Antarctic continent; Buenos Aires afterwards apologised and said the local commander had exceeded his authority. A year later, in February 1953, HMS Snipe put a party of Royal Marines ashore on Deception Island, arrested the two Argentines occupying a hut on British-claimed ground and dismantled both the Argentine and the Chilean huts. A Falklands guardship in that period was doing sovereignty enforcement in earnest, thirty years before the word became familiar.

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.

Bermuda in the spring of 1957 was a more consequential meeting than the guest list suggests. Suez had gone catastrophically wrong the previous autumn, the Americans had used financial pressure to force Britain out of Egypt, Anthony Eden had resigned in January, and the relationship between the two governments was about as bad as it has ever been. Macmillan and Eisenhower had known one another since the North African campaign, and Bermuda was the meeting at which they set about repairing the damage, largely successfully. Bigbury Bay lying offshore for the duration was the sort of quiet, decorative naval presence that these occasions have always attracted, and quite possibly the most restful fortnight of her career.

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.

Her final deployment had a good deal more urgency behind it. On 14 July 1958 the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in a military coup: the young king, the crown prince and much of the royal family were killed, and the prime minister was murdered in the street the following day. Iraq had been the anchor of the British position in the Middle East, and the effect elsewhere was immediate. British paratroops were flown into Jordan to shore up the king there, American Marines landed in Lebanon, and warships were moved into position all round the region in case any of it got worse. A fourteen-year-old anti-aircraft frigate patrolling the Red Sea in the summer of 1958 was a small part of a very large and very nervous response.

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.