HMS Burghead Bay: The Frigate That Faced Down Argentina in Antarctica

A Frigate Commissioned After the War

HMS Burghead Bay was built by Charles Hill and Sons at Bristol, her keel laid on 21 September 1944, launched on 3 March 1945 by Mrs A. V. Alexander, wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, and commissioned on 20 September 1945, after the Second World War in Europe and the Pacific had already ended, under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander G. P. S. Lowe DSC RNVR.

The yard is worth stopping at, because Charles Hill and Sons turns up as the builder of a great many ships in this series and is never explained, and it has a claim nobody else in British shipbuilding can match. James Martin Hilhouse started building ships at Bristol in about 1770, and the firm proper dates from 1772. When the Floating Harbour was cut, the business moved to the south bank and built a new yard there with a dry dock, five hundred and forty feet long when it was dug in 1820, the largest in the city. It became George Hilhouse and Company in 1824, then Hilhouse, Hill and Company, and in 1845 Charles Hill took it over, brought his sixteen-year-old son of the same name into the business and put the family name on it. The yard was renamed Albion in 1848.

So the firm that built Burghead Bay in 1944 had been building ships continuously on the same river for a hundred and seventy-two years, since before the American Revolution. It went on turning them out for another thirty: Flower-class corvettes, Loch-class frigates and Bay-class frigates came off those slips in numbers, and eight of them appear in this series alone. The last ship it built was a beer tanker for Guinness, the Miranda Guinness, launched on 9 July 1976, and the Albion Yard shut on 4 January 1977 when Bristol City Docks closed to commercial traffic altogether. Two hundred and five years of shipbuilding ended with a vessel designed to carry stout across the Irish Sea.

There is a postscript most people miss. The Albion Yard sits immediately alongside the Great Western Dockyard, which means that the SS Great Britain, in her glass-covered dock a few hundred yards from where Burghead Bay went down the ways, has for fifty years had several hundred thousand visitors a year walking past a stretch of Bristol waterfront that was still turning out convoy escorts within living memory.

A Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate displacing 1,600 tons standard and up to 2,530 tons at full load, she carried four QF 4-inch guns on twin mountings, four 40mm Bofors and four 20mm Oerlikon guns on twin mounts, and a Hedgehog anti-submarine projector backed by depth charge equipment carrying 50 charges, a well-rounded fit for a class originally designed around the demands of escorting convoys against determined air attack.

The reason she commissioned into a world with no war left in it is that she had been built for a different one. The Bay class were Loch-class anti-submarine frigate hulls taken in hand and completed instead as anti-aircraft frigates, because by 1944 the fleet heading for the Pacific had worked out that its most urgent problem was not submarines but aircraft flown deliberately into ships. Burghead Bay was commissioned on 20 September 1945, eighteen days after the surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay. A great many of her sisters were cancelled on the slipway. She was finished, handed over, and left with a first-class anti-aircraft armament and absolutely nothing to point it at, which is why her career consists almost entirely of jobs nobody had designed her for.

Escort Duty in the Exodus Affair

Before her Antarctic adventures, HMS Burghead Bay had already found herself at the edge of a very different piece of history. In September 1947, under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander N. Bowden-Smith, DSC, RN, she was deployed to the Mediterranean to escort three ships that remain notorious in the history of the founding of Israel: Ocean Vigour, Empire Rival and Runnymede Park, then carrying the forcibly disembarked refugees of the Exodus 1947, originally the American steamer President Warfield, on the final, controversial leg of their journey back to internment in occupied Germany, one of the most bitterly criticised episodes of Britain's entire Palestine Mandate.

The Exodus affair is worth setting out, because it is one of those episodes where a government wins every argument and loses everything else. The ship had been boarded off Palestine in July 1947 carrying more than 4,500 people, almost all of them Holocaust survivors and displaced persons, and her passengers were transferred on 19 July to three transports for return to Europe. At Port-de-Bouc in southern France they refused to come off. They stayed in the holds for twenty-four days in a heatwave, in conditions that were appalling by any measure, and the French authorities declined to remove them by force. So the ships went on to Hamburg, and on 8 September British troops took them off by force instead, in front of the assembled press of the world, and interned them in camps in the British zone of occupied Germany.

It is difficult to overstate what that did. Photographs of British soldiers carrying survivors of the camps back into camps in Germany went round the world within days, and the argument for ending the Mandate, which had been a political question, became something a great many people simply stopped being willing to defend. Burghead Bay was one of the escorts for the final leg. It was not her decision and it was not her doing, but it is part of her record, and it belongs in it.

Guardship of the Falklands

HMS Burghead Bay served as Falkland Islands guard ship across three separate tours between 1952 and 1958. Her first tour, between January and April 1952, took her via South America, including an official visit to La Plata in Argentina itself on 4 and 5 January, to make calls at the South Orkney Islands, Graham Land, the South Shetland Islands and South Georgia, combining her guardship duties with survey work in some of the most remote and inhospitable waters the Royal Navy operated in, a courtesy call practically on Buenos Aires's own doorstep that made the confrontation only weeks later rather more pointed in hindsight.

It was during this deployment that HMS Burghead Bay found herself at the centre of one of the more dramatic and lesser-known confrontations of the early Cold War.

Facing Down Machine-Gun Fire at Hope Bay

On 1 February 1952, a confrontation erupted at Hope Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula, when the British survey ship John Biscoe arrived to rebuild a research base that had been damaged by fire, only for Argentine personnel from a nearby base to intervene and prevent the landing, firing a machine gun over the heads of the British party to force their retreat back to their ship, a particularly alarming escalation between two nations that were not, formally, at war with one another.

The Governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Miles Clifford, responded decisively and without waiting for approval from London, cabling the Colonial Office that the incident "presumably constitutes an act of war" before boarding HMS Burghead Bay along with a party of Royal Marines and escorting John Biscoe back to Hope Bay on 4 February, a show of force that compelled the Argentine detachment to withdraw and allowed the British base reconstruction to proceed.

Argentina subsequently apologised, claiming its local commander had exceeded his authority, though the incident also served a useful propaganda purpose for President Juan Perón's nationalist Antarctic ambitions, and the returning Argentine detachment was given a hero's welcome at home regardless.

It stands today as a striking and largely forgotten forerunner of the far larger Falklands conflict that would follow three decades later.

It also had a consequence. So far as anyone can establish, Hope Bay in February 1952 is the only occasion in history on which shots have been fired in anger on the Antarctic continent, and everybody involved seems to have grasped fairly quickly that it was an absurd place to start a war. Seven years later, on 1 December 1959, twelve nations signed the Antarctic Treaty, which suspended every territorial claim south of sixty degrees, prohibited military activity outright and reserved the entire continent for science. Britain, Argentina and Chile all signed it, and all three continue to claim the same overlapping slice of the Antarctic Peninsula to this day, which is precisely why the treaty was written the way it was. A frigate with a Governor and a party of Royal Marines aboard, steaming into Hope Bay in 1952, is part of the reason anybody bothered.

An Unfortunate Grounding

The same mission brought HMS Burghead Bay's own share of misfortune: on 7 February 1952, at anchor off Hope Bay in severe weather, her anchor dragged and she ran aground, though she was successfully refloated. The incident was serious enough that, when the ship returned home that November, not just her captain but the entire wardroom faced court martial proceedings at Devonport, a sobering reminder that the extreme conditions of Antarctic waters posed at least as much danger to a Royal Navy frigate as any diplomatic confrontation with a foreign power.

Coronation Review and a Portuguese Retirement

HMS Burghead Bay went on to serve with the West Indies Squadron between 1952 and 1954, took part in the Coronation Naval Review at Spithead in June 1953 marking Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, returned to the Falklands in February 1955, and served on the South Atlantic Station between 1957 and 1958 before her third and final Falklands guardship tour that May and June, a deployment that saw her despatched to Smith Island in the South Shetlands to help search for missing scientists of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, pack ice hampering a full recovery before the party was confirmed safe. She then returned home via Chile, Peru and the Panama Canal.

She was decommissioned in August 1958 at Devonport and sold to Portugal in May 1959, serving in the Portuguese Navy as NRP Álvares Cabral until she was scrapped on 23 June 1971, closing out the career of a frigate whose most consequential moment had come not in open war, but in a tense standoff at the bottom of the world.