HMS Carron: From Norway's Fjords to Training Tomorrow's Navigators

Renamed Before She Was Launched

HMS Carron was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock, her keel laid on 26 November 1942 under the name Strenuous, before being renamed and launched as HMS Carron on 28 March 1944, commissioning on 6 November that year.

The renaming is not a curiosity, it is how the wartime programmes worked. Emergency destroyers were ordered in flotillas of eight and the Admiralty named each flotilla so that every ship in it began with the same letter, which made signalling, station-keeping and administration very much simpler and is why the wartime alphabet runs through the J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z, Ca, Ch, Co and Cr flotillas in order. Names were allocated provisionally when a ship was ordered and reshuffled later as the flotillas were made up, which is how a hull laid down at Greenock as Strenuous came off the slip fourteen months later as Carron. Scotts of Greenock, who built her, had been building ships on the lower Clyde since the eighteenth century and destroyers since the beginning of the twentieth, and their yard was one of the handful of British builders that could turn out a fleet destroyer to time in the middle of a war.

A Ca sub-class C-class destroyer, one of 32 such vessels built for the Royal Navy during the war, she displaced 1,710 tons standard and up to 2,575 tons at deep load, carrying four 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns, a twin 40mm Bofors mount, six 20mm Oerlikon guns and two quadruple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts, a well-armed and versatile destroyer joining the fleet in the war's final year.

The arithmetic behind that is worth untangling, because the C class was really four classes. Thirty-two were ordered as four flotillas of eight, known from their names as the Ca, Ch, Co and Cr groups, and Carron belonged to the first of them. The eight Ca-class ships were Caesar, Cavalier, Carron, Carysfort, Cambrian, Caprice, Cassandra and Cavendish, and if those names look familiar it is because most of them went on to serve for another twenty years after the war, rebuilt, while their contemporaries went to the breakers.

One of those seven sisters is still afloat, and it is worth knowing about. HMS Cavalier survived the reconstruction programme, the 1960s, the 1970s and the breakers, and now sits in dry dock at Chatham as the last surviving British destroyer of the Second World War and the national memorial to the destroyer service: to a hundred and forty-two destroyers lost and something over eleven thousand men who went down in them. Her story is told in the article on HMS Cavalier. If you want to know what Carron looked like, felt like and smelled like below decks, Cavalier is as close as anybody will now get: same class, same yard-era, same layout, and she is the only one left.

Screening the Fleet Off Norway

HMS Carron was assigned to the Home Fleet, where she escorted the fleet's larger capital ships during operations off German-occupied Norway, dangerous work protecting battleships and carriers from the residual but still genuine threat posed by German surface raiders, submarines and aircraft operating from Norwegian bases in the final months of the war.

The Norwegian work needs explaining, because by 1945 it was one of the busiest theatres the Home Fleet had and almost nobody writes about it. Germany was still shipping iron ore, aluminium and troops down the Norwegian Leads, the sheltered inshore channel behind the skerries, and it was a route that could not be reached by anything except aircraft, submarines and mines. So the Home Fleet spent the last winter of the war running a rolling offensive against it: escort carriers flying strikes at coastal convoys, submarines patrolling the approaches, and fast minelayers going in at night to seed the channels the ships had to use. It was cold, close inshore, within reach of shore batteries and German fighters, and it was conducted almost entirely in the dark, because that far north in January there is very little else on offer. Carron spent her war doing this rather than fighting a fleet action, and it was considerably more dangerous than it sounds.

On 11 January 1945 she joined Force 2, escorting the cruiser HMS Apollo and the destroyer HMS Zealous on a minelaying operation off Utsira Island codenamed Operation Spellbinder; Carron's own job was to lay a smoke screen between the minefield and the Norwegian mainland to keep the operation hidden from shore observers, the force returning safely on the 13th.

Spellbinder is worth setting out in full, because the detail is remarkable. The whole operation ran from 10 to 12 January 1945 under Rear Admiral R. R. McGrigor, and the force he took was substantial: the escort carriers Premier and Trumpeter, the heavy cruiser Norfolk, the anti-aircraft cruisers Bellona and Dido, the cruiser minelayer Apollo and nine destroyers of the 17th Flotilla. Carron was in Force 2, the minelaying half, with Apollo under Captain J. A. Grindle and the destroyer Zealous, and Carron herself was commanded by Lieutenant Commander J. V. Wilkinson, DSC. They sailed from Scapa Flow. Between three minutes to midnight on the 11th and twenty past midnight on the 12th, Apollo laid a hundred and fifty-six mines in three lines while the two destroyers screened her. At one point the force was within seven cables of the enemy shore, which is about fourteen hundred yards, close enough to see the coast. Nothing fired at them. They went home to Scapa without a scratch.

The other half of the operation had a livelier time of it. While Apollo was laying her mines, the rest of McGrigor's force went after a German convoy off Egersund and shot up the freighters, leaving the eight-and-a-half-thousand-ton Bahia Camarones and the four-and-a-half-thousand-ton Charlotte so badly damaged that both had to be abandoned. That is the pattern of the whole campaign in miniature: a minefield laid silently in the dark on one side of the operation, a convoy caught and wrecked on the other, and the point of both being to make a single stretch of sheltered water too expensive for Germany to keep using. Nobody gave the operation a name that anybody remembers, and it worked.

She transferred to Far East service in June 1945, joining the East Indies Fleet at Trincomalee that August, arriving just as the war against Japan reached its conclusion, before returning to the UK in 1946 and being paid off into reserve.

The Far East posting turned out to be a very short story. She left for the East Indies Fleet in June 1945 and reached Trincomalee in Ceylon in August, which is to say she arrived in the week the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered. The East Indies Fleet had spent 1944 and 1945 clawing back the Indian Ocean, striking at Sumatra and the Andamans and preparing for the reconquest of Malaya, and a modern destroyer would have been extremely welcome for what was expected to be another year of fighting. Instead she arrived into the sudden anticlimax of a war that had ended, spent a few months in the enormous business of reoccupation, prisoner recovery and getting people home, and came back to Britain in 1946 to be laid up. It is a common shape for a ship of her vintage and it is why so many of the Ca class had almost no war at all.

A Modernised Cold War Destroyer

HMS Carron was modernised at Chatham in 1955, receiving a new bridge, updated fire control systems and Squid anti-submarine mortars, and went on to serve with the Dartmouth Training Squadron from that year, a role that saw her helping to prepare the next generation of Royal Navy officers for service at sea.

Carron has a small distinction in that story. She was the first of the Ca flotilla selected for reconstruction, and she came out of Chatham in 1955 as the prototype for what the other seven would get: an enclosed frigate-style bridge in place of the open one her wartime crews had frozen on, a modern Mk 6M gunnery director, and Squid anti-submarine mortars where a gun and a set of torpedo tubes had been. The programme is described in more detail in the article on her sister HMS Caesar. Being first meant being the one everybody else's lessons were learned on.

A Dedicated Training Ship

In 1960, HMS Carron was converted specifically to a navigational training ship, stripped back to just her torpedo tubes with extra charthouses built onto the old Squid deck, and became a tender to HMS Dryad, the Royal Navy's navigation and operations school, a truly useful second career that put her still-capable hull to work teaching officers the essential skills of naval navigation, a discipline that, however unglamorous compared to gunnery or missile warfare, remained absolutely fundamental to every operation the Royal Navy undertook.

The 1960 conversion is worth taking seriously as well, because navigation training is not a soft option. A navigating officer in 1960 had no satellite fix and no electronic chart. He had a compass, a log, a chronometer, a sextant, an echo sounder, whatever radar the ship carried, a chart and a pencil, and he was expected to know where the ship was at all times to a standard that would keep several thousand tons off a rock in the dark. Carron was stripped back, given extra charthouses built onto the deck where her Squid mortars had been, and attached to HMS Dryad as a floating classroom for exactly that. Every officer who came through her went on to be responsible for somebody else's ship.

The establishment she was attached to is worth knowing about too, because HMS Dryad is one of those shore establishments with a history out of all proportion to its name. Dryad was the Royal Navy School of Navigation, based in Portsmouth Dockyard, and when the dockyard was heavily bombed in 1941 the school was moved out to Southwick House, a country house five miles to the north. Two years later the Navy was turned out of its own school: in 1943 Southwick House was taken over as the forward command post of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, and Dryad was shifted onto further land on the estate to make room. The following spring the house held Eisenhower, Ramsay and Montgomery, and it was in its library that Eisenhower took the decision to put D-Day back by twenty-four hours. So when Carron was stripped out in 1960 and turned into a floating classroom for the navigation school, the school she was working for was the one that had been evicted from the room where the invasion of Europe was decided.

A Quiet Retirement

What happened to the eight Ca-class ships afterwards is a decent summary of the post-war Royal Navy. All eight got the reconstruction; all eight served on into the 1960s and 1970s in a way their wartime contemporaries did not, because a rebuilt Ca was a genuinely useful ship and there was no money to replace her. Caprice was still on active duty into the 1970s. Cavalier is preserved. Carron, having been the prototype for the rebuild, was among the first to go: she paid off on 5 April 1963, before most of her sisters had finished their careers, and lay on the sale list for nearly four years before Thos. W. Ward bought her in March 1967 and towed her to Inverkeithing. Being first is expensive. She got the trial fit, the teething problems and the shortest second career of the eight, and every one of her sisters was better for it.

HMS Carron was paid off on 5 April 1963 and listed for sale that May, eventually sold for scrap to Thos. W. Ward on 10 March 1967, arriving at the breaker's yard at Inverkeithing on 31 March that year, bringing to a close the career of a destroyer that had begun life under a different name, escorted the fleet through the war's final dangerous months, and spent her last years quietly and usefully training the officers who would go on to lead the postwar Royal Navy.