HMS Cawsand Bay: A Frigate Whose Active Career Lasted Barely Four Months

Constructed at Blyth, Commissioned as the War Ended

HMS Cawsand Bay (K644) began life on paper as something else entirely: ordered on 25 January 1943 from the Blyth Shipbuilding Company in Northumberland as the Loch-class anti-submarine frigate Loch Rowan, her contract was changed while still on the drawing board and she was completed to a revised design as a Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate instead, better suited to fending off aircraft than hunting submarines. Her keel was laid on 24 April 1944, she was launched on 26 February 1945, and she commissioned on 13 November that year, displacing 1,600 tons standard and up to 2,530 tons at full load.

The change of design in the middle of building her is the most interesting thing about her, and the article above states it without explaining it. The Loch class was an anti-submarine frigate, drawn for the Battle of the Atlantic and built around the Squid mortar. By 1944 that battle had been won, and the Royal Navy's next problem was on the other side of the world: the British Pacific Fleet was forming, and what it needed was not more submarine hunters but escorts that could put a heavy weight of anti-aircraft fire into the sky, because the threat out there was the aeroplane and increasingly the aeroplane flown deliberately into the ship. So the Admiralty took the later Loch hulls, some of them already on the slip, and completed them to a modified design as anti-aircraft frigates. Somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-six were converted and renamed, from lochs to bays. Loch Rowan became Cawsand Bay on paper, months before anybody cut steel for her.

She was armed with four twin 4-inch guns, four twin 40mm Bofors guns and four twin 20mm Oerlikon guns, alongside a Hedgehog anti-submarine projector and depth charge equipment carrying 50 charges, a well-equipped escort frigate that, like several of her Bay-class sisters, arrived in service only after the war she had been designed to fight was already over.

What went into them says a great deal about the state of Britain in 1944. The Bay class carried twin 4-inch Mark XVI guns forward and aft in Mark XIX high-angle mountings with remote power control, directed from the bridge by a Mark V rangefinder-director with Type 285 radar for ranging: a proper anti-aircraft fit, and a considerable step up from the single low-angle gun a wartime escort usually got. The catch was that Britain did not have enough of them. There was a shortage of 4-inch guns and mountings, and the shortfall was made up by taking them out of ships that were not going to need them again: laid-up V and W-class destroyers that had been converted into anti-aircraft escorts earlier in the war, and Hunt-class destroyers so badly damaged they had been written off as constructive total losses. So a good many Bay-class frigates went to sea in 1945 carrying guns salvaged from ships that were dead or finished, which is what the last year of a long war actually looks like once you get past the propaganda posters.

A Remarkably Short Active Career

Following sea trials in November and December 1945, HMS Cawsand Bay was attached to the Rosyth Local Flotilla, joining in February 1946, promptly sustaining collision damage during local duties there, and being nominated for reserve status almost immediately afterwards, as if the Admiralty had seen quite enough.

She was formally decommissioned at Portsmouth on 11 March 1946, meaning her entire period of active Royal Navy service lasted barely four months from commissioning to decommissioning, a properly striking illustration of just how rapidly the Admiralty scaled back its fleet once the pressures of wartime had passed and the vast number of escort vessels built for the Battle of the Atlantic were no longer needed in anything like the numbers originally planned.

Her own brief career is worth keeping in proportion, because she was not a failure, she was surplus. Britain ordered escorts during the Battle of the Atlantic on the assumption that the war would run into 1946 or beyond, and the Loch and Bay classes were the last and best of them, designed for rapid prefabricated construction so that yards with no warship experience could turn them out. When the war stopped, so did the requirement, at once. Ships were cancelled on the slipway, and ships already finished were commissioned, sailed, and laid up inside a year. Cawsand Bay was one of those. She was a perfectly good frigate that the Royal Navy had no earthly use for by the time she was ready, and she spent thirteen years in reserve proving it.

It is worth being clear that the difference was luck and paperwork rather than merit. When a war ends, a navy does not keep the best ships and scrap the worst; it keeps the ships that happen to be in commission, in the right place, with a crew aboard and a job in front of them, and it lays up whatever is left over. Cawsand Bay commissioned on 13 November 1945, three months after the Japanese surrender, at the exact moment the Admiralty was looking for hulls to get rid of rather than hulls to employ. Had she been finished eighteen months earlier she would have gone to the Pacific with the fleet; had she been finished eighteen months later she would probably have been cancelled on the slip and never existed at all. Instead she arrived in the narrow window where a ship got built, commissioned, sailed, damaged and laid up inside four months, and then sat at a mooring for the next thirteen years.

Her sisters are the reason her own story reads so oddly, because most of them did rather well. The Bay class arrived too late for the Pacific war they had been redesigned for, and the Royal Navy promptly found that a roomy, long-legged frigate with a decent gun armament and good accommodation was exactly the right ship for the two decades of colonial policing, patrol and presence that followed. HMS Cardigan Bay escorted the Exodus 1947 and later helped recover a Soviet MiG. HMS Enard Bay spent the Mandate's last years on the Palestine Patrol. HMS Burghead Bay faced down Argentina in the Antarctic, and HMS Bigbury Bay went from Hong Kong to the Amazon. Cawsand Bay was the same ship as all of them, built in the same yard to the same drawings, and she got four months and a collision.

A Long Wait in Reserve

HMS Cawsand Bay spent well over a decade in reserve following her brief active commission, a fate common to many capable but simply surplus-to-requirements ships of the immediate postwar Royal Navy.

The reserve fleet she went into was itself an extraordinary thing, and worth picturing. At the end of the war Britain had more warships than at any point in its history and no money to run them, so hundreds of them were laid up: dehumidified, cocooned, guns greased, hatches sealed, moored in lines in the Clyde, the Forth, Harwich, Portsmouth, Devonport and half a dozen sea lochs, with a handful of men to a dozen ships. It was not scrapping and it was not service. It was a national insurance policy, and for a few years it looked like a sensible one, because nobody in 1946 could say what the Soviet Union was going to do. Korea pulled some of them out again. The rest waited, were shuffled from anchorage to anchorage as the reserve fleet was reorganised and reduced, and went one by one to the breakers as the 1950s wore on and it became clear that a 1945 frigate was not going to be much use in the war anybody was now planning for.

She was finally placed on the disposal list in 1958 and sold for demolition to an Italian ship-breaker, towed to Genoa where she arrived on 5 September 1959, closing out the career of a frigate whose greatest historical significance lies not in any action she fought, but in what her brief service says about the sheer scale of the Royal Navy's wartime shipbuilding programme, a fleet built for a war that, for ships like HMS Cawsand Bay, ended before they ever really had the chance to fight in it. It is, if nothing else, a properly ironic namesake: the real Cawsand Bay off Cornwall saw rather more history in a single week of July 1815, when the defeated Napoleon Bonaparte was held aboard HMS Bellerophon in its sheltered waters while boatloads of sightseers rowed out for a look at him, than the frigate that bore its name managed to see in her entire four months of service.

That week is worth telling properly, because it is one of the strangest things that has ever happened in a Cornish anchorage. Bellerophon came into Plymouth Sound on 26 July 1815 with Napoleon Bonaparte aboard, having taken his surrender off Rochefort eleven days earlier, and the government had not the first idea what to do with him. He could not be allowed to land in England, because the moment he set foot ashore he could apply to a British court for habeas corpus, and no minister wanted to find out what a judge might say. So he was kept aboard, at anchor, off Cawsand and Cornwall, while London made up its mind.

The public treated it as an attraction, and Napoleon, who understood publicity as well as anybody who has ever lived, played to it. He appeared at the gangway most evenings at about half past six and stood there while the boats came out to look at him. On one Sunday there were something like a thousand craft on the water around the ship. A naval exclusion zone was enforced with warning shots fired over the crowd, a dockyard worker was drowned when a naval cutter capsized his boat, and two more people were drowned when Bellerophon shifted back to Torbay. On 7 August he was transferred to HMS Northumberland, and she sailed for St Helena on the 9th. The last thing Napoleon Bonaparte ever saw of Europe was the coast of Cornwall.