HMS Clematis (K36): Escorting Troopships Through an Attack by the Admiral Hipper

Laid Down at Bristol

HMS Clematis was built by Charles Hill and Sons at Bristol, in collaboration with Richardson, Westgarth and Clark, launched on 22 April 1940 and commissioned that July, a Flower-class corvette built to the class's proven, quickly constructed design that allowed the Royal Navy to rapidly expand its convoy escort capacity at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic.

It is worth knowing what a Flower actually was, because the design decisions explain almost everything about the lives of the men who served in them. Smith's Dock of Middlesbrough had built a whalecatcher called Southern Pride in 1936, and when the Admiralty came looking in 1939 for an escort that could be built quickly, cheaply, and in yards that had never laid down a warship in their lives, Smith's offered a lengthened version of her. That is the whole of it. The ship that fought the Battle of the Atlantic was a whaler with depth charges. She had a single screw and a triple-expansion reciprocating steam engine instead of turbines, not because anybody thought that was better, but because small commercial yards could build them and merchant service engineers already knew how to keep them running.

The name was Churchill's doing. The Admiralty had been minded to call them patrol vessels of the whaler type, which is accurate and unusable, and Churchill, then First Lord, went back to the age of sail and produced corvette. Close to three hundred were built, which makes the Flowers the most numerous class of warship ever put to sea. They were designed for coastal escort work in the Western Approaches and were promptly sent into the middle of the North Atlantic instead, where they were far too short for the sea they were in, and where eighty-odd men lived wet for weeks on end. Their crews said a Flower would roll on wet grass.

Pulling Survivors From the Sea

HMS Clematis's early service included rescuing survivors from merchant ships torpedoed by U-boats. On 29 August 1940 she picked up seventeen men from the Dalblair, sunk by U-100 some 148 miles northwest of Bloody Foreland, grim but essential work that fell to almost every escort corvette operating in the Atlantic during this desperate early phase of the war, when Allied anti-submarine capability still lagged well behind the U-boat threat it faced.

Her second rescue, on 23 October, capped a five-day ordeal born of one of the worst convoy maulings of the entire war. A wolf pack tore into Convoy SC 7 between 16 and 19 October 1940, sinking twenty of its thirty ships; Otto Kretschmer's U-99 alone claimed the British steamer Fiscus on the 18th and, the following night, the Norwegian Snefjeld, torpedoed while she lay stopped picking up four survivors from the already-sunk Greek ship Thalia, a rescue mission that had itself just become a casualty. Fiscus's sole survivor, Ordinary Seaman Edward King, spent two days adrift on a loose packing case, watching three shipmates die of exposure beside him, before Snefjeld's own lifeboats, crewed now by the survivors of a second sinking, hauled him aboard. HMS Clematis, escorting the homeward convoy SL 50, ran north on a wireless report and found the drifting boats at 1455 on 23 October some 55 miles further on, pulling twenty-six men from the sea in one sweep, twenty-one from Snefjeld, four from Thalia and King alone from Fiscus, before landing them all safely at Methil three days later.

Escorting Troops Under Threat From a Heavy Cruiser

HMS Clematis went on to escort the major troopship convoy WS5A, which sailed from Liverpool on 18 December 1940 carrying tens of thousands of troops bound for the Middle East alongside the aircraft carriers Furious and Argus. On Christmas Day the convoy came under attack from the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, one of the most powerful and dangerous surface raiders operating in the Atlantic at the time, capable of outgunning virtually any escort likely to be protecting a troop convoy.

All of which is true, and is exactly why what happened next is remembered. The most famous thing HMS Clematis ever did happened that morning, and it is one of the better known Royal Navy signals of the war. She was stationed on the starboard side of the convoy, forward of the main body, when something very large came out of the murk. Commander Cleeves did the two things a Royal Navy officer was expected to do on sighting an enemy warship while escorting a troop convoy, and he did them in the correct order. He turned towards her. Then he made his signal: am engaging unknown enemy battleship.

The arithmetic of that decision is worth setting out. Admiral Hipper was 676 feet long, could make thirty-three knots, and carried eight 8-inch guns in four turrets laid from a central control position, each shell weighing 269 pounds. Clematis was 205 feet long, could manage sixteen knots on a good day with the wind behind her, and had one 4-inch gun on the forecastle, aimed and fired by hand, throwing a shell of thirty-one pounds. It was not a fight and was never going to be one. What it was, was a position report from a ship that had already committed herself. The cruisers were grouped away on the port side of the convoy and were reading her signal traffic. Clematis did not save the convoy with her gun. She saved it by telling everybody where the enemy was, from a position she had put herself in on purpose. What follows is what her signal produced.

Having missed with a torpedo salvo in the pre-dawn murk, Hipper opened fire at 0808, hitting the troopship Empire Trooper and killing sixteen soldiers aboard her, and damaging the freighter Arabistan, before the escorting cruisers Berwick, Bonaventure and Dunedin scattered the convoy and turned to fight. In a thirty-five-minute gun duel Berwick took four 8-inch hits for her trouble, losing her after turret and four of her own Royal Marine gunners, Marine Denis Broom, Corporal Robert Davison, Marine Reginald Lyons and Sergeant Charles Painter, before Hipper broke off at 0914, reportedly running short of fuel, and made for Brest.

The troopship Hipper hit had a history of her own, and it is a neat one. Empire Trooper was not built British. She was the German liner Cap Norte, and on 9 October 1939, five weeks into the war, she was running for home from South America with a cargo of wheat and stores when she passed HMS Belfast on the Northern Patrol between Orkney and Iceland in filthy visibility.

She very nearly got away with it. What gave her away was a piece of ordinary watchkeeping: Belfast's officer of the watch, Lieutenant Alan Seale, looked at her stern and noticed that the name painted on it had been painted over another one. The other one was Cap Norte. She was taken into Kirkwall, converted into a troopship and renamed Empire Trooper.

So on Christmas morning 1940 the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper put 8-inch shells into a German liner, sailing under a British name, full of British soldiers, and killed sixteen of them; the ship that had taken her fourteen months earlier is today moored in the Pool of London with schoolchildren walking her decks. Empire Trooper made port and went on serving. It is one of the smaller ironies of the Atlantic war and one of the tidier ones.

It was a stark reminder of just how exposed even a heavily escorted troop convoy remained to a determined and capable surface raider, and HMS Clematis's presence, however modest her own firepower compared to Admiral Hipper's, formed part of the layered defence that allowed the convoy's precious cargo of troops to reach its destination.

She went on to escort further significant troop and merchant convoys, including SL63, WS6A and 6B, SL69, SL71, SL73 and SL76, and WS10X, through 1941, a demanding and continuous operational tempo typical of the corvette fleet during this critical period of the Atlantic campaign.

Command changed hands that November, when Commander York McLeod Cleeves, DSC, RD, RNR, who had brought Clematis through her first sixteen months of war service including the Hipper action, handed over to Temporary Lieutenant Christopher Morrison-Payne, RNVR. A third officer, Temporary Lieutenant Richard Henry Farrands, DSC, RNR, took command from the middle of 1943 and saw her through her final wartime convoy assignment, HX 278, in February 1944.

A Quiet End

By the war's final year Clematis had long since left the mainstream convoy routes behind; she does not appear as an active unit in the July 1945 Navy List, her service having wound down quietly as the conflict reached its close.

She was scrapped at Charlestown in September 1949, closing out the career of a corvette whose service, spanning some of the most dangerous convoy routes and encounters of the early Atlantic war, exemplified the vital, unglamorous work that kept Britain's wartime supply lines open against determined opposition both above and below the waves.

One of Clematis's own wartime officers, RNVR Sub-Lieutenant John Palmer, later published his service diary as Luck on My Side, a first-hand account of a year aboard the corvette that remains one of the more detailed surviving records of daily life on a Flower-class ship at war.

Palmer is worth a word himself. He was aboard on Christmas Day 1940 as Clematis's navigating officer, which means that the best surviving eyewitness account of the Hipper action was written by the man whose job that morning was working out where everybody was while it happened. He kept the diary throughout the war, which was against regulations, and went on to serve in the frigate Exe and the sloop Amethyst. Afterwards he qualified as a solicitor and rose to be President of the Law Society of England and Wales, and was knighted. He published the diaries in 2002, more than sixty years after he wrote them, by which time he was one of very few men left who could describe a Flower-class corvette turning towards a heavy cruiser and mean it literally.