HMS Fowey (L15/U15): From the Persian Gulf to a U-Boat Kill Off Scilly

Constructed at Devonport

HMS Fowey was ordered on 4 December 1929 under that year's naval building programme, laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 24 March 1930, and launched on 4 November that year by a Mrs Treffery, a Shoreham-class sloop, a design built primarily for colonial and overseas patrol duties rather than intensive convoy escort work, though she would ultimately spend her most significant service doing exactly that.

Her geared turbines produced 2,000 shaft horsepower across two shafts, and she carried two 4-inch guns along with anti-aircraft machine guns, a relatively light armament reflecting her originally intended peacetime policing role.

She commissioned on 11 September 1931, initially crewed by the Devonport Port Division, and was posted to the Persian Gulf, where she served until August 1939, right up to the eve of the Second World War.

Sinking U-55

HMS Fowey's most significant single action came on 30 January 1940, barely five months into the war, when her depth charges forced the German submarine U-55 to the surface some 90 miles southwest of the Isles of Scilly, unable to dive again after attacking a convoy in the area.

A Sunderland flying boat of No. 228 Squadron RAF, flown by Flying Officer Edward Brooks out of Pembroke Dock, found the stricken boat still on the surface and bombed and machine-gunned her himself before calling in the destroyer HMS Whitshed and the French destroyer Valmy, whose gunfire finally persuaded U-55's crew to scuttle her, one man killed and 48 taken prisoner. It was the first U-boat kill in which Coastal Command shared the credit, and the naval historian Captain Stephen Roskill later judged that the submarine "would probably have escaped but for the presence of the Sunderland", an aircraft that would itself be shot down by Italian fighters in the Mediterranean before the year was out.

That credit is worth dwelling on, because it is the first entry in a very long ledger. In January 1940 the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force had almost no practice at working together against submarines: there were no agreed procedures, no reliable way for an aircraft to pass a contact to a ship, and a good deal of institutional suspicion in both directions. U-55 was found by a sloop, held on the surface, attacked by a flying boat that happened to arrive, and finished by two destroyers of two different navies, and it worked more by luck than by system. By 1943 that improvisation had become a machine, and it is the single largest reason the Atlantic was won; how it looked once it was working properly is described in the article on HMS Fleetwood (F47). Fowey was present at the beginning of it.

Into the Atlantic War

Fowey had come home from the Gulf into a home waters posting as war broke out, which is how she came to be off the Scillies that January; it would be some months yet before her service took her further afield. Following repairs at Bombay, HMS Fowey transferred to the Mediterranean on 9 September 1940, before moving on to Freetown for Atlantic convoy defence duties, sailing on her first wartime convoy, SL 11, on 2 December 1940.

Her earlier service that October had already brought her into the thick of the fighting, assisting in the defence of Convoy SC 7, one of the most heavily attacked convoys of the entire Battle of the Atlantic, which lost 20 of its 35 ships to sustained U-boat attack despite her escorts' best efforts, a truly brutal introduction to the realities of the Atlantic convoy war.

SC 7 deserves rather more than a clause, because it is the convoy that taught the Royal Navy what it was actually up against. Thirty-five merchant ships sailed from Nova Scotia on 5 October 1940 with six escorts, which was all that could be spared. Five U-boats, U-46, U-99, U-100, U-101 and U-123, were gathered onto the convoy by radio in one of the first true wolfpack operations of the war, and on the night of 18 October they came in on the surface, at night, from inside the escort screen, where asdic could not see them at all because asdic looks underwater. Sixteen ships were sunk in six hours. The pack then found the following convoy, HX 79, and sank twelve more from that. It was the worst forty-eight hours of the entire Battle of the Atlantic, and every element of the disaster, too few escorts, no radar, no high-frequency direction finding, no night-fighting doctrine and no aircraft, was a problem the Royal Navy had not yet solved.

Rescuing Tanker Survivors

HMS Fowey carried out two significant rescue operations in June 1941. On 15 June, she rescued 16 survivors from the Norwegian tanker SS Italia, torpedoed by U-38.

Less than a week later, on 21 June, she joined HMS Sandwich in rescuing 49 survivors from the tanker SS San Fernando, torpedoed by the German ace Günther Prien's U-47, the same submarine that had famously penetrated Scapa Flow to sink HMS Royal Oak at the very start of the war.

These rescues, carried out amid the constant danger of further U-boat attack, represented exactly the kind of unglamorous but life-saving work that escort vessels performed constantly throughout the Battle of the Atlantic, often with far less recognition than the more celebrated U-boat kills.

Stopping to do it was also a great deal more dangerous than the sentence suggests. A ship lying stopped in the middle of an ocean, in the dark, with her boats away and men in the water alongside, is the easiest target a submarine will ever be offered, and standing orders through much of the war discouraged escorts from doing it precisely for that reason; convoy commodores were instructed to keep going and leave rescue to designated rescue ships where any were available, which in 1941 they very often were not. Every time Fowey stopped, her captain was accepting a real chance of losing his own ship and everybody in her to save men from somebody else's. Sixty-five people came out of the water in six days in June 1941 because he kept deciding it was worth it.

HMS Fowey received radar upgrades and underwent major refits throughout the war, including the addition of a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar outfit, keeping her particularly competitive against an evolving U-boat threat despite her origins as a considerably more modest colonial patrol design.

It is worth appreciating the transformation in what she was being asked to do. Fowey was ordered in 1929 and designed for the Persian Gulf: a lightly armed, slow, comfortable ship built to show the flag, suppress the arms and slave trades and land a party if a sheikh needed persuading, and she spent eight years doing exactly that. Nothing in her design anticipated hunting submarines in the North Atlantic. By 1943 she had radar, Hedgehog and a modern asdic outfit bolted onto a colonial gunboat of the 1920s, and she was doing the most technically demanding work the Royal Navy had. A great many of the ships that won the Battle of the Atlantic were like that: not designed for it, simply available, and refitted until they were.

A Second Life as a Merchant Ship

Following VE Day, HMS Fowey served as a guardship at Stranraer, before being sold to Wheelock Marden and Company in December 1946 for use as a merchant vessel, renamed SS Rowlock.

The buyer is worth a paragraph, and the connection she makes is a direct one. Wheelock Marden was the shipping business built up by George Marden, an Englishman who had made his money in Shanghai and who moved the whole operation to Hong Kong at the end of the 1940s once it became clear that Shanghai was no longer going to be possible for a British firm. The company bought surplus tonnage from the British and American governments in quantity after the war, when there was a great deal more of it about than anybody knew what to do with, and it gave every ship in the fleet a name ending in -lock. Fowey duly became Rowlock.

So did another ship in this series. HMS Clover (K134), a Flower-class corvette that had twice pulled the survivors of a sunk escort out of the Atlantic, was sold in the same period and became Marden's Cloverlock, working out of Hong Kong. Two British escorts that had spent the war on the same ocean ended up in the same Chinese port under the same house flag, and one of them was subsequently bought by the People's Republic and rearmed with Soviet guns.

The postwar disposal market is one of the least examined parts of naval history and it was enormous. Britain finished the war with several hundred small escorts she could not man, could not afford to run and no longer needed, almost all of them only a few years old and structurally sound, and they went out to anybody who would take them: to merchant owners, to allied and neutral navies, to whaling firms, to shipping companies like Marden's who simply wanted a cheap strong hull that could carry cargo. Follow the ships in this series into their second lives and they turn up as Greek coastal ferries, Norwegian weather ships, Hong Kong coasters, Bangladeshi patrol vessels, Chinese escorts, Grimsby trawlers and, in more than one case, somebody's houseboat.

Fowey did not last long at it. She traded as Rowlock until 1950 and was then broken up at Mombasa, twenty years after she had gone down the ways at Devonport and five years after the end of the war she was never designed for. It is not much of an ending for a ship that shared in the first submarine kill Coastal Command was ever credited with, and stopped in open ocean twice in six days to take sixty-five men out of the water. But then almost nobody gets the ending they earned, and a great many of these ships got no ending at all.

She continued in commercial service until 1950, when she was finally scrapped at Mombasa, closing out a career that had carried her from prewar Persian Gulf patrol duty through a notably significant U-boat kill and multiple life-saving rescues at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic.