HMS Lavender (K60): A Flower-class Corvette's Quiet Wartime Service

Laid Down at Aberdeen

HMS Lavender was ordered on 31 August 1939, just before the outbreak of war, and built by Hall, Russell and Company at Aberdeen, laid down on 30 April 1940, launched on 27 November that year and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 16 May 1941, one of well over two hundred Flower-class corvettes built to the same broadly simple, cheap and quick-to-build design that formed the backbone of Britain's convoy escort effort through the hardest years of the Battle of the Atlantic.

A Steady Run of Convoy Duty

HMS Lavender served under five different commanding officers across the course of the war, with Lieutenant Leonard George Pilcher holding command for the longest stretch, from July 1942 to March 1944. Her first was Lieutenant Commander Jackson Whayman RNR, from her commissioning in 1941, and her last two were Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Graham Butcher DSC RNVR and Lieutenant Trevor Walton Lewis DSC, an officer of the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve commanding a Scottish-built corvette through the final year of the war, before Lieutenant Hugh Dudley Hayes RNR saw her through to the closing months.

She took part in numerous convoy escort operations, including convoy HX 220 in December 1942 and the Mediterranean-bound convoy KMS 30 that same autumn, alongside Operation Alacrity between September and October 1943, itself less a battle than a diplomatic manoeuvre that secured British use of Portuguese air bases in the Azores and finally closed the mid-Atlantic "air gap" where convoys had previously sailed for days beyond the reach of any land-based aircraft. All of this sat alongside routine anti-submarine exercises with other Allied vessels, the steady, unglamorous rhythm of escort work that occupied the vast majority of a Flower-class corvette's career.

Operation Alacrity deserves a good deal more than a clause, because it is the only occasion in the whole war on which Britain acquired a strategic base by citing a treaty signed in 1373. Portugal was neutral and Salazar fully intended to stay that way. The trouble was that the Azores sat squarely in the middle of the stretch of ocean where convoys were beyond the reach of any shore-based aircraft, and everybody on both sides could see it on a map.

The British asked for base facilities in August 1943, invoking the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which is the oldest alliance still in force anywhere in the world and was agreed between Edward III and King Fernando and Queen Eleanor of Portugal in 1373. Salazar's difficulty was not sentiment, it was geography: he had every reason to expect a German protective occupation of Portugal itself if he said yes. By the summer of 1943 the war had turned far enough that he judged the risk worth running. Britain got Horta on Faial and Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel as ports, and the airfields at Lajes on Terceira and Santana on Sao Miguel.

The Royal Air Force group sailed from Liverpool on 30 September 1943 and was ashore on Terceira on 8 October. Churchill announced it to the Commons on 12 October, four days after the fact, by reading out the terms of a fourteenth-century treaty to a wartime House, which is not something that happens twice in a career. Lavender was one of the escorts for the convoys that put it there.

The result was immediate and out of all proportion to the size of the operation. Aircraft flying from Lajes closed the last of the mid-Atlantic gap, and in the final quarter of 1943 something close to four hundred thousand troops crossed to Britain without the loss of a single troopship. For a corvette whose war was otherwise made of routine escort work, that particular set of convoys is the closest she came to a decisive moment.

Rescuing the Survivors of the Granville

HMS Lavender's most notable single action came on 17 March 1943, when, under Lieutenant Pilcher, she picked up 34 survivors from the Panamanian steamer Granville, torpedoed by U-338 under Kapitänleutnant Manfred Kinzel while sailing with the hard-fought convoy SC 122, exactly the kind of rescue work that fell so regularly and so urgently to corvette crews throughout the Battle of the Atlantic, work that saved thousands of lives across the war even as it rarely made headlines of its own.

Thirteen of Granville's complement of 47, which had included a US Army lieutenant colonel travelling as a passenger, did not survive the sinking. One wounded second mate died aboard HMS Lavender herself and was buried at sea before she landed the remaining survivors at Liverpool on 23 March.

The convoy she pulled them out of was one of the worst of the war. SC 122 and the faster HX 229 were found together in mid-March 1943 by something like forty U-boats and lost twenty-two ships between them in four days, the heaviest convoy defeat of the entire Atlantic campaign and the point at which the Allies came nearest to losing it outright. That battle is set out in the article on HMS Bittersweet (K182).

U-338 did more damage to SC 122 than any other boat, and did most of it in a matter of hours. Kinzel got in among the columns in the small hours of 17 March and sank the Dutch Alderamin, the Panamanian Granville and the British Kingsbury in a single attack, damaging a fourth ship as he went, then came back submerged later the same day and sank the King Gruffydd. Four ships out of one convoy in a day, which is about as good as it ever got for a U-boat commander. Six months later U-338 sailed on her third patrol and simply vanished, Kinzel and all fifty-one men aboard, somewhere around 20 September 1943.

That is worth setting directly against what Lavender was doing on the same water on the same day. She was stopped, in a convoy under attack, getting thirty-four men out of the sea, one of whom died aboard her anyway and went over the side before Liverpool. Stopping is the single most dangerous thing an escort can do, because a stopped ship is the easiest target in the ocean, and the corvettes did it again and again for four years.

A Quiet Fade and a Second Life in Trade

HMS Lavender does not appear as an active unit on the Navy List by July 1945, having presumably been withdrawn from front-line service as the war drew to its close, and was formally sold on 9 August 1946.

She went on to a rather different second life, converted into the merchant ship Eugene Vinkle in 1948, joining the ranks of former Flower-class corvettes that found productive civilian work once their naval service had ended, a fittingly practical conclusion for a ship whose entire design had always prized simple, sturdy usefulness over glamour.