HMS Loch Dunvegan (F425): Two U-boat Kills, Then a Career of Collisions

Constructed at Bristol

HMS Loch Dunvegan was ordered on 19 January 1943 and built by Charles Hill and Sons in Bristol, laid down on 29 September that year and launched on 25 March 1944 by the wife of the shipyard's owner, completing fitting out on 25 June 1944 after a construction period of 274 days.

She was the first Royal Navy ship to carry the name, a Loch-class frigate armed with two Squid anti-submarine mortars and Type 147B and 144 sonars, a well-equipped submarine hunter for her size.

Sinking U-354 on the Way to Murmansk

HMS Loch Dunvegan commissioned in June 1944 under Commander Edward Wheeler, RD, RNR, and joined the 10th Escort Group, and after a collision with the destroyer HMS Bulldog while preparing for Russian convoy duty was quickly repaired in time to depart for Murmansk on 15 August 1944 escorting convoy JW 59.

On 24 August, together with the destroyer HMS Keppel and the sloops HMS Mermaid and HMS Peacock, she took part in sinking the German submarine U-354, a significant success achieved on her very first major Arctic deployment.

A Second Kill Off Shetland

HMS Loch Dunvegan rejoined the 10th Escort Group at Londonderry that September, and after a refit on the Tyne returned to North Atlantic operations, where on 14 February 1945, north of Shetland, her escort group detected another submarine.

Following coordinated attacks by fellow frigates HMS Bayntun, HMS Braithwaite and HMS Loch Eck, HMS Loch Dunvegan carried out three attacks of her own with her Squid mortar, after which wreckage and two survivors surfaced, confirming the destruction of U-989, whose commanding officer, Oberleutnant Hardo Rodler von Roithberg, went down with his boat on what should have been his 27th birthday.

The two survivors died shortly after being rescued, but not before confirming the kill, and Wheeler was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the action, a truly notable second U-boat kill inside just six months.

War's End and a Rocky Peace

HMS Loch Dunvegan transferred to the English Channel for continued anti-U-boat operations in March 1945, and following Germany's surrender that May carried out air-sea rescue duties and supported the reoccupation of Norway.

Her postwar record proved rather less distinguished than her wartime one: she ran aground in Lough Foyle in December 1945, requiring repairs at Belfast that ran into April 1946, before returning to training duties at Londonderry under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander V. C. F. Clarke, DSC, RN, and finally paying off into reserve at Devonport in April 1947.

A Truly Accident-Prone Mediterranean Posting

HMS Loch Dunvegan recommissioned for Mediterranean service on 1 May 1950 under Commander R. F. Nicholson, RN, her pennant number now changed to F425, and served as guardship at Aqaba, where that September she reportedly hosted King Abdullah I of Jordan to watch her guns put through their paces, before a further guardship posting at Port Said during the widespread anti-British riots of 1952.

The Aqaba gunnery demonstration has a postscript. The king who came aboard to watch her shoot in September 1950 was Abdullah I, the founder of Jordan, and he had ten months left. On 20 July 1951 he went to Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and was shot dead at the entrance by a twenty-one-year-old Palestinian tailor, Mustafa Shukri Ashshu. His fifteen-year-old grandson was standing beside him and survived, by the usual account because a medal his grandfather had made him wear turned the bullet. The grandson was Hussein, who then reigned over Jordan for forty-six years.

Her Mediterranean deployment proved a remarkably trying one: machinery problems in February 1951 required her to be towed to Gibraltar, where she was still under repair on 27 April when the ammunition ship RFA Bedenham blew up at Gun Wharf, killing 13 people, and her crew turned to for the rescue and firefighting effort that followed. Barely a month later, in May, she ran aground entering Mellieha, sustaining extensive damage including the loss of propeller blades, an incident serious enough that her commanding officer was court-martialled and dismissed as a result.

The Bedenham is worth the whole story, because it is the largest explosion Gibraltar has ever had and it is not much remembered outside the Rock. She had come in on 24 April 1951 from Bull Point at Plymouth with something like seven hundred and ninety tons of depth charges and ammunition aboard, destined for Gibraltar and Malta. On the morning of the 27th she was unloading depth charges at Gun Wharf into a lighter alongside.

At about four minutes to ten a hoist of them went off in the lighter. The dockyard and Gibraltar fire brigades turned out at once, and a sub officer of the dockyard brigade named George Campbell Henderson went aboard Bedenham herself, got a jet on the fire and stayed with it after the order to take cover had been given. The fire reached the ship anyway. Seven hundred and ninety tons of ammunition went up in the middle of a naval dockyard in the middle of a town.

Thirteen people were killed and hundreds injured, more than fifty of them badly enough for hospital. Windows went in the length of Gibraltar; both cathedrals and the Convent, the Governor's residence, were all badly knocked about. Henderson was awarded the George Cross posthumously, and Albert Alexander Indoe, the dockyard's chief fire officer, the King's Police and Fire Services Medal for Gallantry, also posthumously. Loch Dunvegan, laid up in the same dockyard with her machinery in pieces, sent her people to help.

Repairs kept her out of action until September 1951, after which she suffered a further series of collisions in Sliema creek, including one with the destroyer HMS Saintes, a properly unfortunate run of accidents for a ship that had shown such precision and effectiveness against actual enemy submarines just a few years earlier. She recommissioned that November under Commander R. N. Rycroft, RN, for an unusually short eighteen-month commission, half the normal length for a frigate of her type, in what looks very much like a deliberate effort by the Mediterranean Fleet to give her a quieter spell and let her somewhat tarnished reputation recover.

A Quiet End

HMS Loch Dunvegan returned to British waters in October 1952 and was placed in reserve at Devonport, where a planned modernisation was considered in 1953 but never carried out. She underwent a further refit back at her original builder's yard, Charles Hill's in Bristol, in 1955, fitted out with dehumidification equipment for long-term mothballing rather than a return to active service, before paying off for good into the Reserve Fleet at Penarth in 1956.

She was finally sold for scrapping in 1960, arriving under tow at Thos. W. Ward's yard at Briton Ferry on 24 August that year, closing out sixteen years of service that had opened with two particularly impressive U-boat kills and closed with a rather less impressive run of groundings and collisions.