HMS Loch Fyne (K429): The First Ship to Find the Missing Affray

The Build: Burntisland

HMS Loch Fyne was built by the Burntisland Shipbuilding Company in Fife and launched in 1944, commissioning that November, a Loch-class frigate named after the sea loch on Scotland's west coast and built to the same well-proven anti-submarine design as her many sister ships. Lieutenant Henry Herbert Dietrich MacKillican, DSC, RD, RNR, already decorated before he took command, served as her captain throughout this first commission.

War's Final Months

HMS Loch Fyne joined the 18th Escort Group on 22 December 1944, supporting convoys on the UK to Gibraltar route, before transferring to Force 38 in the South-Western Approaches for anti-submarine patrols in February 1945, and later to Task Group 122.2 based at Portsmouth, providing convoy support in the English Channel during the final months of the war in Europe.

Escorting the Defeated U-boat Fleet

HMS Loch Fyne moved to Scapa Flow following Germany's surrender in May 1945 to support the Home Fleet during the reoccupation of Norway, then sailed for Trondheim on 26 May under Operation Pledge, the scheme for collecting Germany's surrendered U-boat fleet, not, whatever some accounts suggest, Operation Deadlight itself, the separate operation that scuttled the fleet outright the following winter. A boarding party stayed aboard one of the captured boats for the whole passage back, with HMS Keats and HMS Kempthorne providing the escort to Loch Ryan.

Command passed that August to Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Reginald Frederick James Maberley, RNVR, who took her out to the Indian Ocean via Aden and Colombo after a refit, joining the East Indies Escort Force for air-sea rescue duty covering aircraft repatriating prisoners of war, operating from Karachi and then Trincomalee, before returning home to decommission at Portsmouth in April 1946.

The First Contact With HMS Affray

HMS Loch Fyne recommissioned in January 1951 under Commander C. P. McN. Hart, DSC, RN, only for a premature depth charge explosion during weapon trials that same month to put her back into repair until April, a frustrating false start before she joined the search that same year for one of the most tense episodes of the postwar Royal Navy: the missing submarine HMS Affray, lost with all 75 of her crew in the English Channel.

After two exhausting months of trawling the Channel, a search that had already investigated dozens of false leads, including the wreck of the wartime U-boat U-269, HMS Loch Fyne made the first contact with the lost submarine on her ASDIC equipment on 14 June 1951 and signalled the news to the Admiralty in Whitehall. The diving ship HMS Reclaim confirmed the find with underwater television, revealing Affray lying in 288 feet of water, and Loch Fyne stood guard over the wreck site while divers worked, a critical breakthrough that, in the end, could not change the tragic outcome for her crew.

It is worth saying what Loch Fyne had found. Affray sailed from Portsmouth on 16 April 1951 for Exercise Spring Train, a simulated war patrol, with a reduced ship's company made up to strength with trainee officers and a party of Royal Marines: seventy-five men in all. She dived about thirty miles south of the Isle of Wight at a quarter past nine that evening and was due to make her surfacing signal by nine the next morning. Nothing came.

The search that followed was the largest of its kind the Navy had ever mounted and it went on for two months over some of the most awkward ground in British waters, the Hurd Deep off the Channel Islands being a trench of considerable depth in the middle of a fast tideway. Loch Fyne's contact on 14 June was made in an area that had already been searched once.

What killed her has never been settled. The board of inquiry, under Rear-Admiral R. M. Dick, found that her snort mast had broken off, and the Navy concluded that the mast had failed through metal fatigue and let the sea in. The divers who went down on her were less sure, and thought the mast might equally have snapped when she hit the bottom; the standing alternative is an explosion in her main battery. Seventy-five years later the argument is still open. Affray is the last submarine the Royal Navy has lost at sea, and Loch Fyne is the ship that found her.

That same commission brought a very different sort of tragedy that September, when the forward falls of a whaler being hoisted at Portland broke and left her crew in danger; Petty Officer Woods lost his life going to their assistance, a sobering reminder that peacetime service carried its own real risks.

A Decade in the Gulf

HMS Loch Fyne was decommissioned for modernisation in March 1952 and recommissioned on 14 February 1956 for Persian Gulf service, going on to complete multiple tours across the Gulf and Indian Ocean over the following years.

She assisted the disabled Swedish tanker MV Julius in 1956 and the Norwegian tanker Gilda, aground off Iran, in January 1957, embarked the future Cabinet minister John Profumo, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and five years away from the scandal that would end his political career, for a passage to the Seychelles and the Maldives in September 1958, and even collected a herd of heifers from Socotra for the Ruler of Bahrain's own stock the previous month. The Sultan of Muscat presented her captain with a silver coffee pot in July 1962, a gift so unusual that the only previous recipient of anything similar had been a visiting admiral, and she stood by on air-sea rescue duty in January 1961 while Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Flight passed overhead en route to Delhi.

Her most demanding Gulf moment came in April 1961, when, exercising alongside HMS Loch Alvie and HMS Loch Ruthven, she was sent 250 miles to help fight a fire aboard the passenger liner MV Dara, towing the blazing, drifting hull clear of shallow water before handing the firefighting effort on to Loch Alvie and the salvage vessel Ocean Salvor; despite everyone's efforts, Dara later foundered under tow, with 238 of the 819 aboard losing their lives. Three months later she joined Loch Alvie again for Operation Vantage, patrolling to intercept Iraqi craft during the defence of Kuwait, before the operation was stood down that August once Arab League troops took over. Other highlights of a remarkably busy Gulf decade included multinational exercises such as Exercise Jet in the Indian Ocean and the CENTO exercise Midlink V.

What happened to Dara, and the Admiralty court finding that an anti-tank mine had been deliberately placed aboard her by a person or persons unknown, is set out in the article on HMS Loch Alvie (F428), the ship Loch Fyne handed the firefighting over to.

A Quiet End

HMS Loch Fyne returned to Devonport to decommission on 6 May 1963, and was laid up in reserve there before being placed on the Disposal List in 1964.

She was finally sold for scrapping in 1970, closing out the career of a frigate whose most historically notable contribution came not from any combat action, but from a single, critical sonar contact during one of the Royal Navy's most anxious postwar search operations.