HMS Meynell (L82): Ashbourne's Destroyer, Four Years in the North Sea and a Second Life in Ecuador

Built for the Narrow Seas

HMS Meynell was laid down by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne on 10 August 1939, three weeks before the war began, on the same day and in the same yard as her sister Mendip. She was one of the first Hunt Class escort destroyers, ordered that April as small, quick to build ships with a strong anti-aircraft armament for convoy escort in the narrow waters around Britain.

She was launched on 7 June 1940, in the week that the evacuation from Dunkirk ended, and completed on 30 December 1940; the yard's work on her may have been held up by the urgent repairs needed by ships damaged off Norway and at Dunkirk.

The Hunts took their names from fox hunts, and Meynell's came from the Meynell hunt in Derbyshire. She was the second ship of the name; the first had been a minesweeper of 1917, one of the earlier Hunt Class of the First World War. Her badge was a gold scallop shell bearing a fox's mask.

In February 1942 the people of Ashbourne in Derbyshire adopted her following a Warship Week savings drive. She was first commanded by Lieutenant Commander William Farrington.

As a Type I she carried four 4 inch high-angle guns in two twin mountings, with a four-barrelled pom-pom aft and depth charges for hunting submarines. The first Hunts had come out of the yards too top heavy for the third twin mounting the design had promised, and the Type Is went to sea with two.

In 1941, like many of the East Coast escorts, Meynell was given an extra gun, a 2 pounder pom-pom mounted right at her stem, the bow chaser, which could be fired dead ahead at an E-boat. It can be seen clearly in the photograph above.

The East Coast Convoys

She worked up at Scapa Flow in January 1941 and joined the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness, and on 3 February she escorted the auxiliary minelayer Teviot Bank as she laid a section of the East Coast mine barrier, the long field that kept the German surface ships and U-boats away from the coastal convoy route. Four days later she began the work that would fill most of the next four years.

Every day a southbound convoy, the FS, left the Forth for the Thames and a northbound convoy, the FN, set out the other way, each of thirty or forty colliers and coasters strung out for miles along a channel a few cables wide, swept clear of mines between the barrier and the sandbanks of the coast. The convoys carried the coal that kept London's power stations, gasworks and factories going.

They were bombed and machine gunned by day, and on dark nights, especially in the stretch off Norfolk and Suffolk that the sailors called E-boat Alley, the German motor torpedo boats came across from Holland and lay in wait off the buoys that marked the channel.

The Hunts, with Garth, Holderness and the old V and W destroyers of the flotilla, were the backbone of the escort, and Meynell also went out at night to support the British Coastal Forces in their own battles with the E-boats.

In the late summer of 1942 Captain Cecil Parry, Captain (D) of the flotilla, flew his pendant in Meynell for a few weeks before moving his staff to Mendip in September, and Lieutenant Brian I'Anson took command. In December she and Mendip were escorting a northbound convoy when the E-boats got in among the merchant ships, and several were sunk.

Mason, who recorded her career, called her "another of the unsung heroines of the North Sea", and it is a fair description: much of her work left no mark in the record books, because most of the convoys she escorted arrived without loss.

Arctic 1943

In February 1943 she was lent to the Home Fleet, and on 15 February she sailed from Loch Ewe with Middleton and Pytchley as the western local escort of the Russian convoy JW 53, taking it out past the north of Scotland until the ocean escort took over on the 21st. In March she and Pytchley met the homeward convoy RA 53 and brought it in to Loch Ewe.

It was a small part of the Arctic campaign, but in a winter of gales it earned her the battle honour Arctic 1943, and then she went back to the North Sea.

Normandy

On 25 February 1944 she was in action again with E-boats attacking a convoy off Great Yarmouth. In the spring she was told off for the invasion of Normandy, and in June she joined Garth and the corvettes Camellia and Charlock as Escort Group 101 at the Nore.

On D-Day itself, 6 June, the group sailed with one of the first follow-up convoys, ETM 1, nine large infantry landing craft and twelve ships loaded with vehicles, and saw it safely to its anchorage off the beaches. For the next month she escorted the build-up convoys from the Thames to France, and on 5 July she rejoined her flotilla for the North Sea.

On 31 October 1944 she ran aground and badly damaged her starboard propeller shaft, and she spent the winter under repair in London. She was back at Sheerness by March 1945, when the U-boats, now fitted with schnorkels, were making a last effort against the coastal convoys and the E-boats were laying mines in the Thames approaches.

Her last captain of the war was Lieutenant Jack Bitmead, who held the DSO.

Presidente Velasco Ibarra

After the German surrender she was chosen for conversion to an air target ship, and in September 1945 her guns were taken out at Rosyth so that she could act as a fast target for aircraft to practise attacks on. She served in that role in the Mediterranean until 1947, and was then reduced to reserve at Sheerness, Harwich and Barrow.

In October 1954 she was sold to Ecuador, together with her sister Quantock, and after a refit by J S White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight she sailed for South America in 1955 as the Presidente Velasco Ibarra, named after José María Velasco Ibarra, who was then serving the third of his five terms as President of Ecuador. She served the Ecuadorian Navy for more than twenty years and was broken up in 1978.

Her battle honours were English Channel 1941-43, North Sea 1941-45, Arctic 1943 and Normandy 1944. Other Hunts that shared the same waters, among them Cleveland, Wheatland and her sister Mendip, have their histories and photographs on this site.