HMS Myosotis (K65): From Convoy Corvette to Antarctic Whaler

Built in Aberdeen

HMS Myosotis was ordered on 31 August 1939 and built by J. Lewis and Sons Ltd in Aberdeen, laid down on 21 June 1940, launched on 28 January 1941 and commissioned on 30 May that year, a Flower-class corvette, one of a huge and thoroughly dependable class of small escort vessels that formed the backbone of Britain's Atlantic convoy protection effort throughout the Second World War.

There was a neat irony baked into that design from the very start. The Flower class itself had been developed from Southern Pride, a commercial whale-catcher built by the Smith's Dock Company, simply lengthened and strengthened to take on U-boats instead of whales. Myosotis, in other words, was descended from a whaling ship before she ever chased a single submarine.

The name was not decorative either. Myosotis is the forget-me-not, and with two hundred and ninety-four corvettes to name the Admiralty simply worked through the seed catalogue: Gladiolus, Marigold, Snowdrop, Tulip, Buttercup. There was a reason for it beyond running out of admirals. The propaganda value was thought to be worth having, on the reasoning that a U-boat commander who lost his boat to a British warship named after a garden plant was going to have to put that in his report.

One of them did not survive contact with the lower deck. HMS Pansy was ordered in 1939, and the story goes that her ship's company objected with some force to the prospect of Pansy on their cap ribbons. The name was changed before she was launched and she went to sea as Heartsease, which the naming committee will have known perfectly well is another name for a wild pansy. Honour was satisfied on all sides.

She served under two wartime commanding officers in succession, Lieutenant Gerald Peter Shiers Lowe from July 1941 until February 1943, and Temporary Lieutenant Reginald Lugg from then until roughly mid-1945.

A Convoy Career Spanning Two Oceans

HMS Myosotis escorted a wide range of convoys over the course of the war, beginning with Convoy HG 66 from Gibraltar to home waters in June and July 1941, and going on to escort Convoy KMS 3 from the Clyde to North Africa carrying troop transports that November.

She continued her escort duties through 1943 and 1944, covering Convoy OS 48 and KMS 15G from the UK to Freetown and Gibraltar, the homebound Convoy SL 131 from Freetown, and finally the long-haul Convoys GUS 29, GUS 36 and GUS 38, running between Port Said, New York and North Africa in the first half of 1944, a global spread of convoy work for a single small corvette.

No Confirmed Kills, But No Losses Either

HMS Myosotis's surviving records do not show any direct anti-submarine engagements resulting in a confirmed U-boat kill, a reminder that the vast majority of convoy escort work throughout the war involved no dramatic action at all, simply the patient, watchful business of shepherding merchant ships safely through dangerous waters, a job at which HMS Myosotis evidently succeeded well enough to see out the entire war without serious loss.

That paragraph deserves underlining, because it is easy to read a blank kill sheet as a blank career. A Flower was about two hundred and five feet and nine hundred and forty tons, made sixteen knots on one shaft, and carried a crew of around eighty-five in a hull originally drawn for a whale-catcher and a quarter of that number. She was wet, she was violently uncomfortable in any sea at all, an experience described in the articles on HMS Alisma (K185) and HMS Clematis (K36), and she was slower on the surface than the submarine she was hunting.

Which changes what the job actually was. A corvette could not run a U-boat down and everybody knew it. What she could do was be there: force the boat to dive, keep it down and blind while thirty merchant ships went past overhead, and still be in company the next morning. A U-boat submerged is a U-boat travelling at walking pace with a periscope for eyes. Most successful escort work therefore looks exactly like Myosotis's record, which is to say like nothing happening at all, repeatedly, across two oceans, for four years.

A Faroese Trawler, Then an Antarctic Whaler

HMS Myosotis's postwar story is where things get truly unusual. She was sold on 2 September 1946 to the Faroe Islands, refitted as the trawler Grunningur, a fate shared by a number of surplus Flower-class corvettes whose sturdy, seaworthy hulls made them well suited to conversion for commercial fishing work.

Her transformation did not stop there: she went on to serve as a whaler under the name Thorsørn in Antarctic waters between 1953 and 1967. Given that her own class had been designed from a whale-catcher in the first place, it was less a bizarre final twist than a ship simply returning to the family trade after a rather eventful couple of decades spent hunting U-boats in the North Atlantic instead.

She was finally sold to shipbreakers at Grimstad in 1969, closing out one of the more remarkable postwar careers of any former Flower-class corvette.