HMS Owen (K640): The Survey Ship That Retraced Darwin's Voyage and Marooned a Willing Robinson Crusoe

A Frigate That Changed Identity Twice Before Completion

HMS Owen began life with a notably confusing string of identities: ordered from Hall Russell at Aberdeen on 2 May 1943 as the Loch-class anti-submarine frigate Loch Muick, she was laid down on 30 September 1944 already re-specified as the anti-aircraft Bay-class frigate Thurso Bay, then had her contract suspended and sat laid up for three years while the Admiralty worked out what to do with her. In September 1947 the answer arrived: she would become a survey ship, and she was towed to Chatham Dockyard and finally completed and commissioned in August 1949 under the name Owen, honouring Vice Admiral William Fitzwilliam Owen, a veteran of the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794 who went on to make his name surveying the coasts of Canada and West Africa.

Displacing 1,600 tons standard and capable of 20 knots, she never actually served in her originally intended frigate role at all.

Converted Before She Ever Fired a Shot in Anger

HMS Owen was converted into a survey vessel while still under construction, a decision driven by the enormous practical need, in the aftermath of the Second World War, to properly chart the huge numbers of uncharted wrecks and mines scattered around the British Isles as a direct legacy of years of naval combat.

Her Chatham refit added extra accommodation for chart preparation, proper stowage and handling gear for her survey launches, radar suited to survey work rather than gunnery, and a strengthened quarterdeck for handling sweeping and measuring equipment, while her only armament was four 3-pounder saluting guns, a striking illustration of just how completely her purpose had shifted from her originally intended role as a fighting frigate.

A Decade in the Persian Gulf

Between her 1949 commissioning and that famous Antarctic cruise, HMS Owen spent most of the 1950s shuttling between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean on unglamorous but genuinely useful survey work, charting the approaches to Bahrain and Qatar, sounding the Suez Canal's Strait of Gubal, and clearing decade-old wartime wreckage from the harbours of Tripoli and Tobruk, work that turned up some 80 obstructions at Tobruk alone and helped reopen the ports for use by British and American forces. Along the way her ship's company found time to rescue a stranded dhow crew off Qatar, host a Cambridge University research team for a gravity survey, and, memorably, attend a "mutton grab" hosted by the Sheikh of Qatar, the kind of small, human detail official records rarely bother to leave out.

Retracing Darwin's Voyage

HMS Owen undertook a remarkable expedition in 1961, a survey cruise lasting nearly five months that retraced portions of Charles Darwin's historic voyage aboard HMS Beagle through the South Atlantic and towards Antarctic waters.

She called at Gough Island to retrieve her medical officer, who had spent a full month tending to the medical needs of the isolated islanders of Tristan da Cunha, and landed members of her survey party alongside British scientists to carry out research ashore.

Icebergs, Teal Birds, and a Willing Castaway

HMS Owen navigated through dense fog and past icebergs to reach Elsehul, where she recovered further survey team members and, in a delightful piece of conservation work, transported three rare South Georgian teal birds to the Severn Wildfowl Trust for safekeeping.

The expedition's most remarkable moment, however, came when the author and explorer Duncan Carse disembarked in uncharted waters between Ducloz Head and South Undine Harbour to begin a deliberate, solitary Robinson Crusoe existence on South Georgia, an extraordinary act of voluntary isolation. Carse was no stranger to the island: between 1951 and 1957 he had led the South Georgia Survey through four southern summers, producing the first proper map of the whole island, one so accurate it was still the standard reference used by British forces during the 1982 Falklands conflict. This time, aged 47 and a decade removed from his other career as the voice of BBC radio's Dick Barton, Special Agent, he was attempting something rather different: a personal psychological experiment in total isolation, planned to run the best part of two years.

Before HMS Owen sailed on, her commanding officer, Commander G. P. D. Hall, presented Carse with the ship's own crest, a small, personal token to accompany him into a self-built hut he christened Arnow House on one of the most remote and inhospitable islands on Earth. The isolation lasted rather less than the two years originally planned: by May a surge wave had wrecked the hut and swept away many of his stores, and Carse held out until he was finally picked up by the sealing vessel Petrel, having spent from February to September, the whole of the southern winter, entirely alone. It was not his last brush with the island's dangers either; in 1973, ferried this time by the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance, he returned to attempt a retracing of Ernest Shackleton's celebrated 1916 crossing of South Georgia, only to be beaten back by a savage blizzard and rescued a fortnight later from high on the glacier.

Charts Instead of Gunnery

HMS Owen's blend of scientific surveying, wildlife conservation and support for isolated island communities captures something truly distinctive about the wide range of work Royal Navy ships undertook throughout the twentieth century, work that had nothing to do with combat and everything to do with knowledge, discovery and quiet, practical assistance to people living at the very edges of the map.

She had four more years of it left, and they were among her most useful. From late 1961 into 1963 Owen took part in the International Indian Ocean Expedition, one of the largest co-operative oceanographic programmes ever attempted, surveying the Kenyan and East African coasts, the open Indian Ocean and the waters around the Seychelles and the Maldives. It was, in a neat piece of continuity, exactly the coast her namesake had spent his career charting a hundred and forty years earlier.

Her last commission, through 1964 and 1965, was spent rather closer to home, running Eastern Atlantic surveys off Morocco and Spain with Decca navigation equipment, which was the coming thing and which would put ships like Owen out of a job soon enough.

Paid Off, and Broken Up at Blyth

HMS Owen paid off on 14 October 1965, sixteen years and two months after commissioning, and was reduced to reserve. She sat on the disposal list for the rest of the decade before being sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation in 1970 for demolition by Bolckow, arriving in tow at the breakers' yard at Blyth on 15 July that year.

It is worth remembering, at the end of it, what she was supposed to be. She was ordered as an anti-submarine frigate, redesignated as an anti-aircraft frigate, laid up half-built for three years while nobody could think what to do with her, and finally finished as a survey ship carrying four saluting guns and nothing else. She never fired a shot at anybody. What she did instead was chart the approaches to a dozen ports, clear eighty obstructions out of one harbour, carry a doctor to Tristan da Cunha, take three rare ducks to Gloucestershire and put a man ashore on South Georgia to be alone on purpose. Not every warship needs a battle honour.