HMS Padstow Bay (K608): The Frigate Whose Whole War Was a Caribbean Cruise

A Loch That Became a Bay

HMS Padstow Bay belongs to that peculiarly unlucky generation of Royal Navy escorts ordered in the last full year of the Second World War, only for the war to be rather rudely won before they were ready. She was laid down at Henry Robb's yard in Leith on 25 September 1944, originally intended as a Loch-class anti-submarine frigate under the name Loch Coulside.

Like many of her sisters, she was redesigned partway through construction as a Bay-class ship instead, trading some of her anti-submarine armament for a heavier anti-aircraft outfit better suited to defending the fleet then pressing towards Japan, where kamikaze attacks had made air defence the more urgent problem.

She took the name Padstow Bay, the first Royal Navy ship ever to carry it, after the Cornish fishing town and its harbour, and was launched on 28 August 1945, a little over a fortnight after Japan's surrender ended the war she had been designed to help win. Her new badge was suitably nautical if a touch surprising for a ship named after a sleepy Cornish harbour: a wolf, couchant, on a wavy gold and blue field, heraldry apparently caring rather less about zoological accuracy near a fishing village than about looking suitably fierce.

In fairness to the heralds, the wolf is not an accident and has nothing to do with zoology. Padstow is Petroc's Stow, named for St Petroc, the sixth-century abbot who founded the monastery there and a second one at Bodmin. Among the many stories told about him is that he tamed a wolf, which thereafter served as his watchdog and would not leave the cell he retired to when he wanted to be left alone. A wolf couchant on the badge of a ship named for Padstow is Petroc's wolf, lying down outside the door.

The bay has a rather less peaceable reputation than the town. The mouth of the Camel estuary is barred by the Doom Bar, a shifting sandbank that has accounted for somewhere between four and six hundred vessels wrecked, stranded or foundered over the centuries, and which Cornish legend blames on a mermaid: a young man named Tristram Bird is supposed to have shot her, having taken her for a seal, and with her dying breath she threw up handfuls of sand from the seabed and cursed the harbour.

So the naming committee gave an anti-aircraft frigate the name of a bay whose single most famous feature is a sandbank that has sunk several hundred ships, and put a saint's pet wolf on her badge. Whether that was a deliberate piece of dry humour or simply nobody checking is not recorded. Given how her career turned out, sailing round the Caribbean for eighteen months and then sleeping for eleven years, the curse cannot be said to have taken.

Fitting out and trials took their time, as they did for a great many wartime programmes suddenly relieved of their urgency, and she was not completed until 11 March 1946, commissioning that June at Plymouth.

She had, in effect, arrived at the party a full year after it ended.

As completed, she was a fairly typical Bay-class ship: a little over 1,600 tons standard displacement, built around the hull, machinery and lattice mast of the Loch design she had started life as, but carrying twin 4-inch guns fore and aft, twin 40mm Bofors amidships and twin 20mm Oerlikons for close-range work, backed by a Type 285 gunnery radar. Even getting her to sea proved a struggle in the postwar manpower crunch: through April 1946 she sat at Plymouth with a reduced crew, simply waiting for enough sailors to become available to bring her up to full complement.

She kept a Hedgehog and depth charges too, a nod to her original anti-submarine purpose, though by the time she was ready for sea there was, happily, no enemy submarine left to use them against.

Henry Robb's yard at Leith, on the Firth of Forth, was one of the many smaller British shipbuilders pressed into large-scale naval construction during the war, turning out escorts, minesweepers and landing craft alongside its usual peacetime trade in merchant vessels.

Padstow Bay was one of 26 ships ordered to the revised Bay-class design, a programme driven by the British Pacific Fleet's urgent need for anti-aircraft escorts once it became clear just how costly kamikaze attacks could be; the irony, repeated across the class, was that most of these ships were completed only after the very threat they were built to counter had ceased to exist.

One Deployment, Thoroughly Enjoyed

If HMS Padstow Bay never got to fight a war, she made the most of the peace that followed. After contractor's trials and a work-up at Portland to calibrate her weapons, she sailed in July 1946 for Bermuda by way of the Azores, arriving on 8 August to join the America and West Indies Station, the Royal Navy's answer to a very pleasant posting indeed.

What followed was less a deployment than an extended goodwill tour. Through the autumn of 1946 she ranged the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America on a genuinely epic circuit: Havana in Cuba, Vera Cruz in Mexico, ports in Honduras, Kingston in Jamaica, Bluefields in Nicaragua, Cartagena in Colombia, Curacao, La Guaira in Venezuela, Trinidad, Georgetown in British Guiana, Paramaribo in Surinam and finally Cayenne in French Guiana, before turning for home and returning to Bermuda by 15 November.

In 1947 she carried on in similar style, visiting the Leeward Islands, Tobago and Antigua, before heading north in June, this time sailing in company with the cruiser HMS Sheffield, for joint exercises with the Royal Canadian Navy out of Halifax. From there the pair worked their way up the eastern seaboard and into the Gulf of St Lawrence, calling at Bathurst in New Brunswick, Ellis Bay on Anticosti Island, the French islands of Miquelon, and Argentia, St John's and Corner Brook in Newfoundland, before continuing as far up the St Lawrence as Montreal and finally, on the way back to Bermuda, a call at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the United States.

It is hard to think of a more agreeable itinerary for a frigate built to shoot down aeroplanes, and one imagines her crew were not overly troubled by the change of plan.

The America and West Indies Station she had joined was one of the Navy's oldest overseas commands, dating back to the days of sail, and by 1946 its work was less about fighting than about reassurance: showing the White Ensign around colonies and friendly republics alike at a moment when Britain's global reach was visibly contracting, even if the ships doing the showing had not yet had time to notice.

For a frigate designed to fend off kamikazes over the Pacific, it was a gentle and rather fortunate way to spend a first commission.

Paid Off, and Into a Long Sleep

The tour could not last forever. Nominated for reserve status in October 1947, Padstow Bay made her way home to Plymouth, arriving on 18 October, and was paid off at Devonport that December, joining the Reserve Fleet.

There she stayed, in the way so many wartime-designed but peacetime-built escorts did, laid up and largely forgotten while the Navy worked out what to do with a generation of ships that had never quite found their war.

She remained in reserve for over a decade, a remarkably long time to spend tied up doing nothing in particular, before finally being placed on the Disposal List in 1958.

By then Britain's harbours were full of similarly redundant wartime tonnage, and the British Iron and Steel Corporation, set up to manage the flow of scrap metal back into domestic industry, had become the standard channel for selling off ships the Navy no longer needed.

Padstow Bay was sold through BISCO in 1959 and passed to an Italian shipbreaker, arriving under tow at La Spezia, on Italy's Ligurian coast and by then one of Europe's busiest breaking yards, on 11 August 1959 to be cut up for scrap.

A Career of One Voyage

There is something almost wistful about a warship whose entire operational life amounted to a single, extended cruise. HMS Padstow Bay never fired her guns in anger, never hunted a submarine, and never did any of the things her Bay-class armament of twin 4-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikons was designed for.

What she did do was spend a year and a half showing the flag around some of the most agreeable ports in the Western Hemisphere, before spending nearly twelve times as long doing nothing at all.

Not every Bay-class ship shared her fate of quiet obsolescence. Some of her sisters went on to become survey ships or despatch vessels, others were transferred to foreign navies including Portugal and Finland, and a handful served on into the 1960s.

Padstow Bay's path was simpler and, in its way, more poignant: one bright commission, followed by a long silence, followed by a tow to an Italian breaker's yard.

It is a very Royal Navy sort of story: built for a war, deployed for a holiday, and retired to gather rust while the world moved on without her. Named for a small Cornish town whose harbour has seen rather less excitement than the ship that carried its name, Padstow Bay's brief moment in the Caribbean sun remains her one claim to a story worth telling.