HMS Penylan (L89): Carmarthen's Hunt, Three Months in Commission and an E-boat off Start Point

A Welsh Hunt from Barrow

HMS Penylan was one of fifteen Type III Hunt Class escort destroyers ordered in the summer of 1940, when the fall of France had opened the Channel and the Atlantic to the U-boats, aircraft and E-boats operating from French ports and the Navy needed escorts faster than it could build them. The Hunts were small, fast ships of about a thousand tons with a strong anti-aircraft armament.

The Type IIIs gave up one of the three twin 4 inch gun mountings of the Type II for a pair of torpedo tubes, so that they could fight as destroyers if they met enemy surface ships, and they were easily recognised by their upright funnel.

Vickers-Armstrongs laid her down at Barrow-in-Furness on 4 June 1941 as Job No. J3585 and launched her on 17 March 1942. Like all the Hunts she was named after a pack of hounds, in her case a hunt in Wales, and she was the first ship of the name.

That same March the people of the Borough and Rural District of Carmarthen raised the money for her in their Warship Week and adopted her. Her badge, red and green, carried an inverted gold horseshoe and a white spear head.

She commissioned on 25 August 1942 under Lieutenant Henry Kirkwood, and the shipbuilders completed her on the last day of the month.

This photograph was taken on 27 August, two days after she commissioned, as she was towed through the harbour with her ship's company on the forecastle and a tug in attendance. She is in her brand new disruptive camouflage of light and dark angled panels.

Scapa Flow

In September she went north to Scapa Flow to work up with the Home Fleet. A Hunt's work-up was short but hard, with gunnery, anti-submarine and night exercises, and in between she was used to escort the Home Fleet's big ships in and out of the Flow.

In late September she was escorting one of the fleet's big ships with her Type III sister Blean and Tanatside, and on 12 October she escorted Duke of York during exercises with Middleton and Lamerton. On 10 October Lieutenant Commander John Wallace took command.

When the work-up was over she sailed south to join her flotilla at Portsmouth, but on 22 October defects in her new machinery were found and she had to go into a commercial yard in London for repair. She did not join the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth until 9 November.

The Channel Convoys

The 1st Flotilla's job was to guard the coastal convoys that carried coal, stores and general cargo along the south coast of England, and the most dangerous enemy there was the German S-boat, which the British called the E-boat. These were fast, seaworthy motor torpedo boats, operating at night from Cherbourg and the Dutch and Belgian ports.

They would wait silently near the convoy route with their engines stopped, then dash in at over 35 knots to fire their torpedoes and escape into the darkness before the escorts could catch them. The small coasters and colliers were the usual targets, but an escort that came between the E-boats and the convoy could be hit too.

For three weeks Penylan escorted convoys up and down the Channel. On 1 December she sailed with convoy PW 257, one of the regular westbound convoys from Portsmouth towards the Bristol Channel and Wales.

Start Point

In the early hours of 3 December 1942, off the coast of South Devon, a group of E-boats found the convoy. A torpedo from S 115 struck Penylan, and she sank five miles south of Start Point, at about 50 degrees 8 minutes north, 3 degrees 39 minutes west. Five officers and 112 ratings were picked up from the water.

Thirty-seven of her company were killed or lost with her. Among them were Sub Lieutenant Reginald Ross of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, who is commemorated on the Halifax Memorial in Nova Scotia; Sub Lieutenant Patrick Hopkins, whose brother also died on active service; the ship's NAAFI canteen manager, John Hanna; and a petty officer telegraphist, a sick berth attendant, cooks, stokers and seamen.

Some of the dead were brought ashore and buried at Salcombe and at Plymouth; the rest are remembered on the naval memorials at Plymouth and Portsmouth.

She had been in commission for fourteen weeks, and Mason reckons she had less than thirty days of operational service. Penylan had the shortest life of any of the 86 Hunts. A week later Blean, the sister she had worked up alongside at Scapa, was torpedoed by a U-boat off Oran. Penylan's battle honour was English Channel 1942.

Remembered in Carmarthen

The wreck of Penylan lies in the Channel off Start Point, and it is protected as a war grave under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. Carmarthen, the town and district that paid for her, lists her dead on its war memorial roll.

Her Type III sisters went on to the long careers she never had: Glaisdale was manned by the Norwegians and fought off Normandy, Wensleydale took part in the sinking of three U-boats in a single summer, and Albrighton served into the Cold War with the West German Navy, while the Type II Wheatland, completed the year before her, came through the war.