HMS Porlock Bay (K650): From Facing Down Guatemala to 124,000 Nautical Miles Under a Different Flag

A Bay-Class Ship Finding Her Feet

HMS Porlock Bay was one of the Royal Navy's Bay-class anti-aircraft frigates, part of the same wartime-designed family as ships like HMS Cook and HMS Padstow Bay, ordered in 1944 as the naval war's centre of gravity shifted towards the Pacific, where kamikaze attacks made anti-aircraft escorts a more urgent priority than the U-boat hunters the class had originally been intended as. She was laid down at Charles Hill's yard in Bristol on 22 November 1944, launched on 14 June 1945, and, like so many of her sisters, completed only after the war she was designed for had already ended, on 8 March 1946.

Both of the ships named there have accounts of their own here. HMS Padstow Bay (K608), who would be in company with Porlock Bay on the run to Bermuda that July, sets out how the Bay class came to be redesigned out of the Loch-class anti-submarine frigates halfway through building; and HMS Cook (K638) changed her mind twice more than that and came out as a survey ship.

She commissioned on 14 February 1946 under Lieutenant D. L. Davenport for service with the America and West Indies Station. After weapon trials at Portland that spring, April found her paying a rather charming visit of her own, to Porlock itself, the small Somerset harbour she had been named after.

On 22 July she sailed for Bermuda in company with her sister HMS Padstow Bay, and that August took on the unglamorous job of towing a disabled landing craft into port, a task that left her needing a spell in drydock after a collision. September brought smarter duties, embarking the Governor of Newfoundland at Argentia for an official tour calling at St John's, St Anthony, Corner Brook, Bagotville, Quebec and Charlottetown, before she put back into Bermuda for maintenance that November.

The new year brought further exercises and official visits around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, taking in Veracruz, Kingston, Galveston, Mobile, Key West and Nassau, a pleasant enough introduction to peacetime naval life.

A Real Job in Belize

That pleasant touring came to an abrupt and rather more serious halt in July 1947. Porlock Bay had spent the month's first fortnight on official visits around Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas with the Governor embarked, but on the 21st she was despatched to Belize City instead, after Guatemala threatened the colony of British Honduras.

Guatemala had long claimed sovereignty over the territory, a dispute stretching back to the nineteenth century that periodically flared into genuine tension, and sending a frigate to stand visibly off the coast was exactly the sort of low-key but unmistakable gunboat diplomacy the Royal Navy still practised in the dying years of empire.

The quarrel did not go away, and neither did the Royal Navy's part in it. Guatemala went on claiming the territory for another forty-four years after Porlock Bay showed herself off Belize City, and the Navy kept being sent back: a survey ship, HMS Fawn (A325), found herself facing down a Guatemalan gunboat in her turn, and in 1972 the deterrent of choice was an aircraft carrier. Belize became independent in 1981 with a British garrison left behind to make the point, and Guatemala did not recognise it until 1991.

She remained in the Honduras sea area until the end of the month, back in Kingston by 7 August, and spent what turned out to be her final settled weeks in the Caribbean visiting Tobago, Barbados and British Guiana before the axe fell that September.

It was a brief but pointed reminder that even a ship built too late for the Second World War could still find herself doing real, consequential work in its aftermath.

A Short First Career

The Belize deployment turned out to be close to the high point of Porlock Bay's Royal Navy service. Post-war budget reductions caught up with her on 12 September 1947, when early termination of her commission was announced, and she began the long passage home by way of Miami and Santiago de Cuba.

She limped into Bermuda on 7 October having run into a hurricane along the way, before finally reaching Devonport on 3 November 1947. A further spell with the Fishery Protection Squadron followed through 1948, and she was formally reduced to reserve status at Devonport in January 1949, not yet three years after she had first commissioned.

Matti Kurki, and Sixteen Voyages Under a New Flag

It would have been easy for Porlock Bay's story to end there, tied up and gradually forgotten like so many of her reserve-fleet contemporaries. Instead, on 19 March 1962, she was sold to Finland as a temporary replacement for the sail training ship Suomen Joutsen, and renamed Matti Kurki, after a legendary chieftain from thirteenth-century Vesilahti so wreathed in folklore that historians cannot even be sure he really existed.

Commander Matts Wikberg led the Finnish crew who collected her from Britain, and she was given a proper send-off into her second career with a ceremonial reception at Turku's Pansio naval base that April, delegations, band and all. At 94 metres and 1,580 tons, now armed purely for training with two 4-inch Vickers guns, she carried a crew of 140 and enough of her 724 tons of fuel capacity to cross the Atlantic without refuelling.

The disarming is the part that needs explaining, because it was not thrift. Finland had signed the Paris peace treaty in February 1947, and Part III of it capped the entire Finnish navy at ten thousand tons of shipping and four and a half thousand people, and forbade submarines, torpedoes, sea mines and guided missiles outright.

Put Matti Kurki against that ceiling and the arithmetic becomes striking. At 1,580 tons she was, on her own, better than a seventh of everything Finland was permitted to float. Most of what a Bay-class frigate was built to carry would have been illegal under the treaty in any case, so she went to sea with two 4-inch guns, a hundred and forty people and a great deal of accommodation, which for a training ship is the right way round. A country not allowed a proper navy still needed officers who could handle a ship in the open Atlantic, and this was how it got them.

Over the next twelve years she made sixteen long foreign voyages under Finnish colours, training an estimated 1,500 naval cadets and logging a combined 124,393 nautical miles, distance enough, sailed in one unbroken loop, to have circled the globe close to six times over. She never actually sailed it that way: by the 1960s she no longer rounded Cape Horn or transited the Panama Canal, and her furthest ports of call were Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1967 and Sevastopol in the Soviet Union in 1963, with Denmark, closer to home, visited eight separate times. For a ship whose Royal Navy career had barely stretched to three years, it was still an extraordinary second act.

A Quiet Finnish Retirement

Matti Kurki's training days ended in 1974, after which she was permanently moored at Upinniemi, the Finnish naval base near Helsinki, before finally being scrapped at Pohja, Finland, in 1975. It was a fitting, unhurried retirement in the country that had, in the end, made far more sustained use of her than the navy that had originally built her.

Her original nameplate survives today at the Forum Marinum maritime museum in Turku, decorated with a coat of arms showing a crane carrying a cannonball, a fitting emblem given that kurki is simply the Finnish word for the bird.

A Ship Better Known Abroad

HMS Porlock Bay's own name barely survives in British naval memory, overshadowed by a brief, unglamorous Royal Navy career cut short by budget cuts within a few years of commissioning. In Finland, though, several generations of naval cadets would have known her intimately, as the ship that carried them across a good stretch of the North Atlantic and the Baltic, well over a hundred thousand nautical miles of it, under the name Matti Kurki.

It is a reminder that a warship's real legacy is not always written by the navy that built her.