HMS Quantock (L58): From Escorting Prince of Wales to a Second Career as Presidente Alfaro

A Type I Hunt, Built at Speed

HMS Quantock was a Type I Hunt-class escort destroyer, ordered on 11 April 1939 as the shadow of war lengthened over Europe, and laid down that July at Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering in Greenock. True to the Hunt class's habit of borrowing its names from English fox hunts rather than admirals or battles, she was the first Royal Navy warship to carry a name lifted from the Quantock Hills of Somerset.

She launched on 22 April 1940 and commissioned on 6 February 1941 under Lieutenant Commander David Josceline Algernon Heber-Percy, one of a large family of small, fast escort destroyers designed to be built quickly and in numbers to fill the desperate wartime shortage of ships capable of protecting convoys from submarines and aircraft alike.

Type I is doing a lot of quiet work in that description, and it is worth unpacking, because Quantock went to sea a third less well armed than she was designed to be. The Hunts were drawn with three twin 4-inch mountings, which for a ship of a thousand tons is a serious anti-aircraft battery. Then somebody checked the stability calculations and found a plain arithmetical error in them: as designed, the ships were dangerously top-heavy and would not have survived a bad sea, never mind a bad sea and a full magazine.

The fix was blunt. The first twenty Hunts, Quantock among them, had one mounting taken out and ballast put in, and went to war with four guns instead of six. For the Type IIs the Admiralty cut the hulls lengthwise down the middle and inserted a strip two and a half feet wide to give them the beam they should have had in the first place, at which point they got their third mounting back. The whole business is set out in the article on HMS Eglinton (L87). It is one of the more expensive sums ever got wrong in a British drawing office, and Quantock spent five years of war paying for it.

Screening the Fleet's Biggest Names

Quantock's earliest service put her in some remarkably illustrious company. In March 1941 she screened the battleship HMS Rodney during gunnery exercises near Scapa Flow and escorted the brand new battleship HMS Prince of Wales during her own trials, the very ship that would go down fighting the Bismarck within weeks and be lost herself later that same year off Malaya.

In April 1941 Quantock helped escort the newly commissioned aircraft carrier HMS Victorious from the Tyne to Rosyth, a string of assignments that had her working alongside some of the most significant capital ships in the entire fleet before she had even completed her first year in commission.

The three big ships she was keeping company with all have articles of their own here, and between them they cover a fair slice of the war: HMS Rodney (29), who would help finish Bismarck off eight weeks after those gunnery exercises, and HMS Victorious (R38), whose Swordfish put the first torpedo into her. As for Prince of Wales, the ship Quantock nursed through her trials in March 1941 had nine months to live, and what she did with them is set out in the article on the carrier that carries her name today.

The unglamorous side of that same North Sea work showed itself that summer and autumn: on 10 June 1941 Quantock pulled survivors from the corvette HMS Pintail after she was lost, and on 10 October she did the same for the crew of the Greek grain ship Kyma, the sort of rescue that never earns a battle honour but mattered just as much to the men pulled out of the water.

Hunting Submarines Off Sicily

By the summer of 1943, now under Lieutenant Richard George Lovell Pennell, DSC, who had taken command that January, Quantock had moved to the Mediterranean, where the war had taken a decisive turn against the Axis.

On 24 June she departed the UK with convoy KMS 18B, bound for the invasion of Sicily, and during the passage the escort destroyers, Quantock among them, were diverted to hunt German submarines U-409 and U-375 after they attacked ships within the convoy, exactly the kind of fast, tense, close-quarters anti-submarine work the Hunt class had been designed for.

That September she escorted convoy STF 1 from Augusta towards Taranto, protecting transports and landing craft as the Allied campaign moved onto the Italian mainland. Command changed hands again on 3 October, when Lieutenant Kenneth Talbot Holland took over for what would prove her longest and final wartime commission, seeing her through the Adriatic operations of 1944 and on to VE Day; by the time she was done, Quantock had earned battle honours across five separate theatres and campaigns: the North Sea from 1941 to 1945, the Atlantic in 1943, Sicily in 1943, Salerno in 1943, and the Adriatic in 1944.

From Training Ship to Foreign Flagship

After the war, Quantock settled into the quieter role of an air target training vessel, helping gunnery crews and pilots hone their skills, before paying off into the Reserve Fleet in December 1945 under her fourth and final wartime captain, Temporary Lieutenant Arthur Philip Tomkins, RNVR. Her active career, though, was far from over.

On 18 October 1954 she was sold to the Ecuadorian Navy alongside her sister ship HMS Meynell, which would be renamed Presidente Velasco Ibarra. Quantock herself underwent a refit by J. Samuel White on the Isle of Wight, and commissioned at Portsmouth Dockyard on 16 August 1955 as Presidente Alfaro, named in honour of Eloy Alfaro, the reforming nineteenth-century Ecuadorian president.

In an interesting echo, another Royal Navy frigate in this same series, HMS Penelope, would later serve Ecuador decades on under the closely related name Presidente Eloy Alfaro, a small but neat coincidence in how the two navies' histories intertwined.

That echo runs a little deeper than a coincidence of names. Eloy Alfaro was president of Ecuador twice, separated church from state, brought in civil marriage and free secular schooling and drove the railway from Guayaquil up over the Andes to Quito, and in January 1912 a mob dragged him out of the penitentiary in Quito, killed him and burned his body in a park. The Ecuadorean navy has been naming ships after him ever since, which is why two former Royal Navy warships forty years apart both ended up carrying it. The fuller account is in the article on HMS Penelope (F127).

Over Two Decades Under a New Flag

As Presidente Alfaro, the former Quantock remained in active Ecuadorian service for well over two decades, considerably longer than her original Royal Navy commission had lasted, before finally being struck from the active list in 1978 and sold for scrapping. It was a truly long and useful second career for a ship built in the desperate early years of the Second World War.

A Destroyer Twice Over

HMS Quantock's story traces a path from screening some of the Royal Navy's most famous capital ships through the Mediterranean's hardest-fought campaigns, and on to a full second life defending a South American republic's coastline under a president's name. Not bad going for a ship named after a range of Somerset hills better known for foxes than presidents, and few small wartime escorts managed quite so long or so varied a working life.