HMS St Austell Bay (K634): From the Haifa Patrol to the Hunt for a Lost Submarine

Ordered as a Loch, Completed as a Bay

HMS St Austell Bay began life as an order for the Loch-class frigate Loch Lydoch, placed with Harland and Wolff of Belfast on 2 February 1943, one of twenty-six Loch-class hulls redesigned partway through construction into the more heavily anti-aircraft-armed Bay-class, of which only nineteen were ultimately completed.

She was launched on 18 November 1944 and commissioned on 5 May 1945 under her first captain, Lieutenant-Commander H. J. Lee, arriving just as the war in Europe was ending and too late to see action against Japan; her workup for Far Eastern service was quietly abandoned on 15 August, the very day the news of the Japanese surrender reached her at Malta.

The change from Loch to Bay is worth understanding, because it is a design decision that records the exact moment the Admiralty decided one war was won and another was not. A Loch-class frigate was an anti-submarine ship: prefabricated in sections by structural engineering firms who had never built a warship, thrown together fast and cheap, and armed principally with the Squid mortar, which threw a pattern of depth charges ahead of the ship instead of dropping them over the stern. By the middle of 1944 the Atlantic had been won and there were more of these building than there were U-boats left to hunt.

What there was going to be, everybody could see, was a Pacific war against Japanese aircraft. So twenty-six Loch hulls already on the slips were redrawn on the way up: the anti-submarine armament came out and a heavy anti-aircraft fit went in, twin 4-inch guns and a great deal of close range weaponry, and the resulting ships were called the Bay class. Nineteen were finished. The joke, and it is not much of one, is that St Austell Bay was completed for a war against aircraft in May 1945, was still working up for the Pacific in August, and spent the next decade doing neither: chasing refugee ships off Palestine, playing football in Auckland and guarding the Falklands. Her sisters are here in numbers, among them HMS Veryan Bay (K651), who appears more than once in her story, and HMS Cardigan Bay, whose account covers the Palestine patrols and the Exodus in full.

The Haifa Patrol

St Austell Bay spent the next five years in the Mediterranean, patrolling the Aegean and Adriatic on guardship duties out of Trieste and Pola. In October 1946 she was on hand in the aftermath of one of the era's more notorious incidents, the Corfu Channel affair, after the destroyers HMS Saumarez and HMS Volage struck Albanian mines with the loss of forty-four lives, a dispute over Albania's right to mine international waters that would go all the way to the newly formed International Court of Justice.

The Corfu Channel case matters more than a footnote about mines. It was the first contentious case the International Court of Justice ever decided, and the judgment it produced in 1949 is the foundation of the modern law on innocent passage through international straits, which is the principle Royal Navy ships are still invoking when they sail through the Taiwan Strait or the Strait of Hormuz today. What happened on the day, and what it was like to be shot at from the Albanian shore, is in HMS Superb (25).

From December 1946 she began the first of several deployments on the Haifa Patrol, intercepting ships attempting to carry Jewish refugees to Palestine in defiance of British immigration restrictions, among them the SS Flying Enterprise and the Empire Welcome, fitted with special protective screens to deflect whatever the increasingly desperate passengers threw at boarding parties, one of the more politically fraught and morally complicated duties given to any Royal Navy vessel in the immediate postwar years.

An Exchange Tour to New Zealand

In April 1950, St Austell Bay and her sister ship HMS Veryan Bay were detached for a six-month exchange with the Royal New Zealand Navy's 11th Frigate Flotilla, sailing out via Aden, Trincomalee, the Cocos Islands and Fremantle before reaching Auckland that July. Between exercises she found time for a spot of diplomacy through sport, her ship's company thrashing the Royal New Zealand Navy 7-0 and the Royal New Zealand Air Force 9-1 at football, results Western Australia and Tasmania could at least claim to have narrowed a little when the ship had called at Perth and Hobart along the way. She went on to patrol as far afield as Tonga and the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, disposing of a ton of surplus cyanide over the side in the Pacific en route, a piece of casual environmental practice that would raise considerably more eyebrows today, before returning to Malta via Singapore in January 1951.

The cyanide deserves its moment. It reads today like an atrocity and at the time it was paperwork. Until the London Convention of 1972 there were essentially no rules about what a ship could put over the side once she was out of sight of land, and navies, industries and municipalities all took the same view: the ocean is enormous, the material sinks, and that is the end of the matter. Surplus and time-expired stores were routinely dumped at sea, including chemicals, ammunition and, on a much larger scale than a ton of cyanide, captured German chemical weapons, tens of thousands of tons of which were sunk in the Baltic and the Skagerrak after 1945 and are corroding there still. St Austell Bay was doing the normal thing. It is only the record-keeping that makes her look unusual.

Searching for HMS Affray

Back with the Home Fleet's 7th Frigate Flotilla and freshly recommissioned under Captain D. C. Ingram on 9 April 1951, St Austell Bay had barely a week to settle in before being deployed, on 17 April, in the desperate search for the submarine HMS Affray, lost with all seventy-five hands in the English Channel that month, one of the Royal Navy's worst peacetime submarine disasters.

Guarding the Falklands

Transferred to the America and West Indies Squadron in 1952, St Austell Bay arrived at Port Stanley that July to relieve HMS Veryan Bay as Falklands guardship, a commission that saw her salvage the wrecked trawler Golden Chance from Falkland Sound and tow the damaged survey ship HMS Protector back into port after a propulsion failure, alongside patrols to Fox Bay, Darwin and Goose Green. Her first lieutenant for part of this commission was a young John Harvey-Jones, who would go on to chair ICI and become one of Britain's best-known television business troubleshooters decades later. She returned home via Chile and Peru, meeting the HMS Sheffield at Valparaiso, before a further Caribbean and North American commission running into 1956 that took in exercises with the US and Canadian navies and a five-day Baltimore visit drawing over 1,700 public visitors aboard.

The First Lieutenant Who Became a Television Star

John Harvey-Jones is worth more than a name-check, because the years before he stood on her bridge are stranger than the years after. He went to Dartmouth in 1937 and was a midshipman at sixteen; two of the ships he served in were sunk under him; he went into submarines in 1942 and had his own command at twenty-four. After the war the Navy sent him to Cambridge to learn Russian in six months, which he did, and put him into naval intelligence.

What he then ran is the part nobody believes. Operating under the cover name of the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service, he directed clandestine intelligence work against the Soviet Baltic Fleet using two captured German E-boats, and was appointed MBE for it in 1952. He resigned his commission in 1956, joined Imperial Chemical Industries on Teesside as a junior manager, rose to be chairman of the largest manufacturing company in Britain, and then spent his retirement on BBC television walking into failing firms and telling their owners, with great charm and no mercy at all, what was wrong with them. He won a BAFTA for it. Somewhere in the middle of all that he was first lieutenant of a Bay-class frigate in the South Atlantic, towing a broken survey ship into Port Stanley.

Broken Up at Rosyth

HMS St Austell Bay returned to Plymouth to decommission in August 1956, was placed on the disposal list in 1959, and was sold to BISCO for demolition, arriving in tow at the breakers' yard at Charlestown near Rosyth on 5 July that year, closing out a career that had taken her from the fraught waters off Palestine to the far side of the Pacific and back again.