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, before the design was revised into the Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate she eventually became. She was launched on 18 November 1944 and completed on 29 May 1945, arriving just as the war in Europe was ending and too late to see action against Japan, being stationed at Malta rather than the Pacific when news of the Japanese surrender arrived that August.

The Haifa Patrol

St Austell Bay spent the next five years in the Mediterranean, patrolling the Aegean and Adriatic on guardship duties, including a spell on the Haifa Patrol, intercepting ships attempting to carry Jewish refugees to Palestine in defiance of British immigration restrictions, 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 took part in a reciprocal exchange with Royal New Zealand Navy frigates, arriving at Auckland that July for a spell of exercises and patrols in the Pacific before returning to Malta in January 1951, a genuinely far-flung deployment for a ship whose earlier service had been confined largely to home waters and the Mediterranean.

Searching for HMS Affray

Back with the Home Fleet's 7th Frigate Flotilla, St Austell Bay took part in the desperate search for the submarine HMS Affray, lost with all seventy-five hands in the English Channel in April 1951, one of the Royal Navy's worst peacetime submarine disasters. This account notes her involvement with the seriousness that loss deserves.

Guarding the Falklands

Transferred to the America and West Indies Squadron in June 1952, St Austell Bay served as guardship in the Falkland Islands and carried out regular patrols and exercises across the Caribbean and North American coasts, taking in visits to Chilean, Peruvian and American ports before a final recommissioning in May 1955.

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.