HMS St Brides Bay (F600): The Frigate That Faced Down a Gunboat in the Taiwan Strait

Ordered as a Loch, Launched as a Bay

HMS St Brides Bay was ordered from Harland and Wolff in Belfast on 2 May 1943 as the Loch-class frigate Loch Achilty, with her keel laid down the following year before the design changed.

She was launched under her eventual name on 16 January 1945 and completed that June under her first captain, Lieutenant-Commander R. A. St C. Sproul-Bolton, commissioning for the British Pacific Fleet just as the war she was built for drew to a close, her planned Pacific deployment cancelled that August when Japan surrendered.

The redesign that turned her from Loch Achilty into St Brides Bay was not a change of name but a change of war. Twenty-six anti-submarine frigates already on the slips were redrawn as anti-aircraft ships in 1944, because the U-boats had been beaten and the Pacific had not, and the story is set out in the article on her sister HMS St Austell Bay (K634), who was ordered from the same yard three months earlier and finished a month before her. Neither ever fired at an aircraft. Both spent their careers doing things nobody had imagined when they were drawn.

The Haifa Patrol

Instead, St Brides Bay joined the 5th Escort Flotilla in the Mediterranean, flying weather ship and air-sea rescue cover during American troop repatriation flights, patrolling the Aegean, Adriatic and Red Seas, and taking on guardship duties at Alexandria, Trieste and Aqaba.

She also served on the Haifa Patrol, attempting to intercept ships carrying Jewish refugees to Palestine in defiance of British restrictions, one of the most politically fraught duties of the immediate postwar years.

The Yangtze and Malaya

Sailing for the Eastern Fleet in July 1949 and arriving at Hong Kong that August, St Brides Bay took on guardship duty on the Yangtze, kept watch on Chinese Nationalist warship movements during the closing stages of the Chinese Civil War, and patrolled in support of operations against insurgent forces during the Malayan Emergency.

Four Tours of the Korean War

From December 1950, St Brides Bay joined the United Nations naval task force supporting the evacuation of Incheon, going on to complete four separate Korean tours through 1953, including bombardment operations on the Han River in December 1951, and providing medical assistance to the American destroyer USS John R. Pierce after she was damaged by shore batteries. Her fourth and final tour, in the spring of 1953, saw her pick up a downed airman from the sea, part of a Korean commitment that by war's end had taken her some 72,000 miles and burned through 13,000 tons of fuel.

In June 1953 she carried out further bombardments in the Ch'o-do area in support of South Korean army operations.

Facing Down a Gunboat in the Taiwan Strait

On 16 August 1953, a Republic of China Navy gunboat seized the British freighter Nigelock, herself a former Flower-class corvette named Nigella sold into merchant service after the war, enforcing Taiwan's Guanbi policy of blockading the Chinese mainland coast. St Brides Bay's arrival on the scene was enough to persuade the gunboat to withdraw and release the freighter, a striking example of how the simple appearance of a Royal Navy warship could defuse a tense international incident, and the first of several such Formosa Strait patrols she carried out over the next three years to keep British merchant shipping clear of Chinese Nationalist interference.

The Blockade Nobody Remembers

The Guanbi policy deserves proper explanation, because it produced one of the longest running confrontations between the Royal Navy and a nominal ally in the whole of the Cold War. When Shanghai fell to the Communists in May 1949, the Nationalist government, by then reduced to Taiwan, declared the entire Chinese coast from Fujian to Hebei closed to foreign shipping, and set its navy to enforce it. There had been no declaration of war, which is precisely the difficulty: a blockade is a recognised act of war with rules attached, and what Taiwan was doing had no standing in international law at all, as the United States Naval Institute was pointing out in print by 1950.

Britain objected more loudly than anybody, for the straightforward reason that most of the ships being stopped were sailing out of Hong Kong. British merchantmen were boarded, searched, detained and occasionally taken into Taiwanese ports. The Royal Navy's Formosa Strait Patrol eventually logged something like a hundred and forty-one separate incidents of interference with British shipping, which generated thirty-seven formal diplomatic protests, and on a number of occasions, as with the Nigelock, a British warship simply turned up and the Nationalist vessel let go.

There was an additional awkwardness that made the whole business stranger. Britain had recognised the People's Republic of China in January 1950, well before any of this. So a Royal Navy frigate positioning herself between a Nationalist gunboat and a British freighter was, from London's point of view, protecting British trade with the government of China from the armed forces of a government Britain no longer recognised as the government of China, while simultaneously fighting Chinese troops in Korea. Nobody involved found this easy to explain at the time either.

A Near-Fatal Collision

St Brides Bay went on to serve off Aden during the 1956 Suez Crisis and made extensive visits to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, but her later career included a properly alarming moment: on 2 July 1960, berthing at Hong Kong, a breakdown in communication between her bridge and engine room saw her collide with the minesweeper HMS Damerham, almost cutting the smaller ship clean in half. Remarkably, nobody aboard either vessel was seriously hurt.

Sixteen Years of Continuous Service

St Brides Bay finally sailed for home in November 1961, arriving at Portsmouth and paying off on 14 December that year after an extraordinary sixteen years of continuous overseas service, a particularly remarkable stretch for any Royal Navy ship, before formally joining the Reserve the following January. She was sold to BISCO for scrapping and towed to Faslane, arriving there on 3 September 1962 to be broken up by Metal Industries.

Sixteen years abroad is worth sitting with, because it was not an accident and it was not unique. Ships on foreign stations in the 1940s and 1950s did not come home between commissions; they stayed, and their people were changed around them, arriving by troopship after a passage of several weeks and going home the same way at the end of a commission of two years or more. There was no flying anybody out. A man who joined St Brides Bay at Hong Kong in 1953 had left England months earlier and would not see it again until 1955, and the ship herself simply carried on.

It is the same idea the Royal Navy has come back to in the last few years, keeping HMS Spey (P234) in the Indo-Pacific for years at a time and flying her ship's companies out to relieve one another, and it is what the minehunters did in Bahrain. The difference is that the modern version is a deliberate choice made to squeeze presence out of a small fleet, and the 1950s version was simply how an imperial navy worked when the empire was still there to be patrolled. St Brides Bay saw Palestine, the Yangtze, Malaya, Korea, the Taiwan Strait, Suez and the South Pacific, and did not tie up at Portsmouth once in between.