HMS Starwort: From Arctic Convoys to Whale Catcher

A Flower Named for a Plant, Named for Nothing Grand

HMS Starwort was one of the Royal Navy's Flower class corvettes, small, tough and unglamorous escort vessels named, in keeping with the class's whole naming convention, after flowering plants rather than admirals or battles, a modest naming scheme for ships that would go on to do some of the hardest and least celebrated work of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Somewhat unusually for a ship of her class and era, HMS Starwort has left no single convenient account of herself behind, an absence worth noting honestly rather than papering over, and one that made piecing her story together from specialist naval history sources all the more necessary.

She was built on the Clyde by A & J Inglis of Glasgow, launched on 12 February 1941 and commissioned that May, a fairly typical Flower class corvette on paper: 1,060 tons, 205 feet long, capable of 16 knots, and armed with a single 4 inch gun, a 2 pounder, depth charges and Asdic, crewed by around 70 to 80 officers and men living in famously cramped and damp conditions even by wartime escort standards.

Over her wartime career she had three commanding officers in turn: Lieutenant Commander Norman Winder Duck from March 1941, Lieutenant Arthur Horace Kent from August 1942, the officer who would lead her into her most celebrated action, and Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Michael Fitzmaurice Villiers-Stuart from August 1944 until she paid off from front line service in 1945.

Rescuing Hundreds From a Torpedoed Troopship

More than a year before her famous U-boat kill, HMS Starwort took part in one of the most harrowing rescues of her career. On 5 July 1941, while escorting the troopship Anselm towards Gibraltar alongside the corvettes HMS Lavender and HMS Petunia and the survey ship HMS Challenger, the convoy was found by the German submarine U-96, whose torpedo sent Anselm to the bottom in just 22 minutes.

Of the 1,316 troops and crew aboard, 254 were killed, yet the scale of the rescue that followed was remarkable: Challenger and Starwort between them hauled hundreds of survivors from the water and from Anselm's own boats and rafts up scrambling nets, so many that both escorts were left dangerously overloaded and had to transfer their survivors again, this time to the liner HMS Cathay, before she could land them safely at Freetown in Sierra Leone.

The Chaplain Who Would Not Come Up

There is something the Anselm is remembered for that the casualty figures do not carry. Among the RAF personnel aboard was a chaplain, Squadron Leader the Reverend Herbert Cecil Pugh, on his way to a posting on the Gold Coast. When the torpedo went in, a number of injured airmen were trapped in a hold below the waterline that could not be reached from above, and by the time this was understood the decks were already awash and the ship had minutes left. Pugh asked to be lowered into the hold on a rope so that he could be with them.

Everybody present told him what that meant. He went anyway, saying that he must be where his men were, and the Anselm took him down with them twenty-two minutes after she was hit. He was awarded a posthumous George Cross, which his widow and his son received from King George VI at Buckingham Palace in December 1947, and he remains the only Royal Air Force chaplain ever to have been given one. Starwort spent that morning hauling men up scrambling nets until she was too full to take any more, and that is the ship's part in it; the other part happened forty feet below her, in the dark, and nobody who was down there came back to describe it.

One of the other escorts that morning also has her own account here: HMS Lavender (K60), a Flower of exactly the same type doing exactly the same job, and a useful reminder of how thin the escort of a troopship carrying thirteen hundred men actually was in the summer of 1941.

A Confirmed Kill Off North Africa

HMS Starwort's clearest and best documented moment of action came on 12 November 1942, when she combined with the fellow Flower class corvette HMS Lotus to sink the German submarine U-660 off Oran, in the waters off French North Africa, in the tense period immediately following the Allied Operation Torch landings.

The action itself took longer and was more dramatic than a bare date and name suggests. Starwort, then escorting convoy T.E.3, picked up U-660 on Asdic that morning; when an initial hedgehog attack failed to produce any explosions, she followed up with a depth charge pattern set so shallow that watching crews aboard the destroyer HMS Wescott reportedly wondered whether Starwort would end up damaging herself in the process. The charges wrecked U-660's motor compartment and left her unable to dive properly, so her captain, Kapitanleutnant Gotz Baur, scuttled the boat around midday rather than let her sink uncontrolled; Starwort herself hauled 29 of the 45 survivors aboard, the remainder picked up by nearby escorts, for the loss of just two German lives.

It was exactly the kind of unglamorous, cooperative escort work that Flower class corvettes existed to do, unlikely to make headlines at the time but directly responsible for protecting the shipping lanes that kept Britain in the war.

The Arctic Convoy Route and a Deadly Minefield

HMS Starwort is also recorded as having escorted convoy QP 13, one of the Arctic convoys running the brutal route between Britain and the Soviet Union via the Barents Sea.

QP 13 is remembered as a particularly tragic episode in convoy history: in thick fog on 5 July 1942, the minesweeper HMS Niger mistook an iceberg for the Icelandic coast and led six merchant ships, Heffron, Hybert, John Randolph, Massmar and Rodina among them, straight into the British-laid Northern Barrage minefield. Niger herself was lost with all but eight of her 127-man crew, and the total death toll across every mined ship ran to well over a hundred, considerably worse than the figure sometimes quoted for this incident.

HMS Starwort does not appear among the named ships that struck the mines, and as an ocean escort rather than the ice pilot minesweeper that led the convoy astray she was probably not among them, though a complete ship by ship account of every escort's exact track has not been found, so this is offered as likely rather than certain, particularly given the loss of life involved.

A Second Life Hunting Whales

Unlike so many of her wartime sisters, which ended their days cut up for scrap within a few years of the war's end, HMS Starwort's story took a distinctive turn.

She was sold out of naval service in 1948 to Christian Salvesen's Polar Whaling Company of Leith, refitted as a whale catcher by James Jamont and Co of Greenock, and recommissioned in February 1949 as Southern Broom, bound for the whaling grounds of South Georgia. In a nice piece of symmetry, her old U-660 partner HMS Lotus went the same way at almost the same time, refitted as Southern Lotus for the same company, so the two corvettes that had hunted a U-boat together ended up hunting whales together instead, in a trade that has since become deeply controversial and is now widely recognised as having driven several whale populations towards collapse.

Back to the Job She Was Designed For

The whaling career is a neater circle than it looks, and it is worth closing properly. The Flower class did not come from a warship design at all. In 1939 the Admiralty needed a great many small escorts very quickly, from yards that had never built a warship and could not, so it went to Smith's Dock on the Tees and took an existing commercial design off the shelf: a whale catcher called Southern Pride. That is why a Flower is shaped the way she is, with the high flared bow, the enormous sheer forward and the vicious short roll that made her famously miserable to live in. She was drawn to chase whales in the Southern Ocean, and the Southern Ocean is worse than the Atlantic.

So when Christian Salvesen of Leith, the largest whaling firm in Britain, bought Starwort in 1948 and had her fitted out at Greenock as the whale catcher Southern Broom, they were not repurposing a warship. They were putting a whale catcher back to work. The same happened to HMS Myosotis (K65) and to a good many others, and it is why so many Flowers outlived their sisters by two decades: there was an industry that specifically wanted their hull form and was prepared to keep them running.

What that industry was is worth knowing. Salvesen worked South Georgia and the Antarctic through the 1950s from shore stations at Leith Harbour and from factory ships, and a whale catcher's job was to find a whale, run it down, put a harpoon into it from a gun on the bow, inflate the carcass with compressed air so it would float, flag it and leave it for the factory ship while she went after the next one. It was extremely hard, extremely cold, extremely dangerous work, and it was the single largest cause of the collapse of the great whale populations of the Southern Ocean. Starwort spent eighteen years at it, twice as long as she spent in the Royal Navy, and she was scrapped in 1967, which is roughly when the whole trade collapsed for want of anything left to catch.

In this new role she survived considerably longer than most of her class, finally being scrapped at Bruges in 1967, nearly a quarter of a century after her wartime service began.