HMS Veryan Bay (K651): From the South China Sea to a Summit With Eisenhower and Churchill

Redesigned Mid-Build

HMS Veryan Bay was built by Charles Hill and Sons in Bristol, originally ordered in March 1943 as the Loch-class frigate HMS Loch Swannay before the design was revised into the improved Bay class. She was launched on 11 November 1944, completed on 13 May 1945 and commissioned two days later under Lieutenant-Commander J. S. Brownrigg, arriving just as the war in Europe was ending.

Veryan Bay is a wide sandy bay on the south coast of Cornwall, between the Roseland peninsula and Dodman Point, and the class she belongs to takes its names from bays around the British Isles. Why a set of anti-submarine frigates was redesigned mid-build into anti-aircraft ships is explained in HMS Start Bay. The short version is that by 1944 the U-boats were beaten and the kamikaze was not, and a hull already on the stocks was cheaper to alter than to start again.

Into the Pacific and the South China Sea

After working up, Veryan Bay joined the British Pacific Fleet's Escort Group, going on to patrol the South China Sea and serve across the Pacific, Mediterranean and Home Fleets through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, part of the extensive worldwide policing role the Royal Navy maintained in the years immediately after the war.

Palestine Patrol and Falklands Guardship

Between 1947 and 1948, Veryan Bay served on the demanding Palestine patrol during the final, turbulent months of the British Mandate, and later took on extended guardship rotations at the Falkland Islands, alongside a spell transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy between 1950 and 1951, a remarkably varied portfolio of duties for a single frigate.

Two Frigates Swapped for Two Frigates

The New Zealand spell is more interesting than a loan. In 1950 Veryan Bay and her sister St Austell Bay were sent out to the Royal New Zealand Navy in what amounted to a straight exchange: the two Bay-class ships went south and the New Zealand frigates Hawea and Taupo came north to serve with the Royal Navy in their place. She reached Auckland on 3 July 1950 and joined the 11th Frigate Flotilla, showed herself round the country, was photographed lying in Gisborne harbour that September, and sailed for home on 28 October, arriving at Malta on 4 January 1951.

Six months is a very short loan, and the timing is worth noticing. War broke out in Korea in the same month she sailed, and the Royal New Zealand Navy immediately sent frigates to it; ships were being shuffled about the Commonwealth that summer to cover the gaps that left. What looks like a curiosity in a ship's record is very probably the visible end of a small navy going to war and a larger one lending it hulls to do it with.

The Penguins

The Falklands guardship rotation produced the single best entry in her whole service record. In June 1951, on leaving the islands, HMS Veryan Bay embarked a cargo of penguins destined for Vancouver Zoo and carried them to Montevideo, from where they were flown on to Canada.

That is a real line in a real warship's record, and it is worth thinking about the practicalities. Penguins need cold, they need fish, they are extremely messy, and a Bay-class frigate steaming north from the Falklands to the River Plate in the southern winter is crossing about fifteen degrees of latitude in the wrong direction for all three. Somewhere in the Royal Navy's files is a set of arrangements made by a first lieutenant for the feeding, watering and hosing down of a consignment of penguins, and it is a pity nobody has published it.

What she was doing down there in the first place was sovereignty patrol: through the late 1940s and early 1950s Britain, Argentina and Chile all claimed the same slice of Antarctica, and each sent ships south each summer to make the point. The sharp end of that argument is in HMS Snipe (U20) and HMS Burghead Bay.

A Summit With Eisenhower and Churchill

Veryan Bay supported diplomatic occasions including ceremonies for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and in 1953 was present at a summit involving President Eisenhower and Prime Ministers Churchill and Laniel, a striking moment of high diplomacy for a modest frigate more usually engaged in convoy and patrol work.

Which Summit It Was

The summit has a name and it is worth having: the Bermuda Conference, held from 4 to 8 December 1953. Veryan Bay was on the West Indies station with the 7th Frigate Squadron, having recommissioned that March, and Bermuda was the squadron's own base.

It was the first meeting of the British, American and French heads of government since Potsdam eight years earlier, and what it was really about was whether to talk to the Russians. Stalin had died in March. Churchill, back in office at seventy-eight and increasingly preoccupied with the hydrogen bomb, believed there was a moment in which a personal meeting with Stalin's successors might settle something before both sides had thermonuclear weapons in quantity, and had been pressing Eisenhower for months to agree to one. Eisenhower thought it naive and would not have it. The French premier, Joseph Laniel, was ill through most of the conference and preoccupied with Indochina, where the French garrison of Dien Bien Phu had just been established.

Churchill did not get his summit. Four days after Bermuda, Eisenhower went to the United Nations in New York and made the Atoms for Peace speech, which was the answer he had decided on instead: not negotiation but a proposal for international control of fissile material. It is a reasonable candidate for the moment the early Cold War hardened into the long one, and a nine-year-old anti-aircraft frigate from Bristol was lying off the island while it happened.

Scrapped After a Short Career

HMS Veryan Bay was paid off and reduced to reserve status in March 1957, remaining in Plymouth's Reserve Fleet before being sold and scrapped on 1 July 1959, a relatively short but truly eventful career for a ship that had touched three oceans and one significant piece of Cold War diplomacy.

Twelve years from launch to breakers is short for a frigate and it is not a reflection on her. The Bay class had been built quickly, in wartime, for a war that ended before most of them were finished, and by the mid-1950s the Royal Navy had a great many of them and no money. Several went abroad and served for decades under other flags; several, like Veryan Bay, simply stopped. In those twelve years she worked in the South China Sea, off Palestine, in New Zealand waters, in the Falklands, in the West Indies and off Bermuda, and she carried a load of penguins to Uruguay. Very few ships with far longer careers have covered more ground.