HMS Wigtown Bay (K616): A Short Career Spent Mostly Waiting

Redesigned Mid-Build

HMS Wigtown Bay was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, originally ordered in March 1943 as the Loch-class anti-submarine frigate Loch Garasdale before the design was revised part-way through construction into the improved Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate, laid down on 24 October 1944 and driven by the Royal Navy's growing need for anti-aircraft escorts for service in the Far East.

Taking her name from Wigtown Bay in Galloway, she was launched on 26 April 1945, arriving just as the war in Europe was ending.

The Bay She Was Named After

Taking her name from Wigtown Bay in Galloway is the sort of line that goes past without stopping, and the bay is worth stopping at, because it is one of the strangest pieces of coast in Britain.

It is the estuary of the Cree and the Bladnoch on the Solway side of Galloway, and what it mostly consists of is mud: a vast plain of salt marsh and intertidal flat that empties and fills twice a day across several miles. In 1996 almost all of it was made a Local Nature Reserve, and it is the largest in Britain. In winter it holds tens of thousands of wildfowl and waders. There is very little there and there is a great deal of it.

It is also the scene of one of the most notorious executions in Scottish history. On 11 May 1685, during what the Covenanters called the Killing Time, two women were sentenced at Wigtown for refusing the Oath of Abjuration and acknowledging James VII as head of the church. Margaret Wilson was eighteen. Margaret McLachlan was sixty-three. They were tied to stakes in the tideway of the Bladnoch, the older woman placed furthest out so that the younger would have to watch, and left for the water. McLachlan died first.

Historians have argued for three hundred years about whether the sentence was actually carried out, and there is a respectable case that the two were reprieved and the story grew in the telling. Nobody in Wigtown has ever much cared for that argument. There is a stake in the merse to this day and there are two graves in the kirkyard, and a Royal Navy frigate carried the name of that bay for fourteen years without, one suspects, a single soul aboard knowing any of it.

Patrolling the Mediterranean

Commissioned in November 1945 under Lieutenant-Commander D. Carson, Wigtown Bay completed sea trials by January 1946 and deployed to Malta the following month, joining the 5th Escort Flotilla for Mediterranean patrol duties, including missions in May 1946 to intercept ships carrying illegal immigrants to Palestine, part of the tense and demanding work occupying much of the Mediterranean Fleet in the years immediately after the war.

The Palestine work in May 1946 was the beginning of the Royal Navy's least comfortable post-war duty and, for her, very nearly the whole of her active career. What the patrol involved, and what it did to the people carrying it out, is set out in HMS Enard Bay (K435) and HMS Whitesand Bay (K633), who was built in the same Belfast yard and did the same job a year later.

She had eighteen months in commission. She was launched twelve days before the war in Europe ended, into a navy that had ordered her to fight Japanese aircraft in a Pacific war that finished before she was ready, and by April 1947 she was back at Devonport with the paying-off pennant up. She was two years old.

A Long Spell in Reserve

Wigtown Bay returned to Devonport in April 1947 and was decommissioned that May, spending the following decade largely laid up in reserve and serving periodically as an accommodation ship, with occasional refits in 1948 and 1951 keeping her nominally ready for a return to service that never really came.

What Ten Years in Reserve Actually Meant

Largely laid up in reserve sounds like rusting quietly at a buoy, and it was a good deal more organised and considerably sadder than that.

In 1947 the Royal Navy had far more ships than it had money or sailors, and rather than scrap perfectly good hulls that had cost a fortune and might be needed within a decade, it mothballed them on an industrial scale. Guns and sensitive equipment were greased and sealed. Openings were plated or capped. Dehumidifying plant was run inside the hull to hold the air dry, because dry steel does not rust. Care and maintenance parties moved from ship to ship on a rota, turning machinery over, checking the dehumidifiers, sounding the bilges. Whole creeks and lochs were full of them, ranked in trots, grey and shut up and waiting.

The waiting had a point. The assumption behind it was a general war with the Soviet Union within ten years, in which the Atlantic convoys would have to be run again and every escort in existence would be wanted. In the meantime the reserve fleet did useful things: ships like this one were opened up as accommodation for dockyard workers or for the crews of ships in refit, which is what she was doing for part of the decade. Her two refits, in 1948 and 1951, were to keep her genuinely capable of being brought forward rather than merely afloat.

What killed the whole arrangement was the Defence White Paper of April 1957. Duncan Sandys argued that the next war would be nuclear and would be over in days, that there would be no time to mobilise a reserve fleet and no convoys to escort if there were, and that the money should go on missiles instead. The Reserve Fleet was effectively abolished. Hundreds of ships went to the breakers in the following three years, most of them perfectly serviceable. The same paper is what finished the cruiser HMS Black Prince and a great many others in this fleet.

Wigtown Bay went on the Disposal List in 1958, which is exactly on cue.

A Sale That Fell Through

Negotiations to sell Wigtown Bay to Ceylon in 1957 ultimately fell through, and she was placed on the Disposal List the following year. HMS Wigtown Bay was sold for scrapping in October 1958, arriving under tow at the breaker's yard at Faslane on 10 April 1959, a relatively quiet end for a frigate whose active service had been brief but whose time in limbo had lasted considerably longer.

The Ceylon sale is worth a note on what happened instead. The Royal Ceylon Navy was a new service in the 1950s, building itself up on a small budget, and it wanted ocean-going ships. It did not buy this one. It took the Algerine class minesweeper HMS Flying Fish as HMCyS Vijaya, and in 1959 it acquired two Canadian-built River class frigates that had spent the intervening years in Israeli service, commissioning them as Mahasena and Gajabahu. Second-hand Canadian frigates by way of Tel Aviv were cheaper than a British anti-aircraft frigate from Devonport, and that is very often how these deals go.

The Breaker's Yard at Faslane

Arriving under tow at the breaker's yard at Faslane on 10 April 1959 puts her in some very grand company, because Faslane before it was a submarine base was the most important shipbreaking yard in Britain.

The wartime military port on the Gareloch was leased to Metal Industries Limited in August 1946, for thirty years, at twelve and a half thousand pounds a year. The deep, sheltered water and the long quays that had been built to load troops turned out to be exactly what you want for taking a large ship to pieces. Between 1946 and its closure in 1981 the yard cut up sixty-eight Royal Navy ships and a good many merchantmen, including the Cunard liner Aquitania in 1950.

Six of the sixty-eight were battleships. HMS Anson went there, and HMS Duke of York, who had sunk the Scharnhorst. The carrier HMS Indomitable arrived in 1955. And in 1960, a year after this frigate, so did HMS Vanguard, the last battleship Britain ever built, who ran herself aground in Portsmouth harbour on the way out and had to be pulled off by tugs while half the city watched.

And then the ending that nobody in 1959 could have seen coming. Metal Industries were required to give up a large part of the Gareloch frontage so that the Royal Navy could build a base there for the Polaris submarines, agreed between Macmillan and Kennedy at Nassau in December 1962 with the frigate HMS Whirlwind lying offshore as guardship. So the patch of Scottish water where an obsolete 1945 escort was quietly taken apart became, within a few years, the place from which Britain's nuclear deterrent has put to sea ever since. Wigtown Bay spent her whole life waiting for a war that never came, and the yard that took her apart became the home of the weapons meant to make sure it never did.