Motor Yacht Marala; wartime heroine of Gibraltar.

This elegant 90 year old lady, alongside at Mid Harbours Marina in late August, has a remarkable tale to tell. She was built at Camper & Nicholson, for Montague Stanley Napier, the famous automobile and aero engine manufacturer, who died just a month before her launch in February 1931. She became the only vessel to leave C&N without a name, leaving the yard as number 388. She soon found a buyer; he was Charles Richard Fairey, the founder and owner of Fairey Aviation.

Richard Fairey was a keen racing yachtsman; he named the yacht Evadne, after Poseidon’s daughter, and used her as a base whilst participating in sailing events. In 1932 when Amelia Earhart made a forced landing in Londonderry, having failed to make her intended destination in France after a solo flight from the USA, Richard Fairey offered her the use of Evadne to meet her well wishers waiting in Cherbourg. As a prominent racing sailor Fairey entertained the movers and shakers of the times, and hosted Crown Prince Olaf of Norway during the 1937 Coronation Regatta.

After almost a decade of celebrity Evadne’s career took a sudden swerve when WW2 arrived and she was requisitioned by the Admiralty. Fairey handed her over to the Royal Navy to become His Majesty’s Armed Yacht; HMS Evadne. Commissioned in September 1939 she initially began patrols from Liverpool and undertook various duties in the Irish Sea. Then in 1940 Evadne was fitted out for anti-submarine patrol, equipped with a 4 inch BL (breech loader) gun on the fore deck and a 2pdr Pom-pom anti-aircraft gun on the rear of the boat deck, as well as 2 depth charge throwers aft. She spent the next 18 months escorting convoys, within the Irish Sea, from bases at Holyhead, Milford Haven and Liverpool. During the year she remained on that station she managed to shoot down a Heinkel III bomber, earning a mention in despatches for T/Lieutenants Carl Brunning & Allan Charlton and for Leading Seaman Edward Watkiss. According to the wireless operator, Petty Officer Noel Raymond Pugh RNVR:

‘It was the seven day blitz of Liverpool, May 1941. They were coming across in droves over South Stack, Holyhead, and one peeled off, he came round low over Holyhead Harbour. He didn’t drop anything but was very low… and there was a liner, the Stuyvesant, anchored in the harbour full of Dutch soldiers and sailors who had escaped the invasion of Holland. The bomber circled round and came round a second time. We had the pom-pom and about eight Lewis guns, so we let go with the lot. Our tracers went through the fuselage of the German plane and the engines stopped, she dropped pieces over farmland and crashed on Trearddur Bay beach… five men were killed.’

 

                                A/ Lt/Com. Norman H. Richards centre & AB George Bradley, ASDIC Operator holding a monkey

In July 1942, Evadne joined the Highlander escort group to take a convoy across the Atlantic before diverting to Bermuda, where she had been a frequent pre-war visitor (Fairey owned a home there) and there she spent 2 years on A/S duties operating outside Bermuda’s barrier reef, as well as escorting incoming vessels. During the Second World War, convoys from Bermuda (coded BHX) joined at sea with convoys from Halifax, Nova Scotia, (coded HX) before crossing the Atlantic. It required relatively fewer warships to protect one large convoy than two smaller ones. Vessels arriving alone at Bermuda generally had no protection until they neared the islands where HMS Evadne patrolled the surrounding seas. They were met then escorted to the channel through the reefs. Inside the reef they were greeted by the converted tugboat HMS Harbour Castle, crewed by local-service ratings, which brought the pilot and the naval officer tasked with inspecting arrivals. The Castle Harbour also carried out A/S patrols within the reef.

 

                                                            HMS Evadne at Gibraltar 1944

HMS Evadne remained at Bermuda until being re-allocated to Commander in Chief Mediterranean, arriving in Gibraltar on the 12th March 1944. Here she joined the mixed flotilla of armed trawlers, yachts, sloops, corvettes and destroyers hunting submarines and escorting convoys. Towards the end of her tour she bagged a sub. 

           

              

                                                                         Loading and firing a 2pdr.
  
On the 19^th February 1945 she detected and depth charged U-300 in the middle of the Strait, halfway between Tarifa and Tangier. The submarine was badly damaged but limped away, to be sunk by gunfire (of minesweepers HMS Recruit and HMS Pincher) two nights later whilst surfaced west of Cadiz and south of the Portuguese town of Quarteira. Some 9 of the crew of 50 were lost; 4 officers and 37 crew members were taken prisoner and landed at Gibraltar. New Zealander Lieutenant Millener, anti-submarine control officer in Evadne, was awarded the DSC for his skill and efficiency in holding contact with the U-boat during the first attack.  

After the attack by Evadne, U-300’s Captain, Oberleutnant Fritz Hein had complained that Evadne’s twin MAN diesel engines were so quiet that he had not paid adequate attention to her. Interestingly, those two original 750hp MAN diesels still power the vessel today, after 90 years service. At the end of hostilities, HMS Evadne was returned to Britain on 6^th September and Fairey retook possession of his vessel in October 1945.

Since then, Evadne has gone through several owners, various refits and two more name changes until she arrived in Gibraltar as MY Marala, looking at least as good as the day she left her builders.

First published at Gibraltar History Society Chronicle Dec 2022. Paul Hodkinson.