HMS Dunvegan Castle was a UK ocean liner that was converted into an armed merchant cruiser (AMC) in the Second World War.In 1935 Union-Castle ordered a pair of 15,000 GRT "intermediate" passenger liners for its service between Tilbury and South Africa.[3] She was the scene of an attempted murder in August 1937, when Antonio Mifsud, a Maltese kitchen porter, stabbed the former cricketer Ernest Hayter.[3] On 3 September 1939, the day the UK entered the Second World War, Dunvegan Castle was in East London in South Africa.[3] She called at Cape Town, and then at Freetown in Sierra Leone where she joined Convoy SL 2F to be escorted to home waters.It included 45 merchant ships, but for its first fortnight at sea it had only three escorts: Dunvegan Castle, the sloop HMS Milford and the Ellerman Lines cargo steamship Corinthian,[11] which had been converted into an ocean boarding vessel.The destroyer HMS Harvester and one of the convoy escorts, the corvette Primrose, rescued Dunvegan Castle's commander and 249 of his crew.
The destroyer
HMS
Harvester
, which with the corvette
Primrose
rescued 250 survivors from
Dunevegan Castle