Countess of Scarborough

Among the blizzard of words that have been written about the Battle of Flamborough Head, the role of the twenty-gun Countess of Scarborough is perhaps overlooked.

A mere footnote, as the leviathans the Bonhomme Richard and HMS Serapis slugged it out beneath the chalk cliffs of the headland. However, as the two frigates met in their deadly embrace, the Countess of Scarborough, vastly out-gunned, made such a nuisance of herself that it took two French frigates
to subdue her and whilst that was happening, the invaluable convoy the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough had been escorting, made its way to safety beneath the guns of Scarborough Castle.

It was an action in the finest traditions of the Royal Navy, one that found its echo 161 years later, when the armed merchant cruiser the Jervis Bay saved the North Atlantic convoy she was escorting, by charging the German pocket battleship the Admiral Scheer in 1940. It is therefore quite fitting that the heroic action of the Jervis Bay is re-enacted for holidaymakers every summer in a miniature naval battle on the lake of Scarborough’s Peasholm Park. Although very few among the crowds of holidaymakers will be aware of the parallel story of the Countess of Scarborough, the bravery and self-sacrifice she displayed in 1779 has become an unquestioned tradition of the Royal Navy and indeed the former foe, and now foremost ally, the United States Navy.

Dr David Pendleton