South African Navy
This page is courtesy of Jaco Berg. He emailed me in April 2005, and offered some his father's photos for these pages. His father served in the South African Navy from 1951-1956. He was apparently stationed at Simonstown and Durban (South Africa), and might have served on the Protea and Sparrow. If anyone has any other information about these images, we'd appreciate hearing from you.
HMSAS Protea (K51) was a survey ship, scrapped in 1967.
F86 in the images above is a British ship. It's HMS Pelican, an Egret class sloop and a bit of an oddity. There were only three ships of this class built and the other two, HMS Auckland and HMS Egret were sunk during World War II. Pelican distinguished herself by sinking four U-boats.
Sloops were designed primarily as escort and antisubmarine ships, roughly comparable to a frigate in size, with greater range but lower speed than the average destroyer.
HMS Pelican was launched in 1938, and commissioned in 1939 with the pennet number L86, later changed to U86 and later still to F86 when she joined the 2nd Frigate Flotilla based in Malta in 1946. In 1954, she was transferred to the South Atlantic as part of 7th Frigate Squadron. Here she carried out extensive exercises with ships of the South African Navy. Because of this, I think the photos were taken in 1954 or 1955. She was decommissioned in 1956 and scrapped on November 29, 1958.
HMS Mull of Kintyre also had the pennant number F86, but she was a Beachy Head class repair ship.