Ships
- HMS Ulster Captain from 12 June 1945 · Relieved on 4 June 1946
John Trevor Kay served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and commanded two destroyers. He became a sub-lieutenant on 16 December 1940 and a lieutenant on 1 February 1942. Within a few months of that second step he was at sea in his own ship, first in an old American-built escort and, at the end of the war, in a modern fleet destroyer.
From August 1942 until 29 March 1943 he commanded Ludlow as a lieutenant. Ludlow was a Town-class destroyer, the former United States ship Stockton, one of the flush-deck destroyers transferred to Britain in 1940. She belonged to the previous war: smaller, harder worked, and less modern than the destroyers then leaving British yards. Through the winter of 1942 and into March 1943, ships of her kind carried a heavy share of the escort work in the Atlantic, at the time when the U-boat campaign was at its height and every seaworthy hull was kept on passage.
On 12 June 1945 he became captain of Ulster, and he remained in command until he was relieved on 4 June 1946. Ulster was a U-class destroyer, pennant number R83, built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend and launched on 9 November 1942. She entered service in 1943. She was a fast fleet destroyer of the wartime emergency programmes, designed to work with the main fleet.
Before Kay joined her, Ulster had already seen hard service with the Home Fleet. In April 1944 she was in the screen of the carriers that attacked the German battleship Tirpitz in the Norwegian fjords. German aircraft struck the force, and Ulster was badly damaged. She was brought back to Britain and spent a long period under repair. His appointment began after that repair and after the surrender of Germany in May 1945. The year he spent in her ran through the surrender of Japan in August 1945 and on into the first summer of peace, when fleet destroyers were employed in dispersing wartime forces and keeping a reduced navy at sea.
He was relieved in Ulster on 4 June 1946, just short of a year after taking her. The two commands stand at opposite ends of the destroyer war: an old transferred escort during the crisis of the Atlantic campaign, and a modern fleet destroyer still in commission while the Navy came down from wartime strength.