HMS Berkeley Castle (K387) HMS Berkeley Castle (K387) HMS "Berkeley Castle" was a Castle-class corvette of the United Kingdom's Royal Navy. She was named after Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The Castle-class corvettes were an improved and enlarged derivative of the earlier Flower-class corvettes, which was intended to be built by shipyards that could not build the larger and more capable frigates. The greater length of the Castles gave made them better seaboats than the Flowers, which were not originally designed for ocean escort work. Large numbers (96 in total) were ordered in late 1942 and early 1943 from shipyards in the United Kingdom and
Berkeley family docent and genealogist at the Berkeley Castle listed the Barclay clan as also descending from the de Berkeley clan through the matriarchal line Alice De Berkeley -- the woman who married Robert Fitzharding and restored the family's name. Additionally, historians on Scottish clans and surnames point out that the Barclay clan spelling moves into the Berkeley (pronounced Bar-Clay) spelling. This descends from Sir Maurice Berkeley (by 1514–81), a politician who rose rapidly in the Tudor court. He came from the Berkeleys of Stoke Gifford, a cadet branch of the main Berkeley family, as a descendant of Sir Maurice de Berkeley