HMS Barfoam (P282): The Unsung Ship That Kept the Nets Up

Built to Hang Nets, Not Fire Guns

HMS Barfoam was a Bar-class boom defence vessel built by W. Simons and Company at Renfrew in Scotland, laid down on 10 January 1941, launched on 8 September that year, and commissioned on 24 September 1941, originally carrying the pennant number Z182.

William Simons and Company is exactly the sort of firm that ended up building ships like her, and the reason is instructive. Simons began building at Greenock in 1810 and moved to Renfrew in 1860, taking over an iron foundry and another yard on the way, and it made its name and its money not from warships but from dredgers and hopper barges: unglamorous, immensely strong, slow working vessels built to lift heavy wet things off the bottom of harbours and rivers and carry them somewhere else. That is very nearly a description of a boom defence vessel, and it is why the Admiralty went to yards like this one. The firm was bought by the Glasgow pump makers G and J Weir in 1957, merged with its Renfrew neighbour Lobnitz in 1959, and the closure of the yards was announced at the end of 1962, the remaining work passing to Alexander Stephen and Sons. The last ship left for Calcutta at the end of April 1964, and that was the end of a hundred and fifty-four years of shipbuilding.

Ships of her class belonged to one of the least glamorous but particularly essential branches of the wartime navy: boom defence, the business of laying and maintaining heavy steel anti-submarine and anti-torpedo nets across harbour entrances, anchorages and dry docks to keep enemy submarines and torpedoes out of Britain's most valuable naval assets while they sat at anchor.

If you want to know why the Royal Navy built so many of these unglamorous little ships, the answer is one night in October 1939. On the 14th, Günther Prien took the submarine U-47 into Scapa Flow through Kirk Sound on the eastern side of the anchorage, threading past blockships that had been sunk to close the channel, through a gap left because one of them, the Lake Neuchatel, had not yet been put down. Inside, he found the battleship Royal Oak lying at anchor and torpedoed her. She rolled over and sank in about nineteen minutes with the loss of some 834 men, 135 of them boy sailors under the age of eighteen.

The consequences reshaped the entire home defence of the fleet. More blockships went down within days. Booms, nets and mines went across the main entrances. Coastal guns and anti-aircraft batteries were installed, and Churchill ordered the causeways across the eastern approaches that still carry the road between the Orkney islands today, built largely by Italian prisoners of war. And every anchorage, harbour entrance and dry dock in Britain was reassessed on the assumption that a determined submarine commander would find the one gap nobody had thought about. Barfoam and her sisters are what that reassessment produced.

Like the rest of her class, she was coal-fired, with bunkers holding around 110 tons plus a further 20-ton reserve, and built with a flush deck, a detail that distinguished the Bar class visually from the raised forecastle of the related Moor-class boom vessels.

It is worth noticing what coal-fired means for a ship commissioned in 1941, as well. By that date the Royal Navy's fighting ships had been oil-burning for a generation, and putting coal into a new vessel was a deliberate choice: coal was available, British, and not needed by anything else, whereas every ton of fuel oil had to cross an ocean past the U-boats. So the ships that protected the harbours were designed around the fuel nobody had to fight for, and a stokehold that would have been familiar to a sailor of 1914 was still being shovelled in a brand-new warship in the middle of the Second World War.

The class itself is worth quantifying, because the numbers are not small. Seventy-four Bar-class vessels were built for the Royal Navy, spread across a range of British yards, each of about seven hundred and thirty tons and a hundred and seventy-three feet, with a single three-inch anti-aircraft gun and very little else in the way of armament. The flush deck is not a styling choice. When a boom vessel lifts or lays a mooring, everything comes over the bow and is then ranged along the upper deck: chain, wire, cable, the lot, hundreds of feet of it, and a raised forecastle would simply be in the way. Everything about the design follows from the job, right down to the pair of massive horns over the stem carrying the sheaves that the mooring wire runs through, which is the feature that makes one of these ships unmistakable in a photograph.

It was skilled, physically demanding work rather than combat in the traditional sense. Crews needed real expertise in handling blocks, tackles, knots and splicing to deploy and maintain nets that could stretch some 900 feet and weigh over 40 tons, work that had to be done reliably and repeatedly, in all weathers, for the entire duration of the war.

The work itself is worth picturing properly, because a boom is not a fence. It is a line of heavy steel mesh hanging from floats, anchored at both ends, running across an entrance that ships also have to use, which means it needs a gate: a section that opens and closes, worked by a gate vessel, every single time anything goes in or out. The nets chafe, the floats leak, the moorings drag, storms tear whole sections away, and all of it has to be repaired at sea by men handling wire, chain and forty tons of sodden steel mesh over the bow. There is no way to do that except by seamanship of a very old-fashioned kind, and it is why these ships carried men who could splice wire rather than men who could lay a gun.

Crews on ships of her type were small, typically built around a core of five Royal Navy ratings, a skipper, a first lieutenant, an engine room artificer, a coxswain and a telegraphist, supplemented where necessary by locally hired hands at whichever port the vessel happened to be working.

As the conflict progressed, boom defence vessels like Barfoam commonly took on additional duties too, including salvage work, ferrying troops and cargo, and general harbour tug duties, becoming genuine all-purpose workhorses rather than single-function vessels.

A Ship Whose Job Was to Be Forgotten

Detailed records of Barfoam's specific wartime movements and postwar service have not survived in the same depth as those of the destroyers, cruisers and frigates that fought more visible actions, a common fate for the boom defence fleet generally: their entire purpose was to work quietly in the background, protecting the ships that made the headlines rather than making any of their own.

As for the thinness of her record, that is worth stating fairly rather than apologising for. Boom defence vessels did not keep the kind of narrative war diary a destroyer did, because most of their days consisted of the same work in the same place. They also spent the war attached to ports rather than to fleets, which means what they did is scattered through local port records rather than gathered into a service history. The class as a whole was one of the largest the Navy built, a good many of them were still working into the 1960s and beyond, and several ended up in civilian hands doing much the same job. Twenty-six years of service is what Barfoam has to show, and for a vessel of her sort that is the record.

That she is harder to trace today is, in a sense, a fitting reflection of exactly the role she was built to play, unglamorous, essential, and largely invisible infrastructure holding the wartime navy's home ports safe. What is known for certain is her end: Barfoam, latterly carrying the pennant P282, was scrapped in December 1967, having outlasted many of the more celebrated warships she had once helped protect.

Her scrapping date has a certain point to it as well. The Royal Navy's Boom Defence and Marine Salvage Branch, the organisation that had operated Barfoam and her sisters for a quarter of a century, was wound up in 1968, the year after she went to the breakers. Antisubmarine nets across harbour entrances had simply stopped making sense: a nuclear submarine does not need to get into an anchorage to sink what is in it, the threat had moved to torpedoes and missiles fired from a long way off, and the money went elsewhere. Most of the class outlived the war comfortably and a handful were still working into the 1970s, some in civilian hands doing the same job for harbour authorities. Very few survive. A Bar-class vessel, SAS Somerset, was preserved as a museum ship in Cape Town for many years and was finally scrapped in April 2024; the Australian Karangi lies abandoned in Homebush Bay in Sydney. That is very nearly all that is left of seventy-four ships.