HMS Berkeley Castle (K387): Sunk in Dry Dock by the Great North Sea Flood

A Late-War Corvette

HMS Berkeley Castle was a Castle-class corvette built by Barclay Curle at Glasgow, laid down on 23 April 1943, launched that August, and commissioned on 18 November 1943. She displaced up to 1,630 tons at full load, carried a single 4-inch gun alongside Oerlikon cannon and a Squid anti-submarine mortar, and was fitted with a capable radar and sonar suite for late-war anti-submarine work, with a range of 6,200 nautical miles.

The yard has a small coincidence attached to it. Barclay Curle of Whiteinch, on the north bank of the Clyde below Glasgow, built Berkeley Castle in 1943, and nine years later, on the same river, built a 516-foot passenger liner for the British-India Steam Navigation Company's London to East Africa run. That ship was SS Uganda, who spent the 1970s taking schoolchildren round the Mediterranean and then, in three days at Gibraltar in 1982, became the hospital ship for the Falklands campaign. One Glasgow yard, one corvette and one liner, and between them a convoy escort, a school cruise and five hundred and four surgical operations in the South Atlantic.

The Castle was what the Royal Navy had learned the Flower class corvette ought to have been. The Flowers had been ordered in a hurry from yards that could not build anything larger, and they were too short, too slow and famously too wet for the mid-Atlantic work they ended up doing. The Castles were fifty feet longer, with a properly flared bow, far better accommodation and enough endurance to cross the ocean without a nervous glance at the fuel state, and they could still be built by the same modest commercial yards on the same slipways. Some forty-four were completed, all named after castles of the British Isles and a dozen of them handed straight to the Royal Canadian Navy, and they arrived just as the U-boat war was turning.

The Squid mentioned in passing is the most interesting thing aboard her. Until it appeared, an escort attacked a submarine by running over the top of it and rolling depth charges off the stern, which had one glaring fault: asdic looks forward and downward, so in the final minute of every attack the target passed into a blind spot and the ship was effectively guessing. Squid was a three-barrelled mortar that threw three heavy charges in a triangle ahead of the ship, fired automatically by the sonar set itself at the correct moment and fused to explode at a computed depth. The ship never lost contact and never had to guess. It roughly doubled the proportion of attacks that killed, and Berkeley Castle, at 1,630 tons, was among the smallest ships in the world carrying one.

A Quiet War of Escort Duty

After working up, Berkeley Castle joined the 15th Escort Group, escorting her first convoy in late January 1944, and went on to serve with the 40th Escort Group on the Gibraltar route, followed by the B5 Escort Group and finally the 31st Escort Group through to the war's end.

It was steady, unglamorous convoy protection work of exactly the kind that occupied the bulk of the escort fleet, without any recorded U-boat engagements of her own, a perfectly respectable if unremarkable wartime record.

A Remarkably Unusual End

Berkeley Castle continued as an air-sea rescue vessel until mid-1946 before being placed in reserve at Harwich, and underwent a refit in London in 1949 before returning once again to reserve.

Her actual demise, when it came, was about as unusual as it gets for a warship: on the night of 31 January 1953, a severe north-easterly gale combined with an exceptionally high tide to breach the wall of Sheerness Dockyard roughly two hours before high water, in floods later described as the worst Britain had suffered since the turn of the century.

That description undersells it considerably. The night of 31 January 1953 produced the worst storm surge ever recorded in the North Sea: a deep low over the northern basin pushing an enormous mound of water south into the funnel of the southern North Sea, arriving on a spring tide, with a gale behind it. There was no warning system of any kind, because nobody had thought one necessary. Three hundred and seven people were killed in south-east England, fifty-eight of them on Canvey Island alone, nineteen more in Scotland, and over two hundred at sea, including a hundred and thirty-three aboard the Larne to Stranraer ferry Princess Victoria. In the Netherlands, where the dykes went in the small hours while people slept, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six died. It remains the worst peacetime disaster in modern British history.

Two very large things came out of that night. Britain set up the Storm Tide Warning Service, so that the next surge would be seen coming, and eventually built the Thames Barrier, which was finished in 1982 and exists because of what happened in 1953. The Dutch went considerably further and built the Delta Works. A corvette falling off her blocks in a Sheerness dry dock is a footnote to all of that, but it is a rather good illustration of the sheer force involved: enough water arrived, fast enough, to lift the gates off a naval dockyard and knock over ships that were not even afloat.

The surge burst the dockyard's main lock gates and poured into the basin and dry docks, sweeping away the wooden shores holding ships upright on their blocks; Berkeley Castle, high and dry for a refit, simply toppled over where she stood. She was not alone.

The submarine HMS Sirdar, best known for her starring role a few years earlier in the film Morning Departure, capsized in the same basin that night, while nearby the experimental submarine HMS Seraph survived only because her duty officer and seven sailors kept her motors running and held her off the wall by hand through the worst of the surge, a piece of quick thinking for which, remarkably, none of them ever received official recognition.

The film Sirdar had starred in has a grim story of its own. Morning Departure, with John Mills and Richard Attenborough, is about the crew of a submarine trapped on the bottom, and it had just been completed when, on 12 January 1950, HMS Truculent was rammed by a Swedish tanker in the Thames Estuary and sank with the loss of sixty-four men. There was serious discussion of shelving the picture altogether. It was released instead with a foreword explaining that the film had been finished before the disaster and was offered as a tribute to the officers and men of His Majesty's submarines. Three years later the boat that had played the part was lying on her side in a flooded basin a few miles from where Truculent went down.

And Seraph, held off the wall by eight men and her own motors, had a better claim on the nation's gratitude than almost any submarine afloat. In October 1942 she had put General Mark Clark ashore on the Algerian coast by canoe for a secret meeting with French officers before the North African landings. In April 1943 she carried the body of a Welsh tramp, dressed as a Royal Marines major and carrying a briefcase of forged invasion plans, to a position off Huelva and floated him ashore, and the Germans moved divisions to Greece and Sardinia on the strength of it while the Allies landed in Sicily. That was Operation Mincemeat, the most successful deception of the war. Her reward, ten years on, was to be nearly written off by the weather in her own dockyard.

She was refloated afterward, but the damage proved beyond economic repair.

She arrived at a breaking yard in Grays, Essex, on 29 February 1956, but demolition was not immediate: while awaiting the breaker's torch, and already partly parted out, she was dressed up as the fictional HMS Berkeley for Up the Creek, Val Guest's 1958 naval comedy starring David Tomlinson as an accident-prone lieutenant given command of a long-forgotten, unloved warship, alongside Peter Sellers, Wilfrid Hyde-White, David Lodge and Lionel Jeffries.

It is worth noting that the production got a genuinely derelict ship for nothing. Up the Creek needed a vessel that looked neglected, forgotten and half falling apart, and rather than dress a serviceable warship down, the film-makers borrowed one that was already partly dismantled and waiting for the torch. Berkeley Castle did not have to act.

A fittingly odd final chapter for a ship whose most dramatic real moment had come not from enemy action but from one of Britain's worst peacetime natural disasters catching her, quite literally, with her feet up in dry dock, and whose last job was playing a fictional version of a washed-up old warship that, by then, she genuinely was.

One last thing, about the rest of them, because the class went in some unexpected directions. Ninety-six Castles were ordered from British and Canadian yards. Fifteen of the British ships and every one of the thirty-seven Canadian ones were cancelled as the U-boat war turned and the need evaporated, so Canada was given twelve British-built ships instead; forty-four were completed in all. Five more were finished not as warships but as convoy rescue ships for the Merchant Navy, which is to say ships whose entire purpose was to follow a convoy and pick up the people from anything that got sunk.

And four of them became ocean weather ships. Weather Reporter, Weather Monitor, Weather Adviser and Weather Surveyor spent the 1950s and 1960s parked in the middle of the North Atlantic on numbered stations, sending up radiosonde balloons, taking soundings and readings around the clock, and standing by as the only surface rescue available to any transatlantic airliner that came down. It was a miserable posting, weeks at a time hove to in the open ocean going nowhere on purpose, and the seakeeping that made a Castle a good convoy escort made her one of the few small ships that could stand it. HMS Snowflake (K211) did the same job as Weather Watcher on Ocean Weather Station Alpha, and her article describes what it involved.

Pevensey Castle went furthest of all. She became Weather Monitor in 1959, was later renamed Admiral Beaufort, and was still working in 1982, thirty-eight years after she was built to hunt submarines. The last Castle afloat anywhere was the Uruguayan Montevideo, launched on the Clyde as HMS Rising Castle, who was not broken up until 1975. So while Berkeley Castle was lying on her side in a flooded dry dock at Sheerness in 1953 and being borrowed by a film crew in 1958, several of her sisters were sitting out in the Atlantic taking the weather, and one of them had another quarter of a century to run.