HMS Bream (T306): A Fishing Boat Design Turned Mediterranean Convoy Escort

A Fishing Boat Reborn as a Warship

HMS Bream was built by Cochrane and Sons at Selby, launched on 10 December 1942 and commissioned on 2 March 1943, one of ten Fish-class anti-submarine trawlers ordered by the Royal Navy in 1940.

Cochrane and Sons is a name that should be better known than it is, and the geography of the place is the first surprise. The yard stood on the bank of the Ouse at Selby, fifty miles inland from the open sea, and it launched its ships sideways into a river narrower than they were long, which drew crowds of spectators for the best part of a century. The firm had moved there from Beverley in 1898 and made its living building trawlers and coasters for the Hull and Grimsby fleets, and when the Admiralty needed small warships it already knew exactly who to ask: in the First World War Cochrane built ninety steam trawlers for private owners and another seventy for the Admiralty, which went to sea as minesweepers and gunboats. In the second war the yard turned out twenty-one Admiralty rescue tugs, thirty Empire harbour tugs, a lighthouse tender and a long list of trawlers, Bream among them. It kept building trawlers into the 1960s, passed through several owners, and closed in October 1992 with its machinery auctioned off the following year.

The Fish class as a whole, and what it was like to be one of ten near-identical little ships spread across three oceans, is set out in the article on HMS Mullet (T311). What is worth adding here is what the parent design tells you. Gulfoss was an ordinary commercial trawler of 1929, built for men who fished the northern grounds in winter for a living, and the Admiralty took her lines almost unaltered. That is not a compromise. A boat designed to work in the Arctic with a hold full of fish and a deck full of gear is, by construction, a very seaworthy small ship, and the qualities that make a good trawler, buoyancy forward, an easy motion, an engine that runs for weeks and a hull that can take being knocked about, are precisely the qualities an escort needs. What she lacked was speed, and eleven knots against a submerged U-boat's four is thinner than it sounds when the convoy itself is doing eight.

The class was based directly on a commercial design, the 1929 trawler Gulfoss, also built by Cochrane, adapted for naval service and fitted with a 12-pounder gun, anti-aircraft cannon and depth charges, intended for the dual role of minesweeping and anti-submarine warfare that suited a sturdy, seaworthy commercial hull rather well, even if the Fish class, like most wartime trawlers, could never match a purpose-built warship for speed or firepower.

Ten were built, all by Cochrane, and they were tiny: 670 tons, 162 feet, thirty-five men, a single reciprocating engine of 700 horsepower turning one shaft for a maximum of eleven knots. Eight were completed as anti-submarine trawlers, Bonito, Bream, Grayling, Grilse, Herring, Mullet, Pollock and Whiting, and two, Corncrake and Redshank, as minelayers. Two of the ten did not survive the war, and neither was lost to enemy action. Corncrake foundered in an Atlantic storm in January 1943. Herring, laid down at Selby a day after Bream and launched a fortnight after her, was commissioned on 15 April 1943 and sunk seven days later in collision with the French merchant ship Cassard, about two miles north of Buoy 20 off Blyth. She sits there still, upright in sixty metres of water, with the dent in her stern where the Cassard hit her. A career of one week is not much of a record, and it is a useful corrective to the idea that a small ship in wartime was mainly at risk from the enemy.

Escorting Convoys Through the Mediterranean

HMS Bream served under the command of Skipper Stanley Charles Larner of the Royal Naval Reserve from February 1943 through to the middle of 1945, employed on escort duties protecting merchant convoys in Mediterranean waters, the kind of steady, watchful work that rarely produced dramatic single actions but that kept the supply lines running to a theatre of war that depended entirely on ships getting through.

The word Skipper in front of Stanley Larner's name is not a nickname, and it is the key to what kind of ship this was. Skipper was a substantive rank in the Royal Naval Reserve, held by professional fishermen who had spent their working lives running trawlers and who were commissioned to go on doing exactly that in wartime. It sat outside the ordinary officer structure altogether, and it existed because the Navy had worked out, correctly, that a man who had taken a trawler into the Icelandic grounds every winter for twenty years knew more about handling one in bad weather than any lieutenant it could train. So Bream went to sea under a fisherman, with a crew of thirty-five drawn largely from the same trade, on a hull designed for fishing, and spent two and a half years escorting convoys with it.

In May 1944, HMS Bream was assigned to convoy MKS 49, which departed Port Said bound for Gibraltar, and on 15 May she was detached to Malta while the rest of the convoy continued on, arriving safely at its destination on 20 May 1944, one small but representative episode in a career built almost entirely around this kind of dependable convoy protection.

The Mediterranean she was working in by May 1944 was a very different sea from the one of two years before. The MKS convoys ran homeward from the eastern Mediterranean through Gibraltar, joining the Sierra Leone convoys there for the run up to Britain, and by the spring of 1944 the German submarine force in the Mediterranean had been reduced to a handful of boats that could not get in and could not get out, since passing the Strait of Gibraltar submerged against the inward current had become close to suicidal. The danger by then was mostly from the air and mostly at night. Convoys still sailed with escorts, because the alternative was to find out the hard way, and a trawler on the flank of MKS 49 in May 1944 was doing a job that had become quiet without becoming unnecessary. Bream left the convoy for Malta on the 15th; the rest of it reached Gibraltar safely on the 20th.

A Modest End

It is worth saying plainly that her individual war is thinly recorded, which is entirely normal for the trawlers. They were not in the business of generating despatches. What can be said is what the work consisted of: a vessel of 670 tons and 700 horsepower, capable of eleven knots flat out and a good deal less into a head sea, keeping station on the flank of a merchant convoy with an asdic set and a rack of depth charges, for weeks at a stretch, in a sea with aircraft over it and submarines under it. The measure of that is not actions fought but convoys delivered, and by that measure the trawlers did very well indeed.

Valafell, and an Arrest That Reached the Commons

HMS Bream was sold in 1946 as the Royal Navy rapidly reduced its wartime fleet of requisitioned and specially built trawlers, and at that point she simply went back to the job her hull had been designed for. Consolidated Fisheries Ltd of Grimsby bought her on 24 May 1946, renamed her Valafell on 26 November and registered her as GY 386, and she sailed on her first fishing trip on 27 December. On paper this is where a warship's story usually ends. Hers was about to get considerably more interesting.

On 20 July 1955 she was arrested for fishing illegally inside the Icelandic limit and escorted into Akureyri, her skipper Arthur Bunce and her owners left with a fine of 74,000 kronur, about 1,600 pounds at the time. She was sold on to the Rhondda Fishing Company on 10 March 1958, which was a poorly timed change of ownership, because by then Iceland had extended her fishery limit to twelve miles, Britain had refused to recognise it, and Royal Navy warships were escorting British trawlers into the disputed water. The first Cod War was on.

On 6 February 1959 the Icelandic patrol vessel Thor finally brought the Valafell into harbour, having spent four days trying, with a British warship obstructing her until the trawler was taken inside the four-mile line. Her owners then ordered her into port to stand trial, and she was duly fined and lost her gear and her catch, as did the trawler Lord Montgomery alongside her.

The awkward part was the Royal Navy standing by while it happened, and it reached the House of Commons within the week. On 11 February 1959 Mr Younger asked the Foreign Secretary what assurances had been received from the Icelandic Government before Her Majesty's ships consented to the arrest of the Grimsby trawler Valafell. Mr Profumo replied that no assurances had been sought or received, and that the decision whether or not to allow the trawler to proceed to an Icelandic port was one that only the owners could take. Which is one way of putting it. Anyone who has read about the frigates that would be trading paint with Icelandic gunboats fifteen years later, HMS Andromeda among them, will recognise the shape of the argument.

She went on fishing for another year. In June 1960 she was sold to BISCO, and she was broken up in June 1961, eighteen years after Skipper Larner took her over at Selby. She had spent three years as a warship and fifteen as a trawler, and it was the trawler, not the warship, who ended up being debated by ministers.

There is a last thing worth saying about the trade she went back to, because it did not outlive her by very long. Valafell was fined at Akureyri in 1955 and arrested again in 1959, and both of those were skirmishes in a dispute that Britain went on to lose comprehensively. Iceland extended to twelve miles, then fifty, then two hundred, and in 1976 the British distant-water fleet lost the grounds it had been built around. Ships were laid up and broken up by the hundred, the processing plants and the supply trades went with them, and the government ended up paying out tens of millions in compensation to thousands of men whose jobs had simply ceased to exist. Grimsby and Hull have not recovered. Bream was broken up in 1961, fifteen years before that, which by the standards of her industry counts as good timing. The naval side of the same argument is told in the articles on HMS Duncan (F80) and HMS Andromeda (F57).