HMS Coldstreamer (T337): One of the Largest Trawlers Ever Built for the Royal Navy

Built to a Commercial Design, Scaled Up for War

HMS Coldstreamer was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell at their Holmes yard in Beverley, launched on 10 December 1942 and commissioned on 9 April 1943, one of the Military-class naval trawlers, a design adapted from the commercial fishing vessel Lady Madeleine, also built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell, and scaled up specifically for naval service. The yard itself had been building trawlers on the Humber since 1883, moving to its purpose-built Grovehill site at Beverley in 1901 and turning out well over a thousand vessels across an eighty-year history before finally closing in 1963, a proper Yorkshire shipbuilding institution long before it turned its hand to warships.

The Royal Navy ordered nine of these trawlers between 1941 and 1943, and the class went on to be recognised as the largest trawlers ever built for the Royal Navy, drawing genuine comparisons in size and capability to the Flower-class corvettes despite originating from an entirely commercial fishing boat design.

Her eight sisters were Bombardier, Fusilier, Grenadier, Guardsman, Home Guard, Lancer, Royal Marine and Sapper, an entire class of fishing-boat-hulled trawlers dressed up in the ranks and regiments of the British Army rather than anything more nautical, Coldstreamer herself borrowing her name from the Coldstream Guards.

Each vessel carried a 4-inch quick-firing gun, between four and eight 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, and 65 depth charges, a substantial armament for a ship built around a fishing trawler's hull.

Anti-Submarine Duty

HMS Coldstreamer served throughout the war as an anti-submarine warfare trawler under three different commanding officers: Temporary Lieutenant Harold Norman Smyth, RNVR, from her commissioning until October 1943; Temporary Lieutenant Arthur Lancaster Kerr, RNVR, who held command through 1944 and into the following spring; and Temporary Lieutenant George Beaumont Butler, RNVR, who saw her through to the war's end. On 5 December 1944, under Kerr's command, she took part in anti-submarine exercises off Campbeltown alongside HMS Vitality, HMS Northern Sky and HMS Royal Marine, the kind of routine but valuable training work that kept escort crews sharp and ready.

Detailed records of any specific combat actions or losses involving HMS Coldstreamer have not survived in detail, a situation shared by the entire Military class, all nine of which completed the war without a single vessel lost in action, a remarkably strong record for ships built to a design never originally intended for naval combat.

A Long Career as a Fishing Vessel

HMS Coldstreamer was sold in 1946 to Hellyer Brothers Limited of Hull and renamed Esquimaux, converted to burn fuel oil in April 1947, before being sold on to the Devon Fishing Company in March 1948 and, in May 1955, sold again to the West Dock Steam Fishing Company, who gave her the name she would carry longest, Dunsley Wyke. Her working life came full circle in June 1966, when Hellyer Brothers bought her back, the very same Hull firm that had first taken her on as Esquimaux two decades earlier.

She was finally sold for scrap to a Belgian scrapping company in early 1967, arriving at Antwerp for breaking up on 19 February that year, closing out a career that had taken her from wartime anti-submarine patrol duty to over two decades of truly productive commercial fishing service, a fitting second life for a ship whose naval design had, after all, begun life as a fishing boat.