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.

Lady Madeleine is worth more than a passing mention, because she did not simply lend her lines to the class. She went to war herself, converted for anti-submarine work and put on the Russian convoys, and at twenty-seven minutes past four one morning U-436 fired two torpedoes at her. Both missed. Lady Madeleine turned and depth-charged the boat hard enough to damage her and send her home early. A fishing trawler, in the Arctic, drove off a Type VII U-boat. Her commanding officer, Graeme Ogden, wrote the whole thing up afterwards under the title My Sea Lady, and the Admiralty scaled her up and built nine more.

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.

The comparison with a corvette is closer than it sounds. A Military-class trawler ran to 750 tons on a hull 193 feet long, which made her the largest purpose-built trawler the Royal Navy ever had, and the reason for using a trawler hull at all was not economy but suitability. A trawler is designed to work in the worst weather the North Atlantic produces, to tow heavy gear astern for hours at a stretch, and to be handled by a small crew. Change the gear for depth charges or a minesweeping sweep and you have very nearly the ship you wanted, without asking a single warship yard to stop what it was doing.

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.

The Coldstream Guards, incidentally, are the oldest regiment in continuous service in the British Army, and they got their name from a town on the Tweed where General Monck's regiment was quartered when it set off south on New Year's Day 1660 to put the King back on the throne. Which makes HMS Coldstreamer a fishing boat named after a regiment named after a village, and there is something entirely in keeping about that.

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.

And there were men who already knew how to work them. Ships like Coldstreamer belonged to the Royal Naval Patrol Service, the branch that swept the mines and hunted the submarines in small ships, run from a requisitioned pleasure garden at Lowestoft called Sparrow's Nest and commissioned as HMS Europa. It was the most easterly point in Britain and, for most of the war, the closest British military establishment to the enemy. Through it passed more than seventy thousand men and some six thousand vessels, a great many of them trawlermen who had joined up with their own skippers and their own crews and simply carried on doing at war what they had done for a living.

The rest of the Navy called them Harry Tate's Navy, after a music-hall comedian whose entire act was failing to master a contraption, and also Churchill's Pirates and the Sparrows. The joke wore thin quickly. Around 260 trawlers were lost in action, and the memorial at Lowestoft carries the names of some 2,385 men of the Patrol Service who have no grave but the sea. The branch had its own silver badge, awarded after a minimum of six months in an anti-submarine or minesweeping trawler, and the men who held it regarded it as worth more than any medal, on the reasonable grounds that six months of that particular sea time was six months of it. Against that background, all nine Military-class trawlers coming through the war intact looks less like a design triumph and more like a run of luck that nobody in the branch would have thought to expect.

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.

There is a postscript in the timing of her scrapping. She spent twenty years working out of Hull on the distant-water grounds, off Iceland and in the Arctic, in what was then one of the largest fishing fleets in the world. She went to the breakers at Antwerp in February 1967. Eleven months later, in the winter of 1968, Hull lost three trawlers and fifty-eight men in the space of three weeks, and the disaster changed the industry, and the Cod Wars finished the rest of it. The trawler that had gone to war and come back was broken up just before the fleet she belonged to began to disappear.

That winter deserves telling properly, because it is one of the more remarkable things that has ever happened in a British port. Three Hull trawlers were lost inside three weeks. St Romanus went first, on 18 January 1968, with all twenty of her crew. Kingston Peridot followed on 26 January, again with all twenty. Ross Cleveland went on 4 February with eighteen aboard, and one man out of the three ships came home: Harry Eddom, who got ashore on the north-west coast of Iceland and was found alive on 6 February. Fifty-eight men and boys died in twenty days. Two of them were fifteen years old.

What happened next is the part that changed things. The women of Hessle Road, the trawlermen's own street, did not wait for an inquiry. Lillian Bilocca, a fish filleter from Hessle Road, together with Yvonne Blenkinsop and Mary Denness, drew up a Fishermen's Charter, collected ten thousand signatures for it inside ten days, mounted direct action on the dock to stop undermanned trawlers putting to sea, and then took the whole thing to Harold Wilson's government at Westminster. They were photographed in the headscarves they wore for work, which is how they came to be called the Headscarf Revolutionaries.

They won. The government accepted every demand in the charter, most of them before the public inquiry had even reported: a radio operator on every ship, a mother ship with a doctor aboard on the distant grounds, proper safety equipment, improved weather reporting, an end to sending ships to sea undermanned. The Holland-Martin report on trawler safety followed in October 1968. Lillian Bilocca lost her job with a Hull fish merchant that year for taking three weeks off without leave to run the campaign, was blacklisted, and never worked in the fishing industry again; it took her two years to find any work at all, and then only menial work. She died of cancer on 3 August 1988, aged fifty-nine. Hull City Council put up a plaque to her and to the women of Hessle Road in 1990, and there is a mural of them on the road itself.

Coldstreamer had gone to Antwerp eleven months before any of it. She had spent twenty years on those exact grounds, off Iceland and up into the Arctic, under three different owners and two different names, and the hull had been designed in the first place because it could survive that water. What finished the Hull fleet in the end was not the weather. It was the Cod Wars and the two hundred mile limit, which closed the distant grounds altogether within a decade. The ship went first, the men went next, and the industry followed.