HMS Duncton (T220): A Fishing Trawler on the Deadliest Arctic Convoy Routes

Constructed at Beverley

HMS Duncton was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmill at Beverley, ordered on 18 January 1941, laid down on 2 May that year, launched on 6 September 1941, and commissioned on 11 February 1942, a Hill-class anti-submarine trawler, part of a broader Royal Navy programme of converting and building fishing trawler designs into truly useful, if modest, escort vessels at a time when the demand for anti-submarine ships far outstripped what larger purpose-built warships alone could supply.

The yard itself had form for exactly this kind of work. Cook, Welton and Gemmell was founded in Hull in 1882 by three men who had learned their trade at the Earle's shipbuilding works nearby, and moved nine miles up the River Hull to Grovehill, Beverley, in 1901. By the time Duncton was ordered, the firm had spent four decades building trawlers for the North Sea fishing fleets, expertise the Admiralty leaned on heavily in both world wars: tugs, minesweepers and anti-submarine patrol boats in the first, and corvettes, minelayers, landing craft and further trawlers like Duncton in the second.

Only eight Hill-class trawlers were ever built, all of them at Beverley, each displacing a modest 750 tons, barely 181 feet long and capable of just 11 knots, armed with a single 12-pounder anti-aircraft gun, three 20mm Oerlikons and racks of depth charges rather than anything that would trouble a proper warship's gunnery officer. It was not a glamorous specification, but two of Duncton's seven sister ships still paid the full price for wearing a Royal Navy pennant: Birdlip was torpedoed by U-547 in June 1944, and Bredon by U-521 in February 1943, a reminder that even the smallest escort in a convoy carried genuine risk for her crew.

The Arctic Convoys

HMS Duncton departed Seidisfjord, Iceland, on 10 April 1942 as part of the close escort for Convoy PQ 14, twenty-five merchant ships bound for the Kola Inlet, sailing alongside the destroyers HMS Bulldog, HMS Beagle, HMS Amazon and HMS Beverley and the corvettes HMS Campanula, HMS Oxlip, HMS Saxifrage and HMS Snowflake, under Temporary Lieutenant P. J. G. Christian, RNVR.

These Arctic convoy routes ranked among the most dangerous of the entire war, combining the constant threat of U-boat attack and German aircraft based in occupied Norway with brutal weather conditions and the cover of near-permanent daylight during the summer months that left convoys dangerously exposed to enemy reconnaissance and attack. PQ 14 found that out within hours: thirty hours of fog and pack ice battered the convoy so badly that sixteen of her twenty-five merchantmen turned back for Iceland, several of the escorts damaged in the process, and it was these stragglers, not Duncton's own outbound passage, that formed the westbound Convoy QP 10 she is also credited with escorting that April.

Only nine ships from PQ 14 pressed on to reach Murmansk on 19 April. Among the convoy's losses along the way was the commodore's own ship, the merchantman Empire Howard, torpedoed by U-403 on 16 April and gone in under a minute; twenty-five of her sixty-two crew were killed, including Commodore E. Rees, the survivors hauled from the Barents Sea by the trawlers HMS Lord Middleton and Northern Wave. QP 10 fared no better on the way home, losing Empire Cowper and Harpalion to German aircraft on 11 April and El Occidente and Kiev to the U-boat U-435 two days later.

HMS Duncton was back in the thick of it that September, sailing from Loch Ewe on 2 September as part of the local escort for Convoy PQ 18, forty merchant ships bound once again for the Kola Inlet, this time under Temporary Lieutenant J. P. Kilbee, RNR. PQ 18 and the homeward-bound Convoy QP 14 together made up Operation EV, and it went down in history as one of the most fiercely contested convoy battles of the entire war: German bombers and U-boats sank ten merchant ships in a single day on 13 September alone, among them Wacosta, Oregonian, Empire Stevenson and John Penn.

The following day was scarcely calmer. The submarine U-457 set the tanker Atheltemplar ablaze; HMS Harrier tried and failed to finish her off with gunfire before U-408 sent her to the bottom that afternoon. Swordfish aircraft flying from the escort carrier HMS Avenger hunted down U-589 for HMS Onslow to finish with depth charges, while the Luftwaffe turned its attention to Avenger herself, missing narrowly under heavy fire from her escorting destroyers. Worse still was the fate of the ammunition ship Mary Luckenbach, torpedoed that same afternoon while carrying 1,000 tons of TNT: she did not sink so much as vanish, and there were no survivors.

What remained of the convoy reached Archangelsk on 21 September, battered but through, and PQ 18 remains one of the most extensively studied convoy battles of the entire war.

Later Escort Work

HMS Duncton's war was not spent entirely on the Arctic run. On 6 October 1942 she took part in anti-submarine exercises off Lough Foyle in Northern Ireland alongside HMS Virginia, HMS Vetch, HMS Marigold, HMS Sapphire, HMS Gardenia and HMS Convolvulus, working under HMS H 43, home-waters training of exactly the kind that kept a small ship's company sharp between the real thing.

By May 1943 she had moved to West Africa, joining the huge combined convoy OS 47/KMS 14, assembled off Oversay in the Hebrides on 6 May, now under the command of Lieutenant J. N. Burgess, RANVR, an Australian officer who would remain in command for well over a year. From Freetown, Duncton helped escort a small group of merchant ships north to rejoin the convoy bound for the Gold Coast port of Takoradi, working alongside her sister trawler HMS Birdlip, the corvette HMS Burdock and the armed boarding vessel HMS Corinthian.

That June and July she took part in further anti-submarine exercises off Freetown, this time hunting a genuinely elusive contact: the Free French submarine Le Centaure, standing in as the enemy for training purposes alongside HMS Cowslip, HMS Butser and HMS Crocus. For once, Duncton's crew knew perfectly well whose side the submarine beneath them was on.

In total, six different officers commanded HMS Duncton between 1942 and 1945, a reasonably typical turnover for a small escort vessel across three years of demanding wartime service.

Back to Fishing

HMS Duncton was sold to the Marine Steam Fishing Company on 10 April 1946 and renamed Colwyn Bay (H387, official number 181294), returning to the fishing industry her design had originally been derived from.

That return to fishing was not without its own dangers. On 11 November 1950, Skipper Albert Wilson, 52, died aboard the Colwyn Bay while she was working the fishing grounds off the Norwegian coast, a reminder that having survived U-boats, the Luftwaffe and the Arctic pack ice, a working trawler's life still carried risks entirely its own.

She subsequently passed to the St Andrews Steam Fishing Company of Hull in 1951 and was transferred to Grimsby on 15 April 1955, before finally being sold for scrap and broken up at Hendrik Ido Ambacht in Holland on 29 February 1964, closing out a working life that had taken her from some of the most dangerous convoy routes of the entire Second World War back to the considerably less perilous, if still demanding, business of commercial fishing.