HMS Dunkery (T224): A Convoy Escort's Quiet War, Wrecked in Norway as a Fishing Boat

Laid Down at Beverley

HMS Dunkery was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell at Beverley, ordered on 15 March 1941, laid down on 11 July that year, launched on 4 December 1941, and commissioned on 29 May 1942, a Hill-class anti-submarine trawler built to the same practical, fishing-boat-derived design shared by her many sister ships, ships that gave the wartime Royal Navy a useful supply of modest but capable escort vessels at a time when demand for anti-submarine ships vastly outstripped what larger dedicated warships alone could provide.

The yard is worth a moment as well. Cook, Welton and Gemmell had its works at Grovehill on the River Hull at Beverley, nine miles inland, and between 1901 and 1963 launched more than thirteen hundred vessels from it, at one point being the largest builder of fishing trawlers in the world. That is exactly why the Admiralty gave it anti-submarine trawlers to build in 1941: the firm had been making that hull for forty years. The yard, and how it ended, is described in the article on HMS Begonia (K66).

Who actually crewed ships like her, why the class was named after English hills and what an eleven-knot trawler could realistically do about a submarine are all set out in the article on HMS Duncton (T220), her sister and near-contemporary from the same slipway. Dunkery took her name from Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor, which for a ship that would end her days on the Barents Sea coast is a properly ironic piece of naming.

Only eight Hill-class trawlers were ever built, all of them at the same Beverley yard, 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. Two of Dunkery'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.

Training and Escort Duty

HMS Dunkery spent four consecutive days, 12 to 15 September 1942, on anti-submarine exercises off Lough Foyle in Northern Ireland, training against the submarine HMS H43 alongside a rotating cast of escorts that included HMS Pennywort, HMS Clover, HMS Anemone, HMS Abelia, the destroyer HMS Highlander, HMS Fame and HMS Chelsea, valuable if unglamorous work sharpening the skills of escort crews from right across the Royal Navy.

On 30 July 1943 she carried out further anti-submarine exercises off Freetown, training this time against the Free French submarine Le Centaure alongside the harbour defence motor launch HDML 1089, a rare chance to hunt a submarine her crew could be entirely certain was on their own side.

She went on to serve as one of several escorts for the large Convoy SL152, departing Freetown on 13 March 1944 under Temporary Lieutenant Ernest Ross, but suffered engine trouble only hours into the voyage: at six o'clock that evening she dropped astern of the main convoy and never rejoined it, proceeding independently on to Bathurst rather than continuing with the group, a reasonably minor but genuine reminder of just how much wear and tear these small, heavily used escort vessels endured over years of continuous wartime service.

Convoy SL 152 needs a word of explanation, because the SL series is the forgotten half of the Battle of the Atlantic. Ships carrying cargo to Britain from South America, West and South Africa and everywhere east of Suez made their own way independently to Freetown in Sierra Leone, formed up there, and were then convoyed 3,500 miles north to Liverpool. That was the last and most dangerous leg. The series had started in September 1939 and it ran, without a break, until the last one sailed in November 1944; every reinforcement for India, the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean that went round the Cape came home through Freetown, which is why the Royal Navy kept escorts there for six years. It was long, hot, monotonous work in the tropics with none of the publicity that attached to the Arctic run, and rather more of the war depended on it.

Her defect that evening is worth a moment, because of what it implies. A 750-ton trawler with an engine fault, dropping astern of her convoy at six in the evening and then making her own way to Bathurst alone, would have been a death sentence in 1941 or 1942. By March 1944 it was an inconvenience. The U-boats had been driven out of the central and southern Atlantic the previous summer and had not come back in any numbers, and a lame escort could limp down the West African coast on her own with a fair expectation of arriving. Nothing in the record marks that as a turning point. It simply was one.

Four different officers commanded HMS Dunkery over the course of the war: Lieutenant Commander William Keith Buckley, Temporary Lieutenant Stanley Martin Booker, Temporary Lieutenant Ernest Ross, and Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Charles Stanley Reffelle Shapland, a typical enough rotation of command for a small trawler across several years of continuous escort and training duty.

Back to Fishing, and a Wreck Off Norway

HMS Dunkery was sold to Hellyer Brothers Limited of Hull on 4 April 1946 and renamed Spaniard (H366, official number 181283), returning to the fishing industry her design had originally been adapted from. Hellyer Brothers was itself a proper Hull institution by then, founded by a Devon fishing family who had moved north in the 1850s and grown into one of the port's biggest trawler owners, having once assembled an entire fifty-strong fleet of steam trawlers, all named after Shakespearean characters, in a startling five months flat back in 1906.

Spaniard was fitted to burn fuel oil in January 1947 and sold on again to the Northern Fishing Company on 1 March 1948, a fairly ordinary changing of hands for a working trawler by that point in her career.

Her working life came to an end on 22 March 1949, when she was wrecked off Sletnes Lighthouse near Gamvik in Finnmark, northern Norway, though her entire crew was rescued safely, a fittingly modest close for a ship whose wartime career, like so many of her Hill-class sisters, had been built around patient, largely unglamorous escort and training work rather than any single dramatic action, but which had nonetheless played its own small and genuine part in keeping Britain's wartime convoy routes as safe as they could be made.

There is a geography to her ending that is worth noticing. Sletnes lighthouse stands on the Barents Sea coast of Finnmark, a long way north of the Arctic Circle, on the stretch of water that the PQ and JW convoys had spent the war fighting their way past. Dunkery never went there in uniform; her war was spent off Northern Ireland and West Africa. She got there in 1949 as the trawler Spaniard, chasing fish, and that is where she stayed. Every man aboard got off.

And the coast she ended on had been through something that makes the geography heavier still. In October 1944, as the Germans withdrew from Finnmark ahead of the advancing Soviets, Hitler ordered the province burned and its people removed. Over that autumn German fire patrols destroyed something like eleven thousand houses and six thousand farms along with churches, hospitals, fish factories and lighthouses, close to a hundred thousand mines were laid at sea and ashore, and more than seventy thousand people were ordered out. Perhaps twenty-five thousand of them refused, and spent the winter hiding in caves, in the mountains and on the islands of one of the coldest inhabited coastlines on earth.

Gamvik itself, the village nearest to where she went ashore, had one of the harder versions of it. About three hundred people who had evaded the evacuation were living there in shelters built from the wreckage of their own houses when, on 19 December 1944, German E-boats came in and put landing parties ashore to destroy what was left a second time. Some of the villagers found weapons and held them off long enough for most of the population to get away. After the war the Norwegian government tried to stop people going back because of the mines, and they went back anyway from the summer of 1945, to nothing. So when the trawler Spaniard, once HMS Dunkery, drove ashore near Sletnes light on 22 March 1949 and every man aboard was got off, the people who would have been on that shore had been home for less than four years and were still rebuilding it.