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 Gemmill 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 an 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.

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.

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.