HMS Gateshead (T288): One of Nearly Two Hundred Isles-Class Minesweeping Trawlers

A Fleet Built for Mines and Harbours

HMS Gateshead was one of 197 Isles-class trawlers built for the Royal Navy between 1939 and 1945, vessels spread across four nearly identical sub-classes: the main Isles group of 145 ships, along with the smaller Dance, Shakespearian and Tree groups.

Her name is worth a second look, because the obvious answer is probably the wrong one. She was one of exactly eight Isles-class trawlers built in Canada for the Royal Navy, and the other seven were Campobello, Dochet, Flint, Herschell, Porcher and Texada, all Canadian island names, plus Prospect on the Nova Scotia coast. Gateshead is the odd one out only if you assume Tyneside. There is a Gateshead Island: some two hundred and twenty square kilometres of it, in M'Clintock Channel in the Kitikmeot Region of what is now Nunavut, a long way north of the Arctic Circle, known to the Inuit as Umingmalik and known to zoologists as one of the more important polar bear denning grounds in the western Arctic. A batch of ships built on the St Lawrence, in a class named after islands, with seven Canadian island names among eight, makes the Arctic rather than the Tyne the likelier candidate. Gateshead, County Durham, has a great deal to recommend it. A Metro, a millennium bridge and an angel. No polar bears.

Somewhat larger than the earlier Castle-class trawlers that had served the Royal Navy during the First World War, these ships were built at a range of British and Canadian shipyards, including Smiths Dock Company, Hall Russell and Company, John Crown and Sons, Ferguson Brothers, Collingwood Shipbuilding and Kingston Shipyards, and served not just the Royal Navy but the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal New Zealand Navy as well.

Typical armament for an Isles-class trawler comprised a single 12-pounder gun backed by three or four 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns and 30 depth charges, a modest but notably practical fit for vessels whose primary purpose was minesweeping and harbour defence rather than fleet engagement.

What minesweeping actually involved is worth setting out, because the word suggests something far more like housework than it was. Against a moored contact mine the tool was the Oropesa sweep: a wire streamed from the quarter with a torpedo-shaped float on its outer end, held out sideways by an otter and down at depth by a kite, with cutters set along it. The sweeper steamed a measured line; a mine's mooring cable caught the wire, slid along it into a cutter, and the mine bobbed to the surface to be shot to pieces with rifles. The trawler herself drew about eight and a half feet, which is why a trawler and not a destroyer: she passed harmlessly over most of what she was cutting free.

The other two kinds of mine needed answers of a completely different sort. A magnetic mine sits on the bottom and fires when a steel hull alters the earth's magnetic field above it, and no wire will touch it; the answer was the LL sweep, a pair of buoyant insulated cables towed astern with the current pulsed on and off to produce a moving magnetic field that set the mines off behind the ship. An acoustic mine listens for propellers, so the answer was to make a louder noise further forward: an oscillator in the sweeper's stem with a three-foot diaphragm, hammering away, detonating the mines ahead of her. All of it depended on somebody having found out how the mines worked, and that happened on the mudflats at Shoeburyness on 23 November 1939, when Lieutenant Commander John Ouvry took a German magnetic mine to pieces by hand in the dark with non-magnetic tools. Everything after that, the sweeps and the degaussing coils fitted round every British hull, came out of that night.

Twenty-three ships of the class were lost to enemy action during the war, a reminder that even these small, unglamorous vessels operated in particularly dangerous waters.

A Modest but Essential Record

HMS Gateshead was in fact built by George T. Davie and Sons at Lauzon, Quebec, one of a small batch of Isles-class trawlers built in Canada rather than Britain, her keel laid on 12 December 1941, launched on 1 August 1942, and commissioned into service on 11 May 1943.

The yard she came from has a longer history than most British ones. Shipbuilding at Lauzon on the south bank of the St Lawrence opposite Quebec City goes back to the 1820s and a Scottish-descended sea captain named Allison Davie; the business he founded, under a succession of names and owners, is the oldest continuously operating shipbuilder in North America and is still there today as Chantier Davie, currently building icebreakers. George T. Davie and Sons was the smaller offshoot, set up in 1929 by members of the family after the main Davie Shipbuilding company was sold to Canada Steamship Lines. It repaired small vessels, moved into building them in 1934, and then had the war land on it: the workforce went from fewer than a hundred people to more than two thousand. Gateshead was one of the things they produced. It is a fair picture of what the Allied shipbuilding effort actually looked like, which was very rarely a great naval yard and very often a small commercial one that suddenly had two thousand employees and an Admiralty order book.

Getting her across the Atlantic was not a formality either, and one of the eight did not make it. Campobello, built at Collingwood on Georgian Bay, had damaged her hull against ice in the Gulf of St Lawrence in late 1942. She sailed for Britain in March 1943 with convoy SC 122, began leaking badly in heavy weather, and on 16 March her thirty-five men were taken off by the corvette Godetia, which then sank her with a depth charge. SC 122 is the convoy that, together with HX 229, was about to be fought over in the largest convoy battle of the war, so Campobello was lost in the opening hours of it, of cold water rather than torpedoes. Gateshead was completed in May 1943 and did not reach Britain until early 1944. A hundred and sixty-four feet of trawler crossing the North Atlantic in winter, in company, to go and do a job in the Channel, is not the part of the war anybody makes films about.

She served under a single commanding officer for almost her entire career, Temporary Lieutenant Richard Brian Hughes RNVR, who took charge in November 1942 and remained in post until October 1945. Her recorded service was the quiet, workmanlike sort typical of her class: anti-submarine exercises off Tobermory in February 1944 alongside the Dutch submarine HrMs O 10 and HMS Dittany, escorting HMS Clyde into Falmouth that April, and shepherding HMS Surf between Falmouth, Portland and Portsmouth that November, unglamorous convoy and training work rather than headline-grabbing action, though no less essential for it. She was eventually scrapped on 13 October 1959, closing out a service life spent almost entirely under one captain's watch.

Look closely at her recorded movements and a pattern emerges that the bare list hides: every single one of them involves a submarine. The Tobermory exercises in February 1944 were worked against the Dutch boat O 10; in April she met a submarine off the Scillies and took her into Falmouth; in November she moved another one along the Channel from Falmouth to Portland and Portland to Portsmouth. That was a real and necessary job. A submarine on the surface in home waters was in genuine danger from her own side, as HMS Talisman had discovered in the Bay of Biscay in August 1942 when an RAAF Sunderland put four depth charges alongside her and very nearly finished her; a small surface escort with a recognisable silhouette, in company, solved the problem. It also solved the navigational one, since a submarine bridge sits about ten feet above the water and sees very little. So the trawler went out, found the boat, and walked her home.

It is worth saying who those two submarines were, because they were not nobodies. HMS Clyde, whom Gateshead met off Bishop Rock on 14 April 1944 and brought into Falmouth at eight that evening, was a River-class boat that on 20 June 1940 had put a torpedo into the bow of the German battleship Gneisenau off Trondheim and sent her back into dock; she had since had a battery compartment converted into a cargo hold and run supplies into Malta nine times. She had been assigned to the Eastern Fleet that January and joined the 2nd Submarine Flotilla at Trincomalee in May, going on to land agents in the Andaman Islands. HMS Surf, whom Gateshead shepherded down-Channel in November, had spent 1944 in the Malacca Strait and off the coast of Siam, shooting up a Japanese tug with her gun and laying small minefields off Tarutao Island. A brand-new trawler from Quebec, on her first year in European waters, spent it running errands for boats like that.

That exercise off Tobermory was not a gentle interlude either, and the place has a reputation. HMS Western Isles was the anti-submarine working-up base in Tobermory Bay, and from mid-1940 every escort bound for the Atlantic or the Arctic went through it before going to war. It was run by Commodore Gilbert Stephenson, universally known as the Terror of Tobermory, who had two or three weeks to turn a scratch crew into a fighting ship's company and used every minute of it: ships boarded without warning at three in the morning, power cut in the middle of a drill, individual men declared dead halfway through a task to see whether anybody else could take over. Over four and a half years, 911 ships went through 1,132 courses there, and ships trained at Tobermory were afterwards credited with ninety-one U-boats. Gateshead spent February 1944 being put through it.

It was, in short, exactly the kind of properly vital work that kept Britain's ports and coastal waters safe for the merchant shipping the country depended on throughout the war, carried out day after day by crews who rarely made headlines but whose contribution was every bit as important as that of the more celebrated fleet destroyers and cruisers fighting further out to sea.

The men who crewed these ships had a service of their own, the Royal Naval Patrol Service, which ran the trawlers, drifters and requisitioned fishing boats and lost more of them than anybody now remembers; its story is set out in the article on HMS Duncton (T220). And the work did not stop in 1945: the mines laid between 1939 and 1945 were still being cleared decades later, and the Royal Navy was still building specialist deep sweepers into the 1980s, as described in the article on HMS Dovey (M2005). Some of what Gateshead and her 196 sisters were sweeping for is still down there.