HMS Gulland (T365): From Anti-Submarine Patrol to a Cargo of Lentils

Beverley-Built

HMS Gulland was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell at Beverley in Yorkshire, laid down on 30 April 1943, launched on 5 August that year and commissioned on 30 October 1943, one of the numerous Isles-class trawlers built for the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

Like her many sister ships, she was designed for a range of unglamorous but essential wartime tasks, chiefly anti-submarine patrol, adapting the sturdy, seaworthy hull form of a commercial fishing trawler into a small, purpose-built naval escort vessel at a time when the Royal Navy urgently needed as many hulls as it could get into the water. At 164 feet long and displacing 545 tons, she carried a single 12-pounder anti-aircraft gun, three 20mm Oerlikon cannon and 30 depth charges, a properly no-nonsense fit for a ship whose entire purpose was hunting submarines rather than looking impressive alongside a jetty.

Wartime Patrol Work

Detailed records of HMS Gulland's individual wartime patrols and deployments have proven difficult to trace in the sources available, which is not unusual for a small trawler among dozens of near-identical sister ships built to the same design, though it is known that during 1944, under Temporary Lieutenant C.W. Jobson, RNVR, she took part in anti-submarine exercises off Stornoway. Beyond that single dated entry, what is clear is that she served through the remainder of the war carrying out exactly the kind of steady, unglamorous anti-submarine and escort duty for which her class was built, work that rarely generated headlines but was essential to keeping Britain's coastal waters safe.

A New Life, and a Cargo of Lentils

HMS Gulland was placed on the disposal list after the war and sold to Belgian owners in March 1946, renamed Henken, before passing two years later into the hands of the Arab Navigation and Transport Company of Aden, who renamed her once again as the Arab Trader, a fairly typical afterlife for a small, sturdy wartime trawler well suited to modest commercial cargo work in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea region.

Her career, and her life, came to an end on 13 April 1951, while she was carrying a cargo of lentils from Aden to Mauritius. She grounded on a reef roughly three miles north of Mombasa, Kenya, and it took barely a day or two of heavy seas for the engine and boiler room to flood entirely, leaving her settled with her main deck awash at every high tide. With her cargo ruined and nobody in Mombasa equipped to salvage a stranded steel trawler, she was written off as a total loss where she lay.

Her wreck eventually broke up in the surf and was finally demolished with explosives, an unceremonious end for a ship whose original purpose, hunting submarines in wartime waters, was about as far removed as could be imagined from her final voyage, hauling lentils along the East African coast.