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.

The yard that built her is worth a paragraph, because it is one of the odder places to have built thirteen hundred ships. Beverley is an inland market town in the East Riding, and Cook, Welton and Gemmell's yard sat at Grovehill on the River Hull, a good eight miles from the sea up a river that is in places barely wider than the ships were long. They could not therefore be launched stern-first in the ordinary way. Instead each hull went into the water broadside on, tipped sideways off the ways to land flat with an enormous wall of water going over the far bank, which drew crowds from the whole town and is still the thing people from Beverley mention first. The hull then floated down the river to Hull to be fitted out, largely by Charles D. Holmes and Company. Between 1901 and 1963 something over 1,300 vessels went in that way, most of them trawlers, and for a period Cook, Welton and Gemmell were the largest builder of fishing trawlers anywhere in the world. Gulland, Gweal and Grenadier all came off the same slipways within about eighteen months of each other.

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.

The numbers behind that sentence are worth stating, because they are the whole point of the class. Something like 197 of these ships were built between 1939 and 1945, counting the Isles and the near-identical Dance, Tree and Shakespearian groups, at yards up and down the country that had never built a warship and would never build another. They were named after small British islands, which is why the class list reads like a gazetteer of places nobody has heard of; Gulland Rock is an uninhabited lump in Padstow Bay, three quarters of a mile off Harlyn beach on the north Cornish coast. What the class did, and how many of them there were, is set out in the article on HMS Gateshead (T288), and the service that manned them in the article on HMS Duncton (T220).

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.

By the time she commissioned, that work was also becoming a good deal more relevant than it had been. From late 1944 the surviving U-boats, driven out of the Biscay bases and fitted with schnorkels, were pushed into British coastal waters instead of the open Atlantic, where a boat could sit on the bottom among the rocks and the wrecks and simply wait; hunting one there defeated asdic and tied up an absurd number of ships and aircraft, as described in the article on HMS Grenadier (T334). Small, cheap, slow ships with good sonar and a lot of depth charges, working the same patch of water over and over until they knew every wreck on it, were exactly what that phase of the campaign required. It is not glamorous, and the fact that so little was written down about Gulland's war is in its own way the measure of how well it worked.

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.

What happened to these ships afterwards is a small piece of maritime history in itself. Two hundred sturdy little steel steamers, most of them barely two years old, came onto the market at once in 1946 and went everywhere. By 1949 the Royal Navy still had thirty-one of them, New Zealand had four, Italy had sixteen and Portugal six; two ended up as training ships in the West German navy and were still working in the 1970s, one of them going on to Turkey in 1977. The rest were disarmed and sold to anybody who wanted a ship: Norwegian owners, Italian owners, Greek owners, and, in Gulland's case, first Belgians and then a shipping company in Aden. A hull designed to survive a North Atlantic gale was, as it turned out, exactly the sort of thing a small operator in the Red Sea or the Aegean wanted, and rather cheaper than anything a yard could build new.

The trade she died in is worth a sentence too, because it explains what a Yorkshire-built submarine hunter was doing off Kenya. Aden in 1951 was a free port and one of the busiest bunkering stations in the world, sitting on the route between Suez and everywhere east of it, and the traffic radiating out of it, up the Red Sea, down the African coast and across to India, Ceylon and Mauritius, was carried in exactly this kind of ship: small, cheap, shallow enough for indifferent harbours, and able to take a few hundred tons of whatever needed moving. Lentils from the Horn of Africa to the Indian labourers of Mauritius was an entirely ordinary cargo. She was doing useful work right up to the moment she put herself on a reef.

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.

There is one more thing about the place she chose to die at, and it is a good deal more than a set of coordinates. Three miles south of that reef is Kilindini, the deep-water harbour at Mombasa, and in 1942 Kilindini was the headquarters of the British Eastern Fleet. When Singapore fell there was nowhere left in the east that could be defended, and Admiral Sir James Somerville, who took the command that February, did the only sensible thing available to him: he took his battleships two thousand five hundred miles west, to Kenya, and put them where the Japanese carriers, which had not yet managed to find him, could not reach.

It was not a distinguished decision to have to make and it was the right one. For most of two years the fleet that was supposed to hold the Indian Ocean operated out of a Kenyan commercial port, with indicator loops laid across the harbour approaches to catch submarines, gun emplacements on the shore and a command post ashore, while Ceylon was made defensible again. Somerville stayed in the job until Bruce Fraser relieved him in August 1944. Half a dozen other ships in this series pass through Kilindini in their own records, escorting convoys up to Aden or down to Durban, and the name goes by without comment every time.

Which gives Gulland a quiet, accidental symmetry. She was commissioned in October 1943, while the Eastern Fleet was still using that harbour, and she spent her war on the other side of the world hunting submarines in British coastal water. Eight years later, as a Yemeni-owned tramp carrying lentils to Mauritius, she put herself on a reef three miles north of it and filled up. The Royal Navy she had belonged to had gone from the Indian Ocean by then, and so had the fleet base, and there was nobody in Mombasa with any reason to salvage a small steel trawler out of Yorkshire.

Blowing her up was the routine answer rather than a slight. A steel wreck sitting on a reef three miles north of a busy commercial port is a navigational hazard first and a salvage prospect a long way second, and once the seas had opened her up there was nothing worth lifting; the standard practice, then and now, is to demolish what stands proud of the water and let the rest go. She had been afloat for seven and a half years, of which two and a half were spent as a warship. Of the two hundred ships of her type, she is one of a small number whose end anybody bothered to record at all.

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.