HMS Gweal (T246): The Trawler Renamed Before She Ever Sailed

Constructed at Beverley

HMS Gweal was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmill at Beverley in Yorkshire, laid down on 12 March 1942 and launched on 17 June that year, one of the numerous Isles-class trawlers built to bolster the Royal Navy's anti-submarine and patrol strength during the darkest years of the Second World War.

She had originally been intended to carry the name HMS Broreray, after one of the small islands of the Outer Hebrides that gave the class its naming convention, but was renamed Gweal, after an islet in the Isles of Scilly, before she was commissioned into service on 4 November 1942, a small but genuine piece of naval administrative housekeeping that is easy to overlook amid the wider drama of wartime shipbuilding. At around 50 metres long and displacing 545 tons light, she was powered by a single triple-expansion engine of 850 indicated horsepower giving her a top speed of just over 10 knots, and armed with a single 4-inch anti-aircraft gun and three 20mm Oerlikons, a modest fit for a modest little ship.

The naming convention behind all this is worth a note, because it produced one of the most obscure class lists in the Royal Navy. Nearly two hundred of these trawlers were built, and they were named after small British islands, which meant working steadily down through the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland, the Scillies and everywhere else until the Admiralty was scraping out rocks that most atlases do not bother with. Gweal is a small uninhabited island lying just off Bryher in the Isles of Scilly. Swapping one obscure islet for another before commissioning was routine: names were shuffled to avoid confusion with ships already in service or already allocated elsewhere, and the ship herself was entirely unaffected. What the class was for, and how many of them there were, is set out in the article on HMS Gateshead (T288).

Training and Anti-Submarine Duty

HMS Gweal spent her wartime career under five different commanding officers, a reasonably high turnover reflecting both the demands of the war and the sheer number of trained officers the rapidly expanding wartime navy needed to cycle through smaller commands like hers. Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander William Thomason Hodson, DSC, took her to sea first, from January 1943, followed by Temporary Lieutenant Peter Edward Charles Reuben Main, who handed over to Temporary Lieutenant Wynyard Paul Bush, DSC, in August 1943, before Main himself returned to command from early 1944, finally passing her on to Temporary Lieutenant Harold Hilton for her last year of war service.

Her documented service included anti-submarine exercises off Plymouth beginning in April 1943 alongside HMS Taku, and she continued to take part in training operations and anti-submarine drills right through the war, sharing an exercise with HMS Seraph, the submarine that would later become famous for her role in the wartime deception Operation Mincemeat, in April 1944, with exercises recorded as late as July 1945 alongside HMS Upshot, in the immediate aftermath of victory in Europe, a reminder that training and readiness work carried on right up to, and in some cases beyond, the moment the guns fell silent.

Being an anti-submarine training ship sounds like a soft billet and was nothing of the kind, and it is worth understanding what the arrangement actually was. A submarine working up, or a submarine crew learning their trade, needs a surface ship to hunt them and be hunted; the trawler steams a search pattern, the boat tries to get into an attack position without being detected, and both sides learn something. It is done for hours at a time, in all weathers, and it was the only way to produce escort captains who could tell a submarine from a wreck on an asdic set. Gweal spent most of her war doing that off Plymouth, and the boats she practised with were not training hulks: they were operational submarines between patrols.

HMS Seraph in particular had a war that beggars belief, and Mincemeat was only part of it. In October 1942 she landed Lieutenant General Mark Clark, Eisenhower's deputy, on the Algerian coast by canoe for the secret talks with Vichy French officers that smoothed the way for the Torch landings. Weeks later she went back to lift the escaped French general Henri Giraud off the coast near Hyeres, and hit a diplomatic snag: Giraud flatly refused to be rescued by the British. There was no American submarine within three thousand miles, so Seraph was temporarily commissioned into the United States Navy, hoisted the American ensign and put an American officer, Captain Jerauld Wright, nominally in command, while her own captain, Lieutenant Norman Jewell, quietly went on running the boat. Giraud came aboard USS Seraph none the wiser. The following spring she put the body of a fictitious Royal Marines major into the sea off Huelva and changed where the Germans expected the invasion of Europe to fall.

A Small Part in D-Day

For all her reputation as a trainer rather than a fighter, HMS Gweal did have a genuine role to play in Operation Neptune. In early June 1944 she joined Escort Group 106 at Milford Haven, sailing on 3 June alongside the trawler HMS Caldy and a pair of corvettes to escort Convoy EMB3, eleven empty motor transport ships, from the Irish Sea round to England's south coast to be loaded for the invasion. She sailed again on 7 June, this time shepherding the loaded convoy through the swept channel across the Channel itself, reaching the American sector of the Normandy beachhead on 8 June for discharge, two days after the first landings, unglamorous but properly essential work getting men and equipment ashore once the initial assault had gone in.

The convoys she was working on that month are one of the least celebrated parts of the invasion, and one of the most important. The landings on 6 June put men on the beaches; what decided whether they stayed there was the build-up, the continuous stream of shipping that had to carry ammunition, fuel, vehicles, rations and reinforcements across the Channel every day for months afterwards, through a swept channel, under a standing threat from E-boats, mines and the occasional aircraft. EMB3, eleven motor transport ships going round from Milford Haven empty and coming back loaded, is exactly the sort of thing nobody puts in a film. The Germans understood perfectly well what the build-up meant, which is why the pressure mines went into the anchorages rather than onto the beaches, and it is why small escorts spent that summer plodding backwards and forwards across the same forty miles of water.

The End

HMS Gweal was sold out of Royal Navy service in 1948 and renamed Velox for her civilian career, closing out the career of a trawler whose war had been spent almost entirely on the patient, essential work of training crews, hunting for submarines and, for a few days in June 1944, helping get an invasion fleet ashore, unglamorous duty performed by dozens of near-identical sister ships up and down the British coast, each one a small but genuine contribution to the wider war effort even without a single headline-making action to her name.

What became of her afterwards was the fate of most of her sisters. Sold in 1948 and renamed Velox, she went back to earning a living at sea in the merchant world, one of a couple of hundred sturdy little steel steamers that came onto the market at the end of the war and scattered across Europe and beyond, as described in the article on HMS Gulland (T365). It is a peculiarity of this class that a great many of them outlived, by decades, the destroyers and cruisers whose names everybody remembers.