HMS Halladale (K417): From Convoy Escort to Cross-Channel Car Ferry

Built on the Clyde

HMS Halladale was ordered on 2 October 1942 and built by A. and J. Inglis Ltd at Glasgow, laid down on 25 June 1943, launched on 28 January 1944 and commissioned on 11 May that year, a River-class frigate designed specifically for the long-range convoy escort work that had proven so vital, and so costly, during the Battle of the Atlantic.

The River class came about because the Royal Navy had got its first answer wrong. The Flower-class corvettes had been ordered in a hurry in 1939 on the lines of a whale catcher, and they worked, in the sense that there were a great many of them and they were built quickly in yards that had never seen a warship. What they could not do was keep up. A Flower was slower than a surfaced U-boat, short of endurance, cramped to the point of cruelty and lightly armed, and by 1941 it was plain that the Atlantic needed something better. William Reed of Smith's Dock, the man who had drawn the Flower in the first place, drew the answer: a ship with the range and armament of a Black Swan sloop but built to merchant practice, with reciprocating steam engines rather than turbines so that ordinary commercial yards could make them. The Admiralty needed a word for the result, decided that sloop and corvette both meant something else, and reached back to the age of sail for one it had not used in the better part of a century. That is where the modern frigate comes from, and Halladale is one of the ships it was invented for.

Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Joseph Eric Woolfenden, who held command from April 1944 through to October 1945, she worked up with anti-submarine drills off Tobermory that May and June, exercising alongside HMS Una and HMS Duncan on 31 May and 1 June, then with HMS Una and HMS Bulldog on 7 June, the standard proving ground for newly commissioned escort vessels throughout the war.

The exercises she did that May and June were the last thing standing between her ship's company and the Atlantic. Tobermory was where escorts were made fit to go to war, under a commodore whose methods were a byword in the fleet, and no escort reached an operational group without passing through it; what happened there is described in the article on HMS Gateshead (T288). The submarines she practised against, Una and the rest, were operational boats lent for the purpose, and the point of the whole business was to teach a crew the difference between a real contact and the seabed before somebody's life depended on the distinction.

Woolfenden handed over command to Lieutenant John Valentine Brothers on 1 October 1945, who saw Halladale through her final two months in commission before she paid off that December.

Escorting Troops From Aden

HMS Halladale's operational service took her well beyond home waters. On 9 August 1944 she left Aden as one of five warships escorting the combined convoys AB 43 and ABK 43, a convoy heavy with history: alongside the destroyers HMAS Norman and HMS Penn and fellow frigates HMS Helford and HMS Trent, she shepherded ten troop transports that included several famous pre-war ocean liners pressed into trooping service, among them the Union-Castle liner Dunnottar Castle, the P&O liner Mooltan and her fleet-mates, the sister ships Strathnaver and Strathaird, and the Dutch liner Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, travelling alongside the submarine depot ship HMS Wolfe.

A second, smaller convoy, ABK 43, sailed in company under its own separate escort of HMS Tay and HMS Kale, carrying three further transports bound for Karachi. The two convoys travelled together until 12 August, when ABK 43 detached out in the Arabian Sea; both arrived safely two days later, AB 43 at Bombay and ABK 43 at Karachi, a long and demanding voyage through waters that, while somewhat removed from the main Atlantic and Mediterranean battlegrounds, still carried genuine risk from enemy submarines and required exactly the kind of steady, watchful escort work the River class had been designed to provide.

The ships she was escorting out of Aden deserve a moment, because that convoy list is a roll-call of the prewar passenger trade under new management. Strathnaver, Strathaird and Mooltan had been P&O's crack ships on the Australia and India runs, Dunnottar Castle was a Union-Castle mail steamer and the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt had run to the Dutch East Indies. Taking a liner up as a troopship meant gutting her: cabin furniture and internal bulkheads torn out and replaced with messdecks, hammocks and mess tables, the panelling boarded over, the paint changed to grey. The arithmetic that produced is startling. Strathaird had carried 1,168 passengers in peacetime; at Brest in 1940 she took off six thousand troops and several hundred civilians in one lift, and by 1945 she had carried 128,961 people and steamed 387,745 miles. Halladale, a fourteen-hundred-ton escort with a crew of about 140, was one of five ships shepherding many thousands of soldiers across the Indian Ocean in a single afternoon's worth of hulls.

An Unlikely Second Career

HMS Halladale was held in reserve at Portsmouth from 1947, and sold in April 1949 to Townsend Brothers Ferries Ltd for £15,000, a truly striking transformation for a wartime escort frigate.

The buyers are worth knowing about, because they were about to change how Britain goes abroad. Townsend Brothers Ferries had been set up in 1928 for the specific purpose of carrying motor cars between Dover and Calais, a business that in 1949 was still tiny and still done the hard way. Their existing ship, the Forde, was worn out, and rather than order a new one they bought a surplus frigate for £15,000 and then spent £77,000 converting her, which tells you both how cheap war surplus was and how much of the value was in the rebuilding rather than the hull. The company that made that bet went on to merge with Thoresen Car Ferries in 1968 to become Townsend Thoresen, the name that painted its ships orange and put them on every motorway sign in the south-east, and was absorbed into P&O in 1987. All of it grew out of a converted River-class frigate and a ramp.

She was converted into a car ferry at the Cork Dockyard Company in Ireland at a cost of £77,000, considerably more than her original purchase price, and entered service on the Dover to Calais route on 6 April 1950 as TS Halladale, replacing the ferry Forde, initially carrying 368 passengers and 50 to 60 vehicles across the Channel.

HMS Halladale's ferry career was, by all accounts, an eventful one: following a refurbishment at Immingham that increased her capacity to 650 passengers and 40 cars, she ran aground on a mud bank leaving Calais harbour in a squall on 10 April 1950, only weeks into her new career, then collided with the German motor vessel Hans Hoth off Dover's Eastern Entrance on 14 May 1951 and was sent to Tilbury for repairs.

Barely six weeks later, on 27 June 1951, she redeemed herself rather spectacularly, becoming the first drive-on, drive-off cross-Channel steamer, unveiling Calais's newly built car ramp in front of Dover Harbour Board dignitaries and East Kent Road Car Company representatives, who watched an eight-ton bus driven down the 120-foot ramp and back aboard without a hitch, a proper vindication of the roll-on, roll-off concept Townsend Brothers had bet £77,000 on.

To see why that demonstration mattered, it helps to know what it replaced. From the first car-carrying sailing in 1928, taking your car to France meant handing it over on the quay and watching it be lifted in a sling by a dockside crane and lowered into the ship's hold as cargo, while you walked aboard separately up the gangway; at the far end the process ran in reverse. It was slow, it was expensive in labour, it limited a sailing to a handful of vehicles, and it made a Channel crossing an undertaking rather than a journey. What Halladale did on 27 June 1951 was land a stern ramp on a quay at Calais and let an eight-ton bus be driven aboard and off again under its own power. The ramp itself had been paid for by Townsend, because no port authority was going to fund an experiment. Drive-on berths at both ends followed within a couple of years, and the traffic forecast for the first full year, ten thousand vehicles, was beaten ten times over. Every ferry, every freight lorry and every family car that has crossed the Channel since went through the door this ship opened.

The good publicity didn't stop the mishaps for long: she clipped the Belgian ferry Prinses Josephine Charlotte on 29 June 1952, struck her own loading ramps after a bow rudder failure on 29 June 1958, and ran into the end of Dover's southern breakwater in thick fog in April 1959, a somewhat less distinguished record than her wartime service.

She nonetheless remained in continuous cross-Channel service until her final Dover to Calais crossing on 5 November 1961, a long and useful run for a converted warship who, whatever trouble she found with ramps and breakwaters, never once needed to fire a shot in anger during that entire second career.

From the Baltic to the Caribbean

HMS Halladale's working life continued well beyond her Channel ferry years: sold to the Finnish operator W. Rostedt on 4 January 1962, she served on Baltic routes between Turku and Stockholm, first as Norden and then, from that June, as Turist Expressen, before being acquired that November by the Venezuelan operator Ferry Boats Margarita and renamed Ferrymar III for service out of Margarita Island.

She was last seen semi-dismantled in Curacao around 1987 to 1988, closing out a remarkable career that had carried her from escorting Indian Ocean troop convoys to ferrying holidaymakers across the Baltic and Caribbean, a far cry from the waters where she began her working life.

Her wanderings afterwards were entirely typical of what happens to a ferry, and much less typical of what happens to a warship. Second-hand tonnage of this sort circulates: a hull that is too small and too slow for the Channel is still perfectly good for a short Baltic run, and one that is finished in the Baltic will do for island work in the Caribbean, and each move takes her a little further from anybody who knows what she used to be. Norden, then Turist Expressen between Turku and Stockholm, then Ferrymar III out of Margarita Island in Venezuela; by the end she had spent longer carrying holidaymakers than she ever spent under the White Ensign. She was found half broken up at Curacao in the late 1980s, forty-odd years old, having gone from the Indian Ocean to the Baltic to the Caribbean without ever, in her second life, being asked to do anything more dangerous than come alongside.