HMS Hotham (K583): From D-Day Rescue Duty to Gas Turbine Test Bed

Built in Massachusetts

HMS Hotham was built at the Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard in Hingham, Massachusetts, laid down on 5 November 1943, launched on 21 December that year and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 8 February 1944 as frigate K583, having originally been constructed as the American destroyer escort DE-574 before transfer to Britain under wartime Lend-Lease arrangements, one of many Captain-class frigates that gave the Royal Navy a substantial and much needed boost in escort strength during the final years of the war.

She had a near twin doing very nearly the same things, and the pair are worth reading together. HMS Holmes was DE-572 and Hotham DE-574, laid down within a fortnight of each other on the same slipways at Hingham on the Weymouth Back River in Massachusetts, a shipyard that had been open ground in 1941 and turned out 277 ships in three and a half years; both escorted HMS Indomitable across the Atlantic in April 1944 and both then went to work off Normandy. Holmes's account is in the article on HMS Holmes (K581). The one technical detail worth carrying forward from that yard is the machinery, because it turns out to explain the whole of Hotham's strange second career. She was a Buckley, which means turbo-electric drive: her steam turbines did not turn the propeller shafts at all but drove generators, and electric motors turned the screws. A ship built that way is, in the most literal sense, a floating power station that happens to be wired to its own propellers.

Her name came from Admiral William Hotham, who commanded the Mediterranean Fleet in the 1790s and had a young Captain Horatio Nelson serving under him at the Battle of Genoa in March 1795. Nelson himself later called the affair a "miserable action" and felt his admiral had been altogether too cautious, so the ship named in Hotham's honour arguably went on to see rather more decisive action than the man himself ever quite managed.

Escort Duty From the Atlantic to Normandy

Under the command of Acting Lieutenant Commander Sydney Ayles, RNR, who held the ship from March 1944 until September 1945, Hotham settled quickly into the unglamorous but essential business of convoy escort. In April 1944 she helped shepherd the fleet carrier HMS Indomitable across the Atlantic to Rosyth, and on 7 and 8 June, in the immediate aftermath of the Normandy landings, she was escorting Convoy EWP1 across the Channel to the invasion beaches themselves.

The cross-Channel convoys deserve a word, because the beach traffic was a bigger and more dangerous operation than the landing itself and it went on for months. Everything crossing to Normandy went down a set of swept channels running south from the Isle of Wight, through a marshalling area off Spithead that everybody in the fleet called Piccadilly Circus, and on into what was known as the Spout. Convoys ran in both directions continuously, day and night, in traffic densities no navigator would choose, through water the Germans mined from the air every night they could fly. The escorts' job was to keep E-boats out of the columns, keep station in the dark without hitting anybody, and pick up survivors when something went wrong, which it regularly did. Hotham was in that stream from 7 June onwards, and she was still in it three weeks later when the Maid of Orleans went down.

A Rescue Near the Isle of Wight

On 28 June 1944, while returning from Normandy in convoy, the former cross-Channel steamer Maid of Orleans, by then pressed into service as a Landing Ship Infantry, was struck off the Isle of Wight and began to sink. HMS Hotham and HMS Eglinton, together with the tug Empire Roger, picked up her master, crew and gunners and landed them safely at Portsmouth, though six men were lost in the sinking. Quite what sank her has never been fully settled: she was originally credited to a U-boat, but the wreck later identified as that particular submarine turned out to have already been lost herself before the attack could have taken place, leaving historians still arguing over whether Maid of Orleans struck a mine instead, a small unsolved mystery in an otherwise well-documented war.

The ship they saved deserves better than a footnote, because she had already had one of the more remarkable wars of any vessel afloat. The Maid of Orleans was a Southern Railway cross-Channel steamer, a Dover packet, requisitioned in 1939 to carry the British Expeditionary Force to France. In May 1940 she helped lift people out of Rotterdam and Belgian civilians out of Cherbourg. Then came Dunkirk: she made five crossings and brought home more than five thousand men, 1,856 of them on 1 June alone, which is to say that a single peacetime ferry carried away rather more than a brigade. Four years later, converted into an infantry landing ship and working Sword and Juno out of Southampton and Newhaven, she was coming back from Juno at about half past nine on the evening of 28 June 1944 when whatever it was found her south-east of St Catherine's Point. She sank in half an hour. Ninety-two of her people came off, six did not, and Hotham, Eglinton and the tug Empire Roger between them took the survivors into Portsmouth.

Hotham's escort duties continued for the rest of that year and into the next: in August 1944 she helped see the cruiser HMS Frobisher safely into Chatham Dockyard, and in February 1945 she escorted Convoy CU59 across the Atlantic from North America to the United Kingdom, workmanlike voyages that rarely made headlines but kept Britain supplied all the same.

A Station Ship East of Suez

HMS Hotham's postwar career diverged from most of her Captain-class sisters, nearly all of which were quickly returned to the United States: instead, she remained in Royal Navy service, disarmed and deployed to Singapore in 1945 to work as a floating power station, before moving on to serve as a station ship at Hong Kong, a role that saw her providing a steady, visible naval presence in the colony rather than any active combat duty. She was, in fact, the only one of the entire seventy-eight strong Captain class still in Royal Navy hands by the end of 1947, the rest having long since gone home. She herself returned to the United Kingdom that same year.

Which brings us back to her machinery, because being kept when seventy-seven sisters went home was not sentiment. Singapore and Hong Kong in 1945 had been under Japanese occupation for three and a half years and their power stations had been bombed, cannibalised and run into the ground; there was no electricity worth the name, and no prospect of getting generating plant out from Britain quickly. Hotham was a ship whose engines already drove nothing but generators. Disarm her, moor her alongside, disconnect the propulsion motors and run a cable ashore, and you have several thousand kilowatts of steam-turbine generating capacity delivered fully assembled, crewed, and able to move to the next place that needs it. She did exactly that at Singapore, then went to Hong Kong as a station ship, then in 1948 did the same job again at Malta, where an island of a quarter of a million people that had been bombed harder than anywhere else in the Empire was still short of power three years after the war ended. She kept the lights on in three colonies on two oceans, which is not what the Bethlehem Steel Corporation had in mind.

A Floating Power Station and Turbine Test Bed

HMS Hotham went on to two truly unusual final roles: she served, for the second time, as a floating power station, this time at Malta rather than Singapore, providing electrical power ashore at a time when the island's own generating capacity was under strain, and was later used for early gas turbine propulsion experiments, part of the Royal Navy's ongoing research into new forms of ship propulsion that would, within a couple of decades, come to define an entire generation of postwar warships, including the destroyers and frigates that eventually replaced ships like HMS Hotham herself.

The gas turbine business needs setting out honestly, because it is why she is remembered and it did not quite happen. The Royal Navy had begun playing with gas turbines almost as soon as the war ended: in 1947 a motor gun boat, MGB 2009, was fitted with a Metropolitan-Vickers Gatric, a marinised aero engine, and became the first vessel anywhere to go to sea under gas turbine power. The obvious next step was a bigger ship, and Hotham was picked for the same reason she had been kept, namely that a turbo-electric ship is the easiest thing in the world to experiment on: you can couple almost anything to a generator without having to design a gearbox for it. She was brought home in 1951 and taken in hand for conversion. Then the shore trials of the machinery went badly, the plant proving both heavier and less flexible in operation than anyone had hoped, and in 1952 the whole thing was cancelled with the ship still in dockyard hands. She never turned a shaft on gas turbine power.

The idea survived her, and rather magnificently. In 1953 the Navy converted the steam gunboat Grey Goose to run on two Metrovick G2 turbines and she became the first ship of any type anywhere to be powered by gas turbines alone. The first generation in big ships was less happy: the County-class destroyers and Tribal-class frigates used steam for cruising and gas turbines for boost, an arrangement called COSAG, and the early engines were troublesome enough that in 1966 the Counties were assessed as being available for operations about half the time. The breakthrough came in 1968, when the elderly frigate HMS Exmouth was given a single Rolls-Royce Olympus for full power and a pair of Proteus for cruising and became the first major warship in the world running on nothing else. Everything since has followed from that: the Type 21s, the Type 22s and the Type 42s all went to sea on Olympus and Tyne, and the Royal Navy has been a gas turbine navy ever since. Hotham was the false start at the beginning of it.

The End

HMS Hotham was nominally returned to United States custody on 25 April 1952, only to be immediately transferred straight back to Britain under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, a fairly typical piece of Cold War administrative footwork for ships of her type.

The paperwork at the end is worth explaining, because it looks absurd and was not. Lend-Lease had been a wartime arrangement and the ships were legally loans, so every hull had to go back on the books of the United States Navy before anything else could happen to it. By 1952 the Cold War had produced a different mechanism, the Mutual Defense Assistance Program, under which the Americans supplied equipment to allied navies on rather easier terms. So Hotham was formally handed back on 25 April 1952 and immediately handed out again under the new scheme, without, as far as anybody can tell, moving from where she was lying. She was returned for good on 13 March 1956 and sold that November to Dutch breakers. The comparable handover of a Captain-class frigate on a jetty at Harwich is described in the article on HMS Bayntun (K310).

She was finally and permanently returned to American custody on 13 March 1956, and sold for scrap in the Netherlands on 1 November that year, closing out the career of a frigate whose postwar life, spent testing new technology and keeping the lights on in Malta, had proven just as varied as her wartime escort duty.

She is a much odder ship than her record makes her look. Built in an American yard that had not existed three years earlier, named after an admiral whose chief historical function is to make Nelson look decisive, she escorted a fleet carrier, worked the Normandy beach convoys, pulled ninety-two people off a Dunkirk veteran sinking in the Channel, and then spent much of the next six years doing something no warship is supposed to do at all, which is generate electricity for civilians in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malta. She was the last of seventy-eight to leave British hands. She was then chosen for an experiment that would have made her genuinely historic and the experiment was cancelled around her. There is a version of the twentieth century in which HMS Hotham is remembered as the first gas turbine warship. In the version we got, she is the ship that kept the lights on, which on the whole was probably more use to more people.