HMS Mullet (T311): One of Only Ten Fish-Class Trawlers Built for the Royal Navy

Adapted From a Fishing Boat

HMS Mullet belonged to the Fish-class of Royal Navy anti-submarine trawlers, a properly small class of just ten vessels ordered in 1940 from Cochrane and Sons of Selby, adapted from the design of a commercial trawler, the 1929-built Gulfoss, in much the same spirit as the many other requisitioned and purpose-built fishing vessels the Royal Navy pressed into wartime service.

Ships of her type were intended for minesweeping and anti-submarine warfare, fitted with a 12-pounder gun, three Oerlikon 20mm anti-aircraft guns and around 40 depth charges, more than capable of dealing with the coastal threats they were most likely to encounter.

A Small Class, A Quiet Record

HMS Mullet's individual wartime record is not well documented in the sources currently available, a situation shared by many of her sister ships within such a small class; even within the Fish-class itself, two vessels, originally named Mackerel and Turbot, were later repurposed as controlled minelayers and renamed Corncrake and Redshank, an indication of just how flexibly the Admiralty was willing to redeploy these small, useful hulls as wartime needs shifted.

For the record, the ten were Bonito, Bream, Grayling, Grilse, Herring, Mullet, Pollock and Whiting as anti-submarine trawlers, with Corncrake and Redshank completed instead as controlled minelayers. They ran to 670 tons on 162 feet, with a single reciprocating engine of about seven hundred horsepower turning one shaft, which gave eleven knots on a good day, and a crew of thirty-five. That is a fishing boat with a gun on it, and everybody involved knew it.

All ten Fish-class trawlers saw active service, and two of them met genuinely sobering ends. HMS Corncrake, one of the pair converted to a minelayer, foundered in a North Atlantic storm on 25 January 1943. HMS Herring fared even worse: commissioned on 15 April 1943, she survived barely eight days in service before colliding with the French merchant vessel Cassard off Blyth on 22 April and going down, her wreck still lying upright on the seabed today with both guns intact. Small ships, it turns out, carried exactly the same risks as the big ones.

What the Record Does Show

HMS Mullet herself was commissioned on 4 November 1942, built, like her sisters, by Cochrane and Sons in partnership with Amos & Smith, and was eventually sold out of naval service in 1946. Her day-to-day wartime patrols, and whatever actions she took part in along the way, are not covered in detail by the sources available for this piece, and rather than invent detail where none can be confirmed, it is worth being straightforward about that particular gap.

That said, the record is not quite blank, and what does survive is worth having. On 2 December 1942, four weeks after she commissioned, Mullet was off Tobermory carrying out anti-submarine exercises in company with the trawler HMS Haarlem and the submarine HMS H 43, a boat launched in 1919 and by then old enough to be more use as a target than as a weapon. Mullet was commanded that day by Acting Skipper Lieutenant J. Murray RNR, Haarlem by Lieutenant H. Riding RNR and the submarine by Lieutenant R. Boyd, DSC, RN.

Tobermory is the important word in that sentence. Working up there meant going through the hands of the Royal Navy's notoriously unforgiving training establishment on the Isle of Mull, an experience described in the article on HMS Alacrity (U60). Whatever else is missing from her record, we know that Mullet went through it, in a Scottish December, in her first month.

The rank is worth a moment too. Skipper was a Royal Naval Reserve rank created for the men who skippered fishing boats for a living, and an Acting Skipper Lieutenant was a professional fisherman holding a commission to command exactly the sort of vessel he had been handling since before the war, in weather that would have worried a good many regular officers. Most of the men in these ships came from the Royal Naval Patrol Service, whose story is in the article on HMS Coldstreamer (T337). It is the reason so little of what they did was written down: nobody was keeping a diary, they were fishing for submarines.

What can be said with confidence is that she formed part of an essential, if largely unsung, wartime effort: the fleet of small trawlers and auxiliary vessels that swept mines, hunted submarines and patrolled British coastal waters throughout the Second World War, doing unglamorous but vital work that rarely made it into the history books in the way that battleships and destroyers so often did.