HMS Northern Pride (FY105): A German-Built Trawler Turned Against the U-boats

A Note on Her Origins

HMS Northern Pride is sometimes grouped with the purpose-built Fish-class trawlers, but her actual origins are rather more interesting than that: she was not a Fish-class vessel at all, but a commercial deep-sea trawler built by the German shipyard Deschimag in Bremerhaven, completed in June 1936 for entirely peaceful fishing purposes several years before anyone imagined she would end up on the opposite side of a war against the very country that built her.

There is a nice irony buried in that origin story. Shipping records describe her as one of fifteen sister trawlers that her owner, Mac Line of Fleetwood, took delivery of from the same German yard under a post-war reparations arrangement, before she transferred to Grimsby's Northern Trawlers fleet in 1937. A ship built, in effect, as part of Germany settling an earlier war would spend the next one fighting against her, a piece of nominative determinism no novelist would dare invent. Her time with the Grimsby fleet was not without tragedy of its own: one crewman, Bernard Howlett, was lost in an accident on 15 June 1937, a reminder that deep-sea trawling carried its own everyday dangers even before the Navy got involved.

She displaced 655 tons and was acquired by the Admiralty in August 1939, just weeks before war broke out, and commissioned into Royal Navy service that September.

She did not go alone. The Grimsby Northern boats were taken up almost as a set, and the names run through the war together: Northern Dawn, Northern Gem, Northern Pride, Northern Spray, Northern Wave. Between them they were present at a remarkable number of the war's worst nights, and they were usually there doing the same job.

Northern Gem was in the escort of Convoy JW 51B at the Battle of the Barents Sea on the last day of 1942, and when the destroyer HMS Achates had been shot to pieces covering the convoy with smoke, it was Gem who went alongside and took off a great many of her people; that action is described in the article on HMS Achates (H12). Four months later Gem was with Convoy ONS 5, the largest convoy battle of the entire war, and so was Northern Spray, who came out of it with 146 survivors aboard. A hundred and forty-six people, on a six-hundred-ton fishing boat.

A Small, Sturdy Escort

HMS Northern Pride was armed for her new role with a single 4-inch gun, twin 0.5-inch anti-aircraft guns and a pair of anti-aircraft machine guns, a modest but perfectly adequate armament for the close escort and anti-submarine work she was assigned, work that relied far more on sturdy seakeeping and dogged persistence than on heavy firepower. Her 1,000-horsepower engine gave her a useful top speed of around 16 knots, respectable going for a converted fishing boat asked to keep pace with ocean convoys.

Escorting Convoys Across the Atlantic and to Russia

HMS Northern Pride took part in numerous Atlantic convoy escort operations throughout the war, including the badly mauled Convoy HX 106 in January and February 1941, which lost several merchant ships to appalling weather and U-boat attack, and Convoy HX 130 that June, which she joined as relief escort out in mid-Atlantic. Later that year, while on patrol off the west coast of Ireland, she came under attack from the Italian submarine Bagnolini, which fired several torpedoes that, by good fortune rather than evasive brilliance, all missed.

She went on to serve on the critical Arctic run to Russia, escorting Convoy PQ 15 to Murmansk between 26 April and 5 May 1942, a passage that cost the convoy the merchantman Syros, before escorting the corresponding return convoy, QP 12, back out of Russian waters that same month, one of the most dangerous convoy routes of the entire war, threatened constantly by German aircraft, surface raiders and U-boats operating from occupied Norway.

She returned to the Arctic run in January 1943 for Convoy JW 52, from Loch Ewe to Murmansk, and again in March that year for the homeward-bound RA 53, during which she picked up 42 survivors from the merchant ship Executive, torpedoed by U-255 in the Barents Sea, a rescue that says as much about her crew's seamanship as any of her convoy escort work.

That rescue is not a footnote to her convoy work, it is the point of it. An escort that stops to pick men out of the water is an escort that has left the screen, and a destroyer could almost never be spared to do it: the convoy has to keep going and the hole she leaves is where the next torpedo comes through. So the job of stopping was given to the trawlers, who were slow anyway, who could lie to in weather that would have hurt a destroyer, and whose absence from the screen mattered least.

Which means the forty-two men Northern Pride took off the Executive in the Barents Sea in March 1943 were forty-two men who would otherwise have been left there, not out of callousness but out of arithmetic. That is what a six-hundred-ton German-built fishing boat was for, and it is a better epitaph than most warships get.

She also assisted in escorting British submarines including HMS H 31, HMS H 28 and HMS P 511 on various occasions, a further reminder of just how varied and unglamorous the daily workload of a small escort trawler could be.

From the Barents Sea to the Normandy Beaches

By June 1944, having survived some of the coldest and most dangerous water in the world, Northern Pride found herself off Normandy instead, serving with the Solent Force as an escort vessel for the D-Day landings and arriving off Juno Beach on the day itself, 6 June 1944. She was in action again on 23 June, this time against German E-boats attempting to disrupt the invasion fleet's supply lines, a fittingly aggressive final combat role for a ship that had spent most of the war quietly shepherding convoys rather than seeking out a fight.

Seven Captains Across Six Years

HMS Northern Pride served under no fewer than seven different commanding officers over the course of the war: Skipper Horace Charles Aisthorpe from September 1939, Lieutenant Commander Dermod James Boris Jewitt from January 1940, Temporary Lieutenant Andrew Alan Campbell from March 1940, Lieutenant Patrick Varwell Collings from August 1941, Temporary Lieutenant Albert Richard Cornish from November 1941, Temporary Lieutenant Alfred Leslie Ferdinand Bell from September 1942, and finally Temporary Lieutenant David Oliver Humphreys, DSC, who took command from December 1943 onward and saw her through to the end of the war, a steady turnover reflecting the sheer scale of the wartime demand for experienced small-ship officers across the whole of the Royal Navy's vast auxiliary fleet.

Returned to Her Owners, Then Finally Scrapped

HMS Northern Pride survived the entire war and was returned to her civilian owners in November 1945, resuming the peaceful fishing work she had originally been built for nearly a decade earlier, before finally being scrapped at Gateshead in 1964, closing out an unusual career for a ship built in Germany that spent six years of war fighting against her country of origin.