HMS Pellew (F62): The Submarine Hunter with a Cameo in a Monster Movie

Named for a Fighting Family

HMS Pellew was one of the Royal Navy's Blackwood-class frigates, the so-called Type 14s, a family of small, purpose-built anti-submarine escorts stripped of almost everything except the sonar, mortars and sheer persistence needed to hunt submarines. She was laid down at Swan Hunter's yard at Wallsend on 5 November 1953, launched on 29 September 1954, and commissioned on 26 July 1956.

Her name honoured Israel Pellew, a Royal Navy officer of the Napoleonic era and younger brother of the rather more famous Edward Pellew, Lord Exmouth, a frigate captain and later admiral whose own exploits are still studied for their sheer, reckless competence. It was a fitting piece of naming for a class whose ships were routinely christened after the fighting captains of an earlier age.

He came by his captaincy in a way that even the sailing navy thought unusual. In June 1793, a commander without a ship of his own, he went to sea as a volunteer aboard his brother's frigate Nymphe, which met the French Cléopâtre off Start Point in the first frigate duel of the war. Israel laid a gun that shot away the Frenchman's wheel and brought down her mizzen mast, and Cléopâtre struck. On 29 June the Earl of Chatham presented both brothers to George III, who knighted Edward and made Israel a post captain on the spot. One well-aimed gun, and he was set for life.

The naming produced a small symmetry three centuries later. There were twelve Blackwoods, all named for officers of the sailing navy, and two of them were Pellews: this ship, and HMS Exmouth (F84), named for Edward in his later character as Viscount Exmouth. The brothers spent the 1960s back in commission together, in the smallest and cheapest frigates the Royal Navy owned.

Israel Pellew earned that fame the hard way. In September 1796 he was dining aboard his own frigate, HMS Amphion, moored at Plymouth, when her powder magazine detonated beneath him, the result, an inquiry later found, of a gunner who had been quietly selling off the ship's gunpowder and left a trail of it to the magazine, which duly ignited. Something like 350 people were killed, among them his dinner guest Captain William Swaffield of the Overyssel; Pellew himself came out of it with serious facial and chest wounds and, remarkably, survived to fight again.

The detail that makes the Amphion worse is why she was so full. She lay in the Hamoaze lashed alongside the sheer hulk Princesa, having her foremast and bowsprit repaired so that she could go and join the squadron commanded by Pellew's own brother, and she was due to sail the following day. Some of her men had gone ashore on liberty. Others had brought their wives and children aboard to say goodbye, perhaps a hundred women and children in all. The fore magazine went up at about a quarter past four on the afternoon of 22 September 1796, lifting her keel and making a noise they heard two miles away at Stonehouse.

Pellew was at table with Swaffield and his first lieutenant when the deck threw all three of them upwards into the beams. He got out through the stern windows. Swaffield did not get out at all. His body came up from the wreck a month later, on 22 October, the skull crushed but the uniform intact and a watch and four guineas still in the pocket, and he was buried at Stonehouse chapel the same evening. Of everybody aboard, about forty lived, and only two of those were officers.

There is one more thing the usual telling leaves out. Pellew had already reported the ship's magazine unsafe. Whatever his gunner was doing with the powder he was quietly selling off, the captain had put his concerns on paper first, which is either an exoneration or the most bitter possible vindication depending on how you care to read it.

Fight again he did, commanding the 74-gun HMS Conqueror at Trafalgar in 1805, where he forced the French flagship Bucentaure to strike her colours and sent his Royal Marine captain, James Atcherley, across to formally accept the surrender of Vice-Admiral Villeneuve. Villeneuve, it was later said, seemed rather pleased to be surrendering to a Pellew, though the one he had in mind was almost certainly the more famous Edward; the ceremonial sword ended up presented to Admiral Collingwood instead of the captain who had actually earned it, a mix-up Israel Pellew was reportedly too much of a gentleman to make a fuss about.

It is worth being honest about the man, because the sympathetic version is only half of him. Israel Pellew owed most of his career to Edward, who lobbied the Admiralty on his behalf again and again and eventually took him along as captain of the fleet. Those who served with him rated him a first-class gunnery officer and no better than competent at anything else, and he had a reputation among his own ship's company as a tyrant. He was also deeply religious, which the two facts about him do not obviously reconcile.

It did not hold him back. He was made rear-admiral on 31 July 1810, a Knight Commander of the Bath in January 1815, vice-admiral in 1819 and admiral in 1830, and he died in 1832 at seventy-three, having survived one of the worst ship explosions in the Royal Navy's history and gone on to take a French commander-in-chief's flagship.

A Frigate Built to Teach

Like her sister ships, Pellew was designed around a single job: finding and destroying submarines using a pair of Limbo Mark 10 mortars, a sophisticated sonar suite, and, in her case, a set of 21-inch torpedo tubes that some Blackwoods carried and others didn't.

Her surface armament amounted to little more than a trio of 40mm Bofors guns, reflecting a design philosophy that treated gunnery as very much secondary to submarine detection.

In practice, much of her working life was spent not hunting real submarines but training the men who would one day have to, and by the mid-1960s she was attached to the 2nd Frigate Squadron at Portland, the Royal Navy's principal centre for anti-submarine work-up and instruction, putting successive generations of officers and ratings through their paces.

Flying the Flag Around Europe

Training duties left plenty of room for the more sociable side of frigate life. Between 1964 and 1965, Pellew called at a string of European ports including Calais, Kiel, Flushing, Cherbourg and Jersey, the kind of goodwill visits that gave allied navies and interested locals a chance to look over a working Royal Navy frigate up close.

In 1965 she also took part in Portsmouth Navy Days, the popular open-day event that let members of the public tour warships that would otherwise spend their careers rather more privately.

Like many smaller Royal Navy ships of the period, she was formally adopted by a British town, in her case Teignmouth in Devon, part of a long-standing scheme that gave communities a direct link to a ship carrying their name or connection, and gave sailors a home port's worth of goodwill and the odd care package to look forward to.

A Brush with Hollywood, of a Sort

Pellew's most unusual claim to fame has nothing to do with submarines at all. In 1961 she appeared, playing herself, in Gorgo, a British monster film about a giant prehistoric sea creature that rampages through London after being captured and put on display, in the finest tradition of the genre that owed an obvious debt to Godzilla.

Quite how a real anti-submarine frigate found herself drafted into a production about a rubber-suited monster terrorising Tower Bridge is one of those small, delightful oddities of naval and film history; the Royal Navy of the era was not above lending a genuine warship to a production crew if it added a bit of authenticity, and a frigate steaming purposefully into shot did rather more for the film's credibility than a model could have managed.

It is worth knowing what she was actually doing in it. Gorgo was directed by Eugene Lourie, a Russian-born art director who had by then made rather a speciality of the form: he had sent a rampaging dinosaur through New York in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1953 and knocked a good deal of London about with Behemoth the Sea Monster in 1959. In both, the armed forces kill the monster in the last reel.

The account usually given of Gorgo is that Lourie's young daughter had been upset by the death of the Behemoth, and that he decided nothing was going to die this time. The result is the monster film in which the military loses. The mother comes up the Thames, sinks a Royal Navy warship outright, shrugs off everything the remaining ships, the guns, the tanks and the infantry can do to her, collects her captured offspring from the circus that had been charging people to look at it, and walks back into the sea with it.

Which means that the only naval action HMS Pellew ever took part in was one she lost, to a two hundred and fifty foot rubber lizard, in front of a paying audience. The Royal Navy of 1960 was entirely relaxed about this sort of thing. Lending a training frigate to a film unit for a few days cost nothing anybody had to account for, filled a gap in her programme, and put something on the screen that no model in a tank could match.

A Quiet Retirement

Pellew's active career came to an end in the early 1970s, part of a broader retirement of the Blackwood class as the Royal Navy's anti-submarine fleet modernised around newer, more capable frigate designs.

Why a fifteen-year-old frigate should be scrapped at all is a fair question, and the answer is bound up in what the Type 14 was for in the first place: a deliberately cut-price hull, built in numbers the Admiralty could afford rather than the numbers it wanted, and never intended to have much of a second act. That bargain, and what it cost, is set out in the article on HMS Duncan (F80). Pellew went to the breakers at Fleetwood, and part of her carried on to Glasson Dock, which is a fittingly undramatic end for a ship whose loudest moment was a film premiere.

She was broken up in April 1971, having spent a decade and a half doing the quiet, essential work of teaching submarine hunters their trade, showing the flag around European harbours, and, just once, sharing a scene with a giant monster on the big screen.

A Working Life Well Spent

HMS Pellew never sank a submarine and never needed to; her job was to make sure the men who eventually would knew exactly what they were doing. That is a less dramatic legacy than a battle honour, but it is no less valuable for it, and the fact that she is remembered at all today owes at least as much to a forty-foot rubber monster as to the anti-submarine warfare she spent most of her career quietly teaching.