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.

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.

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. 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.