HMS Peterel (P262): Too Rough a Ride to Patrol, So She Taught Instead

A Sensible Idea, Built the Wrong Way

Not every warship's story is one of battle honours and narrow escapes. Some are quieter tales of good intentions meeting an unforgiving sea, and HMS Peterel's is very much one of those.

She was one of five Bird-class patrol vessels ordered from Richard Dunston's yard for the Fishery Protection Squadron's Inshore Division, at a cost of around £1.1 million apiece, small and relatively cheap ships intended to enforce Britain's fishing limits in coastal and inshore waters where a full-sized frigate would have been absurd overkill.

Peterel herself was one of the first four vessels ordered, back in late 1972, at 37.7 metres long, displacing under 200 tonnes, and armed with a single 40mm Bofors gun and a couple of machine guns, entirely adequate for chasing off the odd errant trawler.

The Gunboat That Told the Japanese Navy to Get Off Her Deck

The name she was carrying had been earned a very long way from the Humber. The Peterel before her was a river gunboat, built by Yarrow, launched in July 1927 and then taken apart again and shipped out to Hong Kong in pieces to be bolted back together, which was how the Royal Navy got flat-bottomed ships onto the Yangtse. She spent the 1930s at Shanghai with the Yangtse Flotilla, and by 1941 she had been disarmed and reduced to something close to a floating wireless office, with her three-inch guns immobilised and a skeleton crew of about twenty-two.

At twenty past four on the morning of 8 December 1941, Shanghai time, the British consulate telephoned to say the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Peterel went to action stations, which in her condition was very nearly a gesture. A launch full of Japanese marines came alongside and officers climbed aboard to demand her surrender.

Her captain was Temporary Lieutenant Stephen Polkinghorn, a New Zealander of the Royal Naval Reserve. He invited the Japanese officers to come below and discuss it. This was not hospitality: below decks were the code books, the chute down to the boiler-room furnace and the demolition charges. They declined to go. Polkinghorn then told them, in the words that have followed the story ever since, to get off his bloody ship.

The armoured cruiser Idzumo, a Japanese gunboat and positions on the French bund opened fire at point-blank range. Peterel answered with her machine guns and hit some of her attackers before she caught fire, rolled over and sank at her mooring. Six of her people were killed, and Japanese troops machine-gunned men who were already in the water. Twelve reached a Panamanian merchant ship called the Marizion, from which the Japanese removed them in flat breach of international law, and they spent the rest of the war in the camps.

She was the first Royal Navy ship the Japanese sank in the Second World War. Eight days later the First Lord of the Admiralty was asked about her in the Commons and could add nothing to the press reports, except to say that what they showed of the gallantry with which her commanding officer and ship's company had fought their ship against overwhelming odds was fully in accordance with the traditions of the Royal Navy. Polkinghorn got his Distinguished Service Cross in 1945, once he was out of captivity to receive it.

One of her people got away with it altogether. Three men were ashore that morning; two were picked up. The third, Petty Officer Telegraphist James Cuming, obtained false papers, took the name Mr Trees and spent the next three and a half years living in a Japanese-occupied city and working for an American and Chinese intelligence ring. He was never caught. Desmond Wettern wrote the whole thing up in 1960 under the title The Lonely Battle.

The badge the 1976 patrol boat inherited was a black petrel in flight on a silver field, and the motto was Reck Not, which is old English for do not care. It is worth knowing what was behind the nameplate on a small ship at Dartmouth.

A Design That Simply Would Not Behave

The trouble was seakeeping, the unglamorous but absolutely fundamental ability of a small ship to cope with rough water without throwing her crew and equipment around like dice in a cup. The Bird class, it turned out, was not very good at it.

The design's poor sea-keeping qualities were serious enough that the whole class came to be regarded as something of a failure, and Peterel's own case was the most extreme: she never completed a single operational fishery patrol in the role she had been built for.

It is a fairly remarkable thing for a purpose-built patrol vessel to manage, rather like commissioning a ship expressly to sink very slowly at the dock.

The fault was not really hers, and it was not a mystery either. The Bird class was drawn from the Royal Air Force's Seal-class long-range recovery boats, which is to say that the Admiralty took a hull designed for fishing aircrew out of the water and asked it to be a warship instead. How that decision came to be made, and what Parliament was told about it afterwards, is set out at length in the article on HMS Kingfisher (P260). The short version is that a launch built to dash out and come straight back is not the same animal as a ship built to stay out, and the North Sea in February established the difference at once.

A Second Calling at Dartmouth

Rather than write the ship off entirely, the Royal Navy found her a job better suited to her limitations. From 1977 to 1979 Peterel and her sister ship Sandpiper were allocated to the Royal Naval Reserve for sea training under what amounted to a hull-sharing arrangement, work that kept them closer to sheltered coastal waters and away from the open-sea conditions that had exposed Peterel's flaws so thoroughly.

She was later fitted with an enclosed bridge, a small but telling concession to comfort and safety, and assigned to the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where generations of officer cadets learned the basics of seamanship and small-boat handling aboard a vessel that, whatever her operational shortcomings, was at least an honest, real warship rather than a simulator.

Sisters Scattered to the Winds

Peterel's sister ships fared rather better in their original role. Kingfisher, Redpole and Cygnet were sent to reinforce the Northern Ireland Squadron, replacing older minesweepers on Operation Grenada, the Royal Navy's standing maritime patrol against arms smuggling to paramilitary groups around Ulster's coast and loughs during the Troubles, a job that asked considerably more of a small patrol vessel than chasing trawlers ever had. It says something about the class's original seakeeping problem that the Navy eventually fitted the surviving sisters with stern extensions during a late-1980s Rosyth refit purely to improve their stability, a fix Peterel herself, tucked away at Dartmouth, never needed and never received.

Of the class's later fates, Cygnet remains in the UK, Redpole crossed the Atlantic into private ownership in the United States, and Sandpiper ended up in the Netherlands, each finding an afterlife rather more settled than their brief, troubled Royal Navy careers as fishery protection vessels ever were.

An Honest Kind of Ship

There is something almost endearing about a warship whose most notable achievement was admitting, in effect, that she could not do the job she was built for and finding something useful to do instead.

HMS Peterel never fired her Bofors gun in anger, never chased down an errant trawler, and never really lived up to her own design brief, but for the best part of two decades she quietly and reliably taught the Royal Navy's future officers how to handle a ship at sea, before finally being sold out of naval service in 1991, which is, in its own understated way, just as valuable a contribution as any patrol she might have run.

Her sister HMS Sandpiper (P263) went the same way to the same place at the same time, so that between them the pair managed a combined career total of no operational patrols whatsoever. Sandpiper at least has a documented retirement, in private hands in the Netherlands. What became of Peterel after 1991 is not recorded anywhere that can be relied upon: she simply stops appearing in the lists. For a ship carrying a name that a gunboat had taken to the bottom of the river at Shanghai, fighting an armoured cruiser with machine guns, it is a very quiet exit.