HMS Portsdown (T221): The Fishing Boat Called Up to Hunt Submarines Off Africa

A Trawler Design Turned Warship

HMS Portsdown was one of the Hill-class Admiralty trawlers, a wartime design adapted from Barnett, a perfectly ordinary commercial fishing trawler built in 1937, and turned into a serviceable anti-submarine escort simply by adding guns, depth charges and a naval crew.

Her name came from Portsdown Hill, the chalk ridge overlooking Portsmouth that carries both the Nelson Monument, funded by two days' pay from every sailor who fought at Trafalgar, and a line of Victorian forts nicknamed "Palmerston's Follies" after the invasion they were built against never actually came. It is oddly fitting company for a trawler that would go on to chase a submarine contact of her own that, as it turned out, was not there either.

It was a typically pragmatic piece of wartime improvisation: rather than tie up scarce warship-building capacity on small escorts, the Admiralty ordered eight of these adapted trawlers from Cook, Welton and Gemmell of Beverley in 1940, giving each one a 12-pounder gun, three 20mm Oerlikon cannon and fifty-five depth charges, a notably useful anti-submarine punch for a ship that had started life as a design for catching fish rather than U-boats.

Not every one of the eight made it home: HMS Bredon was sunk by U-521 in February 1943, and HMS Birdlip by U-547 in June 1944, a reminder that even the least glamorous escort duty carried genuine risk.

Her sister HMS Dunkery (T224), who had dropped out of that same convoy with engine trouble, went back to fishing after the war exactly as Portsdown did, and was wrecked on the Norwegian coast doing it. Of the eight Hills, two were sunk by U-boats. Portsdown and Dunkery both went back to trawling, and Dunkery was lost at it anyway.

Built and Commissioned Within a Year

Portsdown herself was ordered in January 1941, laid down that May, launched in September, and commissioned on 4 March 1942, a brisk construction schedule that reflected just how urgently the Battle of the Atlantic demanded more escorts of every size and type.

Command passed through three wartime officers: Lieutenant Edward Donkin, who commissioned her and held command until 10 March 1944, Lieutenant Leonard Bradley, who took over that same day and served until 20 February 1945, and Lieutenant Kenneth Forth, who saw her through to the war's end.

Guarding the Freetown Convoys

Portsdown's war was fought a long way from the cold grey Atlantic most people picture when they think of convoy escort duty. She was based around Freetown in Sierra Leone, which by the middle of the war had grown into a genuinely vast Allied harbour, holding as many as 180 ships at a time and clearing up to 50 a day, defended by controlled minefields and underwater indicator loops, and a critical assembly point for convoys running along the West African coast and out into the wider Atlantic.

Through the spring and summer of 1943 she took part in a string of anti-submarine exercises off Freetown alongside the Free French sloop Le Centaure, working with a rotating cast of sister trawlers and escorts: HMS Bridgewater, HMS Pict and HMS Copinsay on 11 May, HMS Cowslip and HMS Butser on the 14th, and alone with the French sloop again on 21 July.

Two of that rotating cast have accounts of their own here. HMS Bridgewater (U01) was a sloop of 1928 who had come to West Africa by way of the China station and the guns of Dakar, and HMS Amaranthus (K17) spent essentially her whole war on the same coast and gives a fuller picture of what the Freetown escorts actually lived with, which included a good deal more malaria than U-boats.

In March 1944 she sailed as one of three Hill-class trawlers, alongside sister ships HMS Dunkery and HMS Yestor, escorting the thirty-strong convoy SL 152 out of Freetown. Dunkery dropped out with engine trouble within hours, bound for Bathurst, and on 15 March Portsdown was sent to help HMS Aubrietia run down a sonar contact thought to be a U-boat; nothing was actually there, but rather than rejoin the convoy afterwards, she turned back for Freetown, the kind of routine but particularly important precautionary work that rarely gets written up in the history books but which kept the West African convoy routes as safe as they were.

The other ship in that anticlimax deserves a name rather than a mention, because she is one of the most consequential small warships of the entire war. Aubrietia was a Flower-class corvette, and on 9 May 1941, escorting convoy OB 318 in the North Atlantic, she spotted a periscope and put a pattern of depth charges on it. What came up was U-110, commanded by Fritz-Julius Lemp, the officer who had sunk the liner Athenia on the first day of the war. Her crew abandoned her without scuttling her properly, and a boarding party from HMS Bulldog went down inside and came out with her Enigma machine and her settings.

The full story is in the article on HMS Aubrietia (K96). The point here is smaller and rather more human. Three years after all that, on an unremarkable afternoon off Sierra Leone, the corvette that had opened the door to reading German naval signals and a converted Hull fishing trawler spent an afternoon chasing something that was not there, and then both went back to work. That is what the convoy war was actually like for almost everybody in it, almost all of the time.

Back to the Fishing Grounds

When the war ended, Portsdown's story took the most natural course imaginable for a ship built on a fishing trawler's hull: she went back to fishing.

Sold in April 1946 to Hull Merchants Amalgamated Trawlers, she returned to commercial service, changing hands again in 1949 and 1955 under different owners and, in the way of the trawler trade, quite possibly different names as she passed between fishing companies looking for a solid, war-surplus hull at a reasonable price.

A Long Working Life, Ending in Ireland

Her working life, first as a warship and then as a commercial trawler, finally came to an end when she was sold for scrap to Haulbowline Industries in Ireland in 1964 and broken up that December, more than two decades after she had first been laid down for war service.

It was a fittingly unglamorous conclusion for a ship whose entire career, in and out of uniform, had been defined by hard, practical, unglamorous work.

The Quiet Backbone of the Convoy War

Ships like HMS Portsdown rarely get remembered alongside the destroyers and cruisers that fought the Atlantic war's more dramatic engagements, but the Hill-class trawlers and their many cousins did an enormous amount of the unglamorous legwork, patrolling, escorting and searching, that kept convoys like those running out of Freetown moving safely.

She came home when two of her own eight sisters did not, which is as honest a measure of an unglamorous escort's real stakes as any battle honour would have been.

Portsdown's own war, and her long peacetime return to the fishing trade she had originally been designed for, is as good a summary of that quiet, essential contribution as any single ship's history could offer.