HMS Tango (T146): A Trawler Named for a Dance, Escorting Convoys to Gibraltar

Built at South Bank-on-Tees

HMS Tango was built by Smith's Dock Company at South Bank-on-Tees, ordered on 9 September 1939, laid down the following August, launched on 29 November 1940 and commissioned on 22 April 1941, one of the Royal Navy's Dance-class anti-submarine trawlers, a fleet named, appropriately enough, after dances and dance traditions. Nearly identical to the related Isles class but more heavily armed, with a 4-inch gun, three 20mm Oerlikon cannons and thirty depth charges, these small, tough ships took on the unglamorous but essential work of coastal and convoy escort.

Escorting Convoys Through the Mediterranean

Under Lieutenant John Hunter and later Lieutenant Robert Giles, Tango spent 1942 to 1944 on convoy escort and anti-submarine exercises, including extended service in the Mediterranean escorting convoys to Gibraltar, Algiers and Port Said, exactly the kind of steady, unglamorous protective work that kept the Allied supply lines running through some of the most contested waters of the war.

A Long Life as a Fishing Vessel

Tango was sold to Belgian owners in July 1946 and converted to a fishing vessel in 1948, going on to pass through Belgian, German and Italian ownership over the following decades, eventually being reconstructed as a vessel called Winetanker. Remarkably, she remained on Lloyd's Register into the mid-1990s, a genuinely long working life for a small wartime trawler, stretching more than half a century beyond her original Royal Navy service.