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

The Build: 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.

Twenty Ships Named After Dances

The naming really is as odd as it sounds, and it is worth setting out. Twenty Dance-class trawlers were built, they were in service from 1940 to 1946, and the Admiralty called them Fandango, Foxtrot, Gavotte, Hornpipe, Mazurka, Minuet, Morris Dance, Paso Doble, Quadrille, Rumba, Saltarelo, Sword Dance, Tango and Two Step among others. A signal ordering Foxtrot and Two Step to close Rumba is a real thing that happened in the Second World War. There is no recorded explanation, and the most likely one is simply that somebody in the naming department had run out of birds, fish, villages and Shakespearean characters, all of which the Navy was using at the same time on other classes of small ship.

What happened to them afterwards is a tidy little illustration of how the postwar Navy emptied itself. One, Sword Dance, was lost in the war. Four went to Italy in 1946, at a moment when the Italian navy was being rebuilt from nothing under Allied supervision, and one to Portugal in 1945. The rest were sold, and most of them did what Tango did, which was go back to catching fish, because they had been designed to do that in the first place.

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.

That is the point about the whole trawler fleet and it is worth stating plainly. A deep sea trawler is already, without a single modification, most of what an escort needs to be: she is built to stay at sea for weeks in appalling weather with a small crew, she is designed around towing heavy gear slowly and precisely, which is exactly what sweeping a mine or streaming an anti-submarine sweep involves, her machinery is simple enough to be fixed by the people running it, and there were hundreds of her already in existence with crews who had spent their lives handling her. The Royal Navy took up something like a thousand trawlers over the two wars and built several hundred more to fishing designs, and the men who manned them, mostly fishermen and reservists, formed the Royal Naval Patrol Service. The service and its odd, affectionate reputation are set out in HMS Coldstreamer (T337) and HMS Duncton (T220).

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.

The Gibraltar and Algiers convoys she spent two years on were not a quiet posting either, whatever the phrasing suggests. The route down the Portuguese coast and through the Strait was inside the range of Focke-Wulf Condors flying out of Bordeaux, and it ran past the U-boat concentrations in the western approaches to the Mediterranean; after November 1942 and the Torch landings, the volume of shipping going that way made it one of the most attacked routes of the war. A trawler doing twelve knots, with one 4-inch gun and thirty depth charges, spent that in the outer screen, at night, in company with ships considerably faster than she was. HMS Bern (T294) gives an idea of what the type actually got up to.

A Long Life as a Fishing Vessel

Tango was sold to Belgian owners in July 1946 and converted to a fishing vessel in 1948 at the Chantier Naval St. Pierre yard in Hemiksem, 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 notably long working life for a small wartime trawler, stretching more than half a century beyond her original Royal Navy service.

Her afterlife is worth a last word too. A ship built at South Bank-on-Tees in 1940 as a warship, sold to Belgium in 1946, converted back to fishing in 1948 and still on Lloyd's Register in the middle of the 1990s under Italian ownership as a vessel called Winetanker, has outlived nearly every fleet destroyer of her generation by thirty years. It is the recurring joke of this whole part of the collection: the ships that were built cheaply, to a commercial design, for a job nobody wanted, are the ones that were still working when the glamorous ones had long since gone for razor blades.