HMS Turquoise (T45): A Trawler That Went Through Three More Names Before Retirement

Built Well Before the War

HMS Turquoise was built by Smiths Dock Company at South Bank-on-Tees, launched on 7 March 1935 and commissioned that November, an anti-submarine trawler armed with a single 4-inch gun that entered service nearly five years before the outbreak of the Second World War, giving her crews plenty of time to work up before the fighting began in earnest.

She Was a Grimsby Fishing Boat First

She was not built for the Navy. She was launched at Smith's Dock on 7 March 1935 as the steam trawler Warwickshire, ordered by Shire Trawlers of London, completed that month for the Warwickshire Fishing Company of Grimsby and registered there as GY133 on 28 March: four hundred and twenty-seven gross tons, a hundred and sixty feet, an eight-hundred horsepower triple-expansion engine, and a working life ahead of her on the northern fishing grounds.

She had nine months of it. Through the summer of 1935 Mussolini made his intentions towards Abyssinia plain, the League of Nations made it equally plain that it would do nothing effective, and the Mediterranean Fleet found itself facing an Italian one with no clear idea whether there was going to be a war; the invasion came in October. The Admiralty, going through its inventory that autumn, discovered it had almost nothing with which to screen an anchorage. In September the government authorised it to go out and buy twenty modern trawlers off the open market and convert them into minor war vessels, and Warwickshire, six months old and one of the newest boats in Grimsby, was exactly what it was looking for.

She went to the Admiralty that December, her Grimsby registry was closed on the 23rd, and she was fitted out as a Gem-class anti-submarine trawler and renamed Turquoise. The Gems were the first purpose-converted trawlers the Navy owned outright rather than requisitioning, and the point of them was asdic. A trawler is slow, heavy for her length, and built to work for days in weather that would stop anything else, which makes her a very good platform for listening: quiet, steady and cheap. It also, unavoidably, makes her a very bad platform for running away.

Four Years in E-Boat Alley

Where she spent the war is the most important thing about her, and it goes unsaid. She spent it on the East Coast, out of Harwich, escorting the endless coastal convoys down the Norfolk and Suffolk shore. On 14 January 1944 an Imperial War Museum photographer caught her there and the caption they filed with the picture reads: the trawler HMS Turquoise is an E-boat Alley veteran, and has just completed four years service on the East Coast.

What that meant is set out from the destroyer's point of view in HMS Eglinton (L87), which worked the same water from the same port. From the trawler's point of view it was worse in one specific respect. The German S-boats that hunted that coast at night made close to forty knots. Turquoise made twelve. A Hunt-class destroyer could at least attempt to chase; a trawler could only stand between the convoy and the torpedo and put up what fire she had, which was one 4-inch gun forward and whatever machine guns she had been given. Four years of that is a very long time.

She was not merely a target. On the night of 19 February 1942, escorting a convoy under Lieutenant C M Newns of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, she was attacked by E-boats and drove them off, and eighteen German survivors were pulled out of the water afterwards. A twelve-knot fishing boat with a single gun coming out of a night action with eighteen prisoners is about as good as it got in the Royal Naval Patrol Service, whose culture and casualties are described in HMS Duncton (T220).

A Collision With a Torpedoed Destroyer

In June 1941, Turquoise was involved in a collision with the destroyer HMS Vanessa after Vanessa had already been damaged by a German air attack in the North Sea, an unfortunate accident during what was clearly a chaotic and dangerous stretch of water at the time, though the trawler herself weathered the incident and continued her service.

The Vanessa collision belongs to the same coast. On 19 June 1941 the destroyer had been worked over by German aircraft in the North Sea and was in a poor way, and in the confusion of getting her home the two ships came together. Turquoise took damage from it herself, which the record notes and then, in the way of these things, does not follow up. Both ships survived the war.

Five Commanding Officers Through the War

Turquoise served under five different commanding officers across the course of the war, from Lieutenant Commander Sidney Gunn in the early months through to Temporary Lieutenant Andrew Harris from August 1943, part of the steady rotation of officers that kept the Royal Navy's large fleet of small anti-submarine trawlers operating throughout the conflict.

Three New Names in Civilian Life

Sold in 1946, Turquoise went on to an unusually well-documented afterlife, renamed St Oswald that same year, then Woolton in 1950, and finally Wyre Woolton in 1954, before finally being scrapped at Preston in 1957, a truly long working life spanning more than two decades from her original 1935 commissioning to her eventual retirement under her third civilian identity.

Three Names and Three Ports

The renamings look like trivia and are actually a tour of the English fishing industry in its last good decade. In October 1946 she was sold to the Saint Andrew's Steam Fishing Company and registered at Hull as St Oswald, H335. In 1948 she went to the Grimsby Merchants Amalgamated Trawling Company, and in May 1950 she became Woolton, GY575. In October 1954, after her owners were absorbed into the Associated Fisheries group and restyled Wyre Trawlers, she moved to Fleetwood and became Wyre Woolton, FD18. Hull, Grimsby, Fleetwood: the three great English distant-water ports, in order, in eight years.

And she worked. On 4 August 1952 she landed at Fleetwood from an eleven-day trip to Icelandic waters with twelve thousand stone of cod and haddock, which grossed five thousand and four pounds. That is a good trip by any standard, from a boat that was seventeen years old and had spent six of them being shot at.

She was sold for scrap on 15 April 1957, sailed from Fleetwood for Preston the next day and was delivered on the 17th. Twenty-two years, four names, one war and a great many fish.