I have been very lucky to have come into contact with so many wonderful people, who share a love of History, some have international reputations, a significant number are distinguished academics, many are local to me, who are always willing to share. David Walsh is one of those people I admire and respect highly, as he is deeply knowledgeable and always willing to assist. Please find his contribution to Local History month 2020. Highlighting the contribution to the war effort of an area which has a special place in my heart.
“IT WAS SOUTH BANK WHAT WON THAT WAR”
Perhaps one tragedy of the lockdown has been the effective silencing of the 75th anniversary of the end of The Second World War. A tragedy, as this will be the last real milestone year for the dwindling band of WW2 servicemen and our civilians in uniform. And locally, it will mean this area’s contribution to fighting, and winning that war will also largely go unnoticed. And nowhere more so than in South Bank. For it is no error to say that the war against Germany was won in that often overlooked and all too unfairly derided township.
Let us then start at the beginning, a very good place to start as the song has it. But that beginning was not on a cloudy September Sunday in 1939 – it was a long time before, and a very long way away from South Bank. Picture a cold Antarctic summer day in the little harbour of Grytviken, in the South Georgia Islands, many hundreds of miles south of the Falkland Isles and on the edge of the Antarctic ice sheet. In the clear blue waters of the first decade of the 20th century, a German merchantman is taking on its cargo from what is called a “flensing yard”. This is a Norwegian term (and although South Georgia was a British possession, pretty well everything on the island was Norse – from the harbour, the pub, the Lutheran Church and the food store). A flensing yard was simply a place where whales caught in the southern waters were cut up and separated into usable products – whalebone, whale meat, blubber, oil and finally a strange product called glycerine. This was, in the main, used for making margarine, for soap and creams and finally (mixed in a cauldron with other chemicals) into an incredibly powerful but unstable explosive called Nitro-glycerine – a substance which another Scandinavian, Alfred Nobel, later combined with powdered diatomaceous earth to make dynamite.
A photograph of that scene taken from a British steamer made its circuitous way to the Colonial Office in Whitehall and alarm bells started ringing. For Britain too needed nitro-glycerine to prepare for the coming war with the Kaiser’s Germany that everyone saw as imminent. It was the essential basis for cordite, the universal propellant that kicked the shells out of the army’s howitzers and mortars and the big guns of the Royal Navy. Both we and Germany were experiencing a bottleneck in producing cordite and supplies had to be safeguarded., and here was the coming foe casually buying it in a British possession. In the end there was nothing we could do at that time; Norway was a neutral country and was in theory free to trade with both sides, and in this first conflict, a tight British blockade of the waters of the North Sea and the entrance to the Baltic had to prevent shipments of the valuable whale product getting through.
But next time, and most Whitehall insiders foresaw that next time, it might be different. Today our attitude to whaling is normally one of total opposition, but in those days it was different, and it was seen as a strategic and trading necessity that Britain alone controlled whaling in the South Atlantic and the Antarctic. To do this, the country needed a new fleet of modern whale catching vessels, and here enters South Bank
Underwritten by Government subsidy, the two main whaling concerts in the UK asked a number of British shipyards in the mid-1920s to tender for this new generation of whaling vessels, but, blessed by some previous experience and a good team of marine architects, one yard – Smiths Dock Shipbuilders of South Bank – cornered the market with a successful design for the Christian Salvesen Group who operated in and around the Falklands. In the interwar period this meant steady work at a time of high unemployment elsewhere on Teesside and in UK shipbuilding generally, and by 1938 there were 40 Tees-built catcher craft operating in southern waters and a number of larger factory ships. In 1938 the first of a new class of larger catchers – the “Southern Pride” ships –-had been commissioned for the same customer. This class was more powerful, had a huge range and had a tight turning circle essential for effective harpooning and facilitated by a curved hull shape which allowed the ship to “ride” the water with minimal submerged depth of the keel.
In mid-1937 or thereabouts, a phone rang in the Smith Dock Works Managers office. The men from the ministry were on the line. Their story was a simple one. The best minds at the Admiralty and the War Office were now concentrating on the looming threat from the growing fleet of German Kriegsmarine (Navy) U-boats. Up to now and based on WW1 practice, U Boat hunting had been seen as being the preserve of converted trawlers – ideal for coastal waters, but useless in the deep waters of the Atlantic. What was needed was a long-range U Boat countermeasures vessel, larger and faster than trawlers, but still cheap enough to be built in large numbers, preferably at small merchant shipyards, as larger yards were already busy. The men from Whitehall had been told of Smiths Dock work and wanted to know what could be on the plate from the Tees. So, to meet these requirements, Smiths Dock offered a development of its existing 700-ton, 16 knots 3,700 mile range Southern Pride class whale catcher; after all, it was argued, pursuing a massive twisting and turning whale was not all that different to hunting a U Boat – except whilst the first just needed a harpoon, the U Boat needed small guns and depth charges.
The rest was history. Rechristened as the “Flower Class” Corvette, these ships went on to be produced in their hundreds at Smiths Dock and other yards across the UK, and in Canada. In all, 305 were completed, of which 294 saw active service before VE day. They served with the Royal Navy, the Navies of all the Dominions and India, the navies of the “free allies” of occupied Europe and with the U S Navy. Four, captured from French ports in 1940, even saw service with the German Kriegsmarine. They saw action across the globe, although the bulk of their deployment was in the North Atlantic. As befits the Flower Class the majority bore names of flowers – from the common to the exotic. One fictitious example “HMS Compass Rose” was the grey steel centrepiece of the classic novel and later film of the War of the Atlantic, “The Cruel Sea”.
The Smiths Dock vessels acquitted themselves well, although there were many tragic sinkings, such as that of the La Bastiaise, a vessel kitted out for use by the Free French navy, but which went to the bottom with heavy loss of life (both French and RN ratings and officers and a number of civilian workers from the yard) whilst out on its first sea trials in Tees Bay. Others however earned their medal honours. Indeed, one South Bank ship, HMS Sunflower, was the most successful Royal Navy Flower-class. It “shared” the sinking of U-282 on the 29th October 1943 and sank single-handedly 2 other U-boats: U-631 on the 17th October 1943 and U-638 on the 5th May 1943.
All these kills were in the icy waters off Greenland and Iceland. If we were to have preserved even one of these ships it should have been her, but short-sightedly, she was scrapped in August 1947 on the sands of Hayle in Cornwall.
It is worth looking at the way these ships were designed to operate, and also the men who crewed them. They had about 50 odd U Boat kills but were not primarily sub killers – their job was to pin down a U Boat by circling it with a depth charge barrage and then let the nearest destroyer in the convoy either ram the submarine when it had to surface or drop a bigger depth charge barrage. You could see these ships as sheepdogs guarding the merchant ship lambs in the convoy – both keeping the foxes at bay and taking out foxes if the opportunity arose. I would recommend readers to read The Cruel Sea or see the film if it is on YouTube. It is accurate and graphic.
The crewing of these ships was almost an afterthought. Existing, skilled RN Sailors were normally assigned to the “big” ships, destroyers, cruisers and battleships, and the humble corvettes were normally captained by men seconded from the merchant navy and largely crewed by called up ratings. The experience of HMS Sunflower is typical. Captained by the wonderfully named John Treasure Jones, who later was to be the captain of the Cunard liners Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, the men he had in his care were a mixed bunch, and many, I suspect would have been Teesiders. After the war, Jones wrote, “Around 90% of my crew had not been to sea before. They had been called-up, done a little training in barracks and then sent to man the ships. They were strengthened and knit together by a small number of trained ratings and naval pensioners.”
“I had three officers plus an Engine-room Artificer, who was in charge of the engine and boiler rooms, with a Stoker Petty Officer to assist him. Of my three officers, only one had been to sea as an officer and he had just joined the Royal Naval Reserve prior to the war. My Second Officer was little older; his only sea experience was that he had served six months on the lower deck in one of the battleships, then been sent to an officers training college for 3 months; this was his first ship as an officer. My Third Officer was a young man of 19. He had joined-up straight from school, done six months on the lower deck as a rating, followed by 3 months at an officers training college before being appointed to my ship. I was daddy to these men as well as Captain, since I was 35 at the time.”
“We sailed from South Bank in January 1940 for Tobermory, to work-up before being sent to join a group on ocean escort of convoys. To start with I had difficulty in finding three men who could steer the ship, and as we had encountered bad weather as soon as we had put to sea, most of them were seasick.”
Only one example of a Flower Class Corvette was preserved alas, HMCS Sackville, which can be seen to this day at anchor in Halifax, Nova Scotia – the port from which so many convoys departed for the wide Atlantic, and with luck, the Western Approaches. It is a pity we could not have kept one for the River Tees – an opportunity lost. But the legend lives on. If these South Bank designed ships had not been ordered and then rushed into service, then it is likely that the U Boat “Wolf Packs” would have decimated every single convoy bringing food, weapons of war and US and Canadian troops to our shores. We would have lost the Battle of the Atlantic and with it the war. It is, I believe, both fair and honest to say that a collection of massive brooding iron sheds, towering cranes and open air slipways at South Bank and the local Teesside men (and, in total war, women too) was the key to VE Day – and for that we should pay due tribute.
David’s website can be found here : http://republic-of-teesside.blogspot.com/ although he has not updated it for a while, it contains some fascinating information.
David is, however, active on facebook : https://www.facebook.com/david.walsh.5268750