HMS Beryl

TWO NEW street names will soon be appearing in Bourne to commemorate a little known episode in our history, the action of a small but effective warship and its crew during the Second World War of 1939-45.

During those years, one of the great acts of national savings to fund our military forces was an event known as Warships' Week that was held throughout Britain to finance fighting vessels serving with the Royal Navy fleet. This was a patriotic appeal by the government for the public to dig deep into their pockets and provide the cash to fund new ships and Lincolnshire responded magnificently with each town and village raising massive amounts.

Here in Bourne, the Warships' Week appeal was held from 7th-14th February 1942 with a target of £35,000 to buy a minesweeper but in the event, £54,168 (£1.5 million at today's values) was collected and in June, the town adopted HMS Beryl at an official ceremony on the Abbey Lawn when Rear Admiral F A Buckley of the Royal Navy handed over a plaque to mark the occasion. In return, Bourne Urban District Council also gave a plaque that was eventually fixed on the ship and stayed there for the rest of the war.

The Maritime Museum in Malta contains the actual contract signed by Rear Admiral Buckley on behalf of the Admiralty and the citizens of the town of Bourne who helped finance HMS Beryl, together with a brass plaque from the ship which commemorated the adoption.

The boat had a chequered history. It was built at Hull in 1935 as a 650-ton fishing trawler named Lady Adelaide but was bought by the Admiralty at the outbreak of war in 1939 and renamed HMS Beryl, an auxiliary minesweeper of the Gem Class named after semi-precious stones, others being Jade, Coral, Ruby, Amethyst and Agate. The boat was 150 feet long, powered by a 700 h p engine and capable of 12 knots. The first commanding officer was Commissioned Bosun Harry Sellwood (later Lieutenant Commander Sellwood) and after the ship had been altered and adapted for minesweeping and anti-submarine work, he took it to Malta where it became involved in the long and bitter siege of the island during which action he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

HMS Beryl was sunk alongside Parlatorio Wharf in French Creek during an attack on the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious on 19th January 1941. Only part of her funnel and the tip of her mast were still visible above water in the harbour and she remained submerged until refloated and repaired the following October. At that time, the waters around Malta were littered with mines sown by Italian naval craft and dropped by German aircraft. These claimed various naval and merchant ships.

Two of Beryl's sister ships, Jade and Coral, were wrecked early in 1942 and Beryl became the largest naval vessel remaining afloat at Malta, the lone bulwark in the campaign, and was nicknamed "the Flagship of Malta" by the islanders because she flew the flag of the Flag Officer, Malta.

After the Malta campaign, Sellwood left the ship in November 1943 when there was a complete change of crew and it went to the Greek Islands and Turkey and later took part in the Sicily landings leading up to the invasion of Italy. HMS Beryl was decommissioned when the war ended in 1945 and the following year was sold to the Iago Steam Trawling Company at Fleetwood in Lancashire and renamed the Red Knight. It continued fishing until 1963 when it was sold for demolition and so ended its days in a maritime scrap yard at Barrow-in-Furness.

Commander Sellwood had joined the Royal Navy in 1922 at the age of twelve, enlisting as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and serving until 1947 when he was invalided out of the service and became a salesman for a firm of steel stockholders. He died in 1996 at the age of 86 and was cremated at Harlow, Essex. Checking through their father’s papers after his death, his three sons, Richard, David and Robert, discovered the connection with Bourne and in the summer of 2004, made a pilgrimage to the town as a mark of homage to their father.

Their main port of call was to the Heritage Centre in South Street which contains a display of papers and artefacts connected with HMS Beryl, the centrepiece being the cast iron shield carrying the ship’s crest that was presented to Bourne Urban District Council by the Admiralty in 1942. It would have been destroyed had it not been for the intervention of Bert Johns, of Stanley Street, secretary of the Bourne branch of the Royal Naval Association, who managed to save it for posterity together with the plaque presented by Bourne Urban District Council which had been returned when the vessel was broken up in 1963. This had been specially carved for the council when the ship was adopted by Jack Rayner, a woodwork teacher at Bourne Grammar School, and so it was sent there for safekeeping but that too was almost lost. It was about to be thrown on a bonfire when some of the old wooden buildings were demolished in 1995 but Bert again managed to save it.

Now, after more than half a century, both Beryl and Sellwood have been chosen by the town council as street names on new developments and so they will be remembered by future generations.

A second warship associated with the Bourne area was adopted by South Kesteven Rural District Council whose administration at that time included several villages around the town. Their target was much more ambitious and they managed to raise £120,000 which was used to adopt HMS Polyanthus, a 925-ton vessel with a crew of 85 and one of the Royal Navy's Flower Class of corvettes of World War II whose main duty was safeguarding the passage of merchant ships bringing in vital supplies from the United States and Canada.

They were built mainly in Canadian and British dockyards in 1940-41 and soon became the workhorses of the North Atlantic, escorting supply ships and attacking submarines. In the autumn of 1943, the ship was part of the escort group with the combined westbound convoys that became the first victims of the new acoustic torpedoes introduced by the German Navy. In addition to several merchant ships, four of the escorts were hit and sunk including the frigate HMS Lagan, the four-stack destroyer HMCS St Croix, the frigate HMS Itchen and HMS Polyanthus that went down on September 21st.