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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, June 4, 2025: Tiny Hull, Heart of Oak

Above we see the Tree-class Admiralty type minesweeping trawler, HMT Juniper (T123), as she engages in a one-sided artillery duel with the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper in the Norwegian Sea on 8 June 1940, some 85 years ago this week.

The Trees

The British, with thousands of hardy blue water fishing boats and generations of crews along their coast in the 20th Century, were quickly able to mobilize these home-grown assets as sort of a “pirate fleet” with little effort, much akin to how the USCG almost overnight was able to deploy their 2,000-boat so-called Hooligan Navy or Corsair Fleet during WWII.

The Brits already had volumes of experience with such transformation in the Great War, ordering 609 “Admiralty” military type steel hulled trawlers specifically for naval use, along with another 1,400 boats taken up from trade. 

The concept in the Great War was simple: take a boat, add a deck gun, radio set, and searchlight; crew it largely with experienced trawlermen in uniform led by a reserve officer or two, and then specialize it into either anti-submarine work with listening gear and depth charges or minesweeping with sweep gear, sort said “battle trawlers” into flotillas, and turn them loose.

When 1935’s Italian invasion of Ethiopia, followed by Hitler’s abrogation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles with the reoccupation of the Rhineland by German troops and rearmament to include U-boats, signaled a new war on the horizon, the Royal Navy dusted off its trawler plan as a quick way to boost coastal forces.

This led to the prototype for the British ASW/minesweeping trawlers of the next decade, with HMT Basset (T68) built by Robb in Leith, being launched before the end of 1935.

Coal-burning with a single boiler and VTE engine good for a humble 12.5 knots, Basset ran 160 feet oal, could float in just 10 feet of seawater, and displaced 521 tons. Armament was a 3″/40 12pdr 12cwt QF Mk I/II/V taken from a WWI-era destroyer and mounted on a “bandstand” on the bow, along with weight and space saved for as many as 30 depth charges and mechanical minesweeping gear.

Basset led to a series of nearly two dozen vessels for the Royal Indian Navy and a few for the Canadians, while the design was tweaked for the follow-on Gem and Tree classes.

The first WWII-era Admiralty standard minesweeping trawler type was the 20-member Tree class, so dubbed as all its members were named after trees. These were just barely larger than the Basset (Dog) class, hitting 545 tons standard (770 full) and running some 164 feet long.

Armament, like Basset, relied on a single old 12-pounder forward, a twin 50-cal Vickers rear (sometimes replaced with a second 12-pounder) a pair of Vickers .303s, two depth charge throwers and two depth charge racks with provision for 30 ash cans, along with the novel new Oropesa Mk II mechanical mine sweep or LL-type magnetic mine sweep.

Ordered from nine small yards around Britain, all were laid down on the eve of the war, augmented by 67 other trawlers purchased from trade.

Crews were up to 40 souls, but typically more like 35, relying on a skipper and two junior officers, a couple of ratings from the RN or RNR, and the rest members of the newly stood up Royal Naval Patrol Service (RNPS).

Trained at the “stone frigate” HMS Europa, the commandeered Sparrows Nest Gardens in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the ad-hoc nature of the enterprise soon led to the force being known as “Harry Tate’s Navy” after a popular comedian of the era who had problems getting his car started and soon found it falling apart all around him but carried on with confidence nonetheless. In short, something akin to the “Rodney Dangerfield Navy.”

Meet Juniper

Our subject was the second warship to carry the name in the Royal Navy, with the first being an 8-gun Napoleonic-era Shamrock-class schooner that distinguished herself on Sir Arthur Wellesley’s campaigns in Portugal and Spain.

Ordered along with her future sister, HMT Mangrove from Ferguson Brothers (now Ferguson Marine) in Glasgow, Juniper was laid down as Yard No. 344 in August 1939 while Mangrove, built side-by-side, was No. 345. Their hull numbers would be T123 and T112, characteristically out of sequence, a class trait.

Juniper launched on 15 December 1939, as the Germans were digesting newly conquered western Poland, and commissioned in March 1940, as they prepped to turn West. She was modified while under construction and fitted with a more comprehensive AAA suite: three 20mm Oerlikons in place of the twin .50 cal Vickers.

Juniper’s first (and only) skipper was 42-year-old LCDR (Emergency) Geoffrey Seymour Grenfell, RN. An 18-year-old midshipman of impeccable background during the Great War (grandson of ADM John Pascoe Grenfell, grandnephew of Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, and the nephew of a VC holder killed with the 9th Lancers in 1914) he fought at Jutland on the famous HMS Warspite, a vessel holed 150 times in the sea clash by five German battleships. Leaving active service in 1920 as a lieutenant, after nine years with the colors, he was moved to the Emergency List, where he was made a LCDR in 1928 and remained there until activated in 1939.

Grenfell was a little bit famous at the time, having married the high-profile Countess of Carnarvon in 1938, an American heiress and descendant of the Lee Family of Virginia who had just divorced the 6th Earl of Carnarvon, leaving her son to inherit the title. Of note, the family home was the real Victorian Highclere Castle, the setting of the fictional Downton Abbey. Grenfell and the Countess’s marriage was important enough to be carried across the Atlantic in the NYT’s society pages.

The rest of Juniper’s tiny wardroom was made up of Probationary Temporary (Acting) Sub-Lieutenant Neville L. Smith, RNVR, and Probationary Temporary Lieutenant Ronald Campbell Blair Arnold Daniel, RNVR. Daniel, 40, was an architect in the Richmond practice of Partridge and a proud member of the Petersham Horticultural Society, having just joined the colors in April 1940.

War!

Rushed northward in June 1940 to take part in Operation Alphabet, the Allied evacuation of Norway, on the morning of 8 June, having departed Tromso the day before as the sole escort for the Aberdeen-bound 5,600-ton tanker SS Oil Pioneer, Juniper spotted a large cruiser on the horizon off Harstad.

It turned out to be the 14,000-ton Admiral Hipper, which at the time flew the signals of the British cruiser HMS Southampton.

Realizing the ruse too late and being too slow to make a getaway, Juniper put the “battle” in battle trawler and made ready for a surface action. Signaling her merchantmen to evade as best they could, she began a cat-and-mouse artillery action with Hipper.

Some reports state that it took 90 minutes. Others are just 15. No matter how long it took to play out, the outcome was certain, and Juniper was smashed below the waves by Hipper’s secondary 4.1-inch SK C/33 battery, the bruiser saving its big 8-inch guns for more worthy prey. Any of Hipper’s four escorting destroyers, Z7 Hermann Schoemann, Z10 Hans Lody, Z15 Erich Steinbrinck, and Z20 Karl Galster, would have been more than a match for our trawler.

An on-board camera crew captured the event.

Shortly after, the nearby KM Gneisenau caught Oil Pioneer and sank her with a combination of gunfire and a torpedo from the destroyer Schoemann, leaving one reported survivor.

The bulk of Juniper’s crew were listed simply as missing or “Missing Presumed Killed” (MPK).

ALEXANDER, Ivor, Ordinary Seaman, LT/JX 179311, MPK
AUSTWICK, Clarence H, Engineman, RNR (PS), LT/X 59952 ES, missing
BARGEWELL, Arthur, Stoker, RNPS, LT/KX 106123, missing
BROWNJOHN, Denis E, Telegraphist, C/WRX 1246, missing
CHAPMAN, Charles, Seaman, RNR (PS), LT/X 20188 A, missing
COOPER, Robert, Ordinary Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 183134, MPK
DANIEL, Ronald C B A, Py/Ty/Lieutenant, RNVR, MPK
GEORGE, William, Stoker 2c, RNPS, LT/KX 104599, MPK
GRENFELL, Geoffrey S, Lieutenant Commander, MPK
HIND, Wilson K, Leading Seaman, RNR, D/X 10320 B, missing
JILLINGS, Henry A, Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 177687, missing
MARSHALL, William D, Stoker, RNPS, LT/KX 104048, missing
NEWELL, George W, Ordinary Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 172789, MPK
PENTON, Thomas S, Ordinary Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 176379, missing
PERKINS, James K, Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 177711, missing
PHILLIPS, Peter R S, Ordinary Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 183136, MPK
SAWKINS, Eric W, Ordinary Signalman, RNVR, P/SDX 1535, missing
SEABROOK, William H, Telegraphist, RNW(W)R, C/WRX 124, missing
SMITH, Neville L, Py/Ty/Act/Sub Lieutenant, RNVR, MPK
SUMMERS, George, Engineman, RNR (PS), LT/X 318 EU, missing
TIMMS, Ernest S, Seaman, RNPS, LT/JX 180470, missing
VENTRY, Vincent, Seaman Cook, RNPS, LT/JX 185635, missing
WEAVER, Edgar A, 2nd Hand, RNPS, LT/KX 181715, missing

Those survivors picked up by the Germans were taken to Trondheim and eventually made their way to the Stalag IID Stargard in Pomerania. One of these survivors, Telegraphist Charles Roy Batchelor (499/X4624), though grievously wounded, survived the war and left a detailed account of his post-Juniper experience. He was repatriated home in October 1943 due to his wounds and would endure a series of skin and bone grafts for another 18 months. He went on to make a life for himself in to the 1980s and had a family, but walked with a limp, carried facial scars, and had difficulty chewing until the very end.

Soon after sending Juniper and Oil Pioneer to the bottom, Hipper found the empty troopship SS Orama (19,840 GRT) and made it a hat-trick.

On the same afternoon as Juniper was lost and only a few miles away, the German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst would meet up and sink the carrier HMS Glorious, including her defending destroyers HMS Acasta and Ardent, with the loss of over 1,500 lives. That much larger disaster overshadowed our trawler’s ride to Valhalla.

Epilogue

Despite the heroic charge of Juniper, I cannot find where the vessel or her crew were decorated. British LCDR Gerard Broadmead Roope, skipper of the G-class destroyer, HMS Glowworm, sunk by Hipper under very similar circumstances in April 1940, earned a VC.

The only post-war mention I can find of the good LCDR Grenfell is a notice of the settlement of his estate, published in October 1941.

His wife, the former Countess of Carnarvon, mourned for a decade before taking her third husband in 1950, and passed in 1977.

The Trees had a tough war. Besides Juniper, five of her 19 sisters were lost in action: HMT Almond (T 14), Ash (T 39), Chestnut (T 110), Hickory (T 116), and Pine (T 101).

The British lost an amazing 122 minesweeping trawlers during the war.

The Royal Naval Patrol Service numbered some 66,000 men during WWII, manning 6,000 assorted small vessels. At least 14,500 of these “Sparrows” lost their lives, and no less than 2,385 RNPS seamen “have no known grave but the sea.”

Today, the Lowestoft War Memorial Museum at Sparrow’s Nest remembers their sacrifices. Bronze panels at the Museum hold the names of the 2,385 MPK, including those lost on Juniper, recorded on Panels No. 1 and No. 2.

“Harry Tate’s Navy” echoes into eternity. 

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

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