Original Wartime Convoy Ship Visited Newcastle

Some 1,000 Norwegian merchant navy ships sailed for the Allies during World War Two.

 

One of these was SS (Steam Ship) Hestmanden, a freighter built in Bergen in Norway in 1911.

 

Although relatively small, with a displacement of 979 tonnes, she sailed in the Atlantic convoys in 1940-45, and she is known to have visited the Tyne several times during that period.

Newcastle did not serve as a Norwegian official home town during the war, as it did for the Danes. But as a major British port it was frequently visited by Norwegian ships and we know that the Danes and  the Norwegian sailors met and socialised (read “drank”) together in local pubs. Perhaps on those occasions, the Norwegians teases the Danes because, as the Norwegians might say, the Danes had not been able to fight the Germans when they invaded Denmark and Norway on 9th April 1940.

Denmark, a small and relatively flat country, was overrun in just four hours. Norway, on the other hand, successfully fought for six weeks. The Norwegian king and government managed to escape and eventually reached the UK, carrying the Norwegian gold reserves. They set up in government in exile in London and Norwegian refugees contributed considerable manpower to the British armed forces as well as providing a large number of merchant ships.

In the UK, a Danish Council was set up in London and the Danish merchant sailors provided the main substantial contribution to the war effort. It will have heard them to be teased with the short time the Danish armed forces were able to resist the German invading forces in April of  1940.

Not least because they themselves were the heroes who risked their lives for the Allies from April 1940.

The Norwegians – the Norwegian government-in-exile – were, in fact, a great support to the Danes in their effort to become recognised as war allies in World War Two rather than just refugees from an occupied nation. Denmark owes them a great debt in that respect.

So, it was a delight as Chairman of the Danish Church in Newcastle to be able to meet the Norwegian crew and supporters of SS Hestmanden. We did, of course, urge them to visit the Danish memorial in Newcastle Cathedral where the fallen Danish war sailors are commemorated.

Since 2017, SS Hestmanden has been a museumship and its visit to the Tyne wass a unique opportunity to see and even board the kind of ship the Danes also sailed on, on convoys along the coast of Great Britain and on all the world’s oceans.

I hope you were able to visit the ship in May 2025.

I was on board thanks to Nigel Westwood, former Norwegian Consul to Newcastle.

The visit was remarkable in many respects. Not only are visitors presented with a restored ship as it then looked. There was no luxury of any kind for those who sailed her.

What really made an impression was to realise, as you stood in the cargo hold, that all that separated you from the sea was a hull made of a single plate of steel. Being hit by a German torpedo would have been catastrophic, flooded the ship in no time and sent it to the bottom of the ocean.

It was also moving to witness the relatives of one of the Norwegian war sailors receive a Norwegian medal in recognition of their relative's contribution to the war effort.

From 1939 to 1945, almost four thousand Norwegian sailors lost their lives, more than three thousand sailing for the allies, and some five hundred Norwegian ships were sunk, sailing as part of Norway's wartime merchant navy, Nortraship.

We honour  their memory.