FV Gaul was a supertrawler that fished out of Hull in East Yorkshire. On the 8th or 9th of February 1974, the vessel was lost with all hands in the Barents Sea without issuing a distress call. An initial investigation stated that the Gaul was sunk after it was struck by a succession of large waves. But as the Gaul was a modern vessel designed to fish in harsh conditions, the families of the lost fishermen were highly sceptical of the official explanation of the loss of the Gaul. Decades would pass before the true reason for the loss of the Gaul came to light.
The Last Voyage
The Gaul was initially built for a fishing company based on the River Tyne but was soon bought by a new company and relocated to Hull. The Gaul was a large trawler at 66 metres (217 ft) in length with a tonnage of 1,200 tons and a crew of thirty-six. As it was a factory trawler, its catches could be processed and frozen on board. In late January 1974, the Gaul set off from Hull to the Barents Sea where it began trawling with other fishing vessels. On the 8th of February, the weather began to deteriorate and eventually a storm descended on the area, although radio messages between the ships present in the Barents Sea showed that the Gaul was coping well with the conditions.
However, by the 10th of February, no other vessels or shore establishments had heard from the Gaul, and several mandatory check-ins via radio had been missed. In the early morning of the 11th of February, a full-scale search was launched for the Gaul. Trawlers in the area broke away from fishing to look for the Gaul and Royal Navy ships such as the frigate HMS Mohawk and the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes joined the search, along with RAF maritime patrol aircraft and ships and aircraft from the Royal Norwegian Navy.
Despite an estimated 177,000 square miles of sea being searched, no sign of the Gaul or its crew could be found and the search was called off after four days.
Flawed Investigation and Spy Ship Claims
With no wreck to analyse and no remaining crew members or witnesses it was impossible to come to firm conclusions over what had caused the Gaul to sink. The official explanation was that the Gaul sunk after being hit broadside by a succession of huge waves which caused the vessel to take on water to such an extent it lost buoyancy and sank. The crew’s families rejected this explanation and were backed by marine safety experts who agreed that the Gaul was designed to withstand such conditions and this was unlikely to be the reason for the sinking.
As the Gaul was lost at the height of the Cold War, many conspiracy theories began to emerge. It was claimed that the British government asked trawler crews operating in the Barents Sea to spy on the movements of Soviet shipping, with the government even going as far as training the crews and supplying them with cameras and other surveillance equipment. This was rejected by the British government, but the belief that the Gaul may have become a target of Soviet aggression due to spying became widespread. This led to the belief that the Gaul could have been attacked by a Soviet warship and destroyed by an anti-ship missile or gunfire, explaining why the crew failed to issue a distress call.
Others claimed that the Gaul may not have been destroyed, but instead boarded by the crew of a Soviet warship and taken back to the Soviet Union, meaning that there was a chance that the crew were still alive and being held in prison. Further rumours emerged that the Gual had issued a distress call which was picked up by British and Danish amateur ham radio enthusiasts who were later “got to” by the government and prevented from sharing this information. Other theories stated that the Gaul collided with a British or Soviet warship and sank, struck a naval mine or snagged its nets on underwater cables causing it to capsize.
While some of these theories were fanciful, the British government refused to search for the wreck. Multiple reasons were given, such as the high cost of recovering the wreck, the danger posed to salvage crews due to the conditions in the Barents Sea and the difficulty in finding the wreck amongst the number of Second World War wrecks in the area. This refusal to search for the wreck allowed the conspiracy theories to multiply and grow.
Discovery of the Wreck
In 1997, twenty-three years after the loss of the Gaul, the British television station Channel 4 commissioned a team of Norwegian marine salvage experts to search for the Gaul. They quickly found what they believed to be the wreck, and lowered down a submersible which confirmed that they had indeed located the Gaul. This disproved the British government’s claims that such an operation would be costly, time-consuming, dangerous and unlikely to succeed.
Indeed, the Dispatches programme, entitled Secrets of the Gaul, which broadcast the discovery, saw many of the government’s claims disproved. The area was not littered with the wrecks of Second World War vessels, as the nearest was forty nautical miles away from the Gaul. Furthermore, the location of the wreck of the Gaul was not a mystery, the crew of the Royal Navy frigate Mohawk were almost certain they had located the wreck during the initial search operation, but the British authorities did not act on this information. Furthermore, in the years after the disaster, Norwegian trawlers had repeatedly reported snagging their nets on a previously unknown seabed obstruction which they believed to be the Gaul, but again no action was taken when this information came to light.
However, much more damning information would emerge in the Secrets of the Gaul programme. Both ex-Royal Navy personnel and former trawler crew members stated on camera that spying was commonplace. Trawler crews would be issued with cameras and told to take pictures of any Soviet vessels they spotted, although they were not made aware of the danger this would place them in. There were also more sophisticated spying operations carried out with Royal Navy personnel placed on board trawlers specifically to conduct spying activities on Soviet ships. In the programme, the former head of the British Section of the KGB, Mikhail Lyubimov, was interviewed and confirmed that a British trawler found to be spying in Russian territorial waters could be attacked and destroyed, although he did go on to say that this would obviously cause a huge diplomatic incident and the crew being arrested was a much more likely event. However, it was also confirmed that no one on board the Gaul was involved in spying on its final voyage.
What Really Happened?
With the wreck of the Gaul being located some of the conspiracy theories about the vessel could be put to rest. The wreck of the Gaul was relatively intact, meaning that it had not been destroyed by torpedoes, gunfire or missiles, and collision with another vessel was unlikely. Furthermore, human remains and clothing were found in the wreckage (DNA analysis confirmed they were the remains of crew members) meaning that the crew had gone down with the ship and not been arrested or imprisoned within Russia. It was also revealed that the Gaul was not fishing when it sank and did not have its nets in the sea, also ruling out the theories which stated that the Gaul may have snagged its nets on an underwater cable or been dragged underwater when its nets collided with a submerged nuclear submarine.
With the location of the Gaul now known, the British government finally took action and the UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Board, the government agency responsible for investigating the loss of British ships, launched a new investigation in 1998. They visited the wreck of the Gaul and used submersibles to record footage of the wreck. Some of these submersibles were able to go inside the Gaul and capture footage from the internal cabins and corridors. Scale model tests were also carried out at an oceanography centre to provide more information on the factors which would need to be in place for the Gaul to sink. After an initial report was compiled the investigation was reopened in 2002 and an even more detailed analysis of the wreck was carried out, with submersibles gaining hundreds of hours of footage of the exterior and interior of the Gaul.
The new and definitive inquiry into the loss of the Gaul was published in 2004. Although this inquiry agreed that the Gaul had been hit broadside by a succession of large waves it did not believe that this was the sole cause of the Gaul’s sinking. The vessel should have been able to withstand such waves and there therefore had to be an additional factor which played a part.
The 2004 inquiry highlighted the fact that the Gaul was a factory freezer where the catch was cleaned and filleted before being frozen. This meant that the design of the Gaul was complicated as it needed to incorporate both a factory deck where a section of the crew would process the fish, and a system of chutes where the waste products produced by filleting which had been brought up in the nets (such as fish guts, marine debris and small inedible sea creatures) could be ejected into the sea. On its last voyage, the Gaul had a new skipper. While he had vast experience of working on trawlers of a comparable size to the Gaul, these had been whole fish freezers. In these vessels, fish were simply caught and frozen with no filleting or processing taking place on board. This meant that there was no factory deck or system of waste disposal chutes.
Indeed, on whole fish freezer trawlers, there was usually only a single fish hatch (which was visible from the bridge) which needed to be closed to stop the vessel from flooding in heavy seas. On the Gaul, the system of waste disposal chutes meant that there were many more points which needed to be secured closed to ensure the watertight integrity of the vessel was maintained during a storm. This made the risk of the Gaul flooding, and having its stability dangerously compromised, much greater. However, as the inquiry pointed out, there had been no updated training to make the skipper and crew aware of this.
Analysis of underwater footage and pictures of the Gaul at its resting place on the seabed revealed that the waste disposal chutes were open – a key clue in explaining what happened to the Gaul. It was concluded that when the storm began the hatches of the chutes were left in the open position, allowing seawater to flood into the vessel. As the storm worsened the crew attempted to turn the Gaul so that it faced the waves head-on (the correct procedure in this situation). However, with potentially hundreds of tons of water having flooded in, the Gaul would have had its buoyancy seriously compromised. When the turn was in progress, the water which had flooded into the vessel would have moved to one side, causing the Gaul to first capsize and then sink rapidly. In this situation, the crew would have been unlikely to have had time to issue a distress call.
Questions Remain
Despite the discovery of the wreck of the Gaul and evidence of the open chutes and doors ruling out many of the theories about the crew being captured by the Russians or the Gaul destroyed by a Soviet warship, many questions remain. There has never been a convincing explanation as to why the UK government was so reluctant to search for the Gaul, and the ease with which the Norwegian team hired by the Dispatches programme found the wreck makes the actions of the government look even more incomprehensible. Furthermore, the Dispatches programme revealed that trawlers were used for spying on Soviet ship movements and Royal Navy personnel were placed on board commercial fishing vessels. This was an extremely significant development as it was something which had, for a long time, been denied by the British government.
The British government does not come out of the Gaul tragedy well. At the very least they caused unnecessary anguish to the families of the Gaul’s crew by refusing to search for the vessel and allowing the conspiracy theories to emerge and then continue for over two decades. The letters written to the government (which were published in the 2004 inquiry) show that many family members held onto the belief that the crew may not have died in the disaster and could still be alive and held in captivity in Russia. The lack of any search for the Gaul prevented the families from getting closure on what had happened and it is unacceptable that it took a privately funded expedition from a TV channel to eventually find the wreck.
The bell of the Gaul was recovered from the wreck and was rang at two services in Hull in 2014 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the loss of the vessel and another, larger commemoration was held with ceremonies in Hull and North Shields, where the Gaul had initially been based, for the fiftieth anniversary in 2024.
The Dispatches programme, The Secrets of the Gaul, won a Royal Television Society award for the best current affairs programme in 1997. The six parts of the programme can be watched in full on YouTube here.
A novel called Spy Ship was published in 1981 and was closely based on the loss of FV Gaul. A six-episode BBC television series based on the novel, also called Spy Ship, followed in 1983. The DVD of the series can be purchased from Amazon by clicking here,
The loss of the Gaul remains the worst peacetime disaster to befall the British commercial fishing industry.