HMT Étoile Polaire had a short and brutal career. She was built by J. T. Eltringham & Co. at Willington Quay, yard number 308, launched on 4 November 1914 and completed in March 1915. Built as a steel fishing vessel for Remy & Huret of Boulogne, she measured 278 gross tons and 108 net tons, with dimensions of 141.7 feet by 23.1 feet by 10.5 feet. She was powered by a three-cylinder triple-expansion engine driving a single screw, a practical little working vessel built for hard service rather than glamour.
That hard service began almost at once. In March 1915 she was hired by the Admiralty, given Admiralty number 1402, armed with a 3-pounder gun, and taken into Dover Patrol service as a minesweeper. So although she had been built as a commercial trawler, her operational life was naval from the outset. There is no reliable record of a commercial cargo at the time of her loss, which makes sense, because by then she was serving as a patrol and minesweeping vessel rather than as a merchant fishing craft.
On 3 December 1915, Étoile Polaire struck a mine off the South Goodwin Lightvessel in the Dover Straits. The mine had been laid by the German minelaying submarine UC-1 under Kapitänleutnant Egon von Werner. Contemporary naval summaries place the loss in heavy weather, with a strong south-westerly blowing and rough seas, which would have made a bad situation worse in the space of seconds. She sank the same day, becoming one more small patrol craft lost in the mine war that turned the Channel into a trap.
Three men were lost with her: Deck Hand James Jackson Bayes, Deck Hand John Samuel Lee, and Trimmer John Jones, all Royal Naval Reserve. Bayes was aged 21 and Jones 25; both are commemorated in casualty records, and the wider loss list confirms three fatalities from the vessel. Their deaths are a reminder that ships like Étoile Polaire rarely make the grand histories of the war, yet they carried out some of its dirtiest and most dangerous work. Built in late 1914, completed in early 1915, and sunk before the year was out, Étoile Polaire had barely begun her working life before the Channel claimed her.
