| Philante |
 |
| Rig Class. | Motor Yacht |
| Builder: | Camper & Nicholson |
| Year built: | 1937 |
| Commissioned: | 1937 |
| Fate: | Now (2014) the Norwegian Royal Yacht Norge |
| General characteristics |
| Class & Type: | Motor Yacht |
| Ton: | 1,628 tons |
| Beam: | |
Philante was built in 1937 by Camper & Nicholson as the tender for Sir Thomas Sopwith's 1937 America's Cup challenger Endeavour II. See the main photo opposite.
She was requisitioned by the Admiralty in WWII to act as a convoy ship during submarine exercises. See the right hand photo below. As such she was one of the few Squadron yachts that saw a lot of active service.
Requisitioned in September 1939 for use with the Fleet Air Arm as a training vessel, she was refitted at Southampton in the summer of 1940 and transferred to the Western Approaches Command, and based at Londonderry. As an anti-submarine escort she escorted a large number of convoys to various destinations, making several transatlantic crossings and also going to the West African ports of Bathurst and Freetown.
In the winter of 1940-41 she was converted to a sloop and then joined the 44th Escort Group at Londonderry and resumed her work as a convoy escort. In October 1942 she escorted convoy KMS1, the first one for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. At the end of 1942 she became the Escort Group training ship and stayed in that role until the end of the war.
When she first joined the Royal Navy she brought her peacetime crew with her. They were mainly Shetland Islanders, and her fo'c'sle boasted eight McLeods and five Macdonalds.
Donald McKillop, who had been Sopwith's professional skipper before the war, was commissioned as a Lieutenant RNVR and became Philante's first lieutenant. The ship's chief engineer stayed with her as well. Her Commanding Officer, Captain M J Evans CBE, DSC, RN, Training Captain to C-in-C Western Approaches personally accepted the surrrender of the first two German U-Boats to give themselves up off the northern coast of Scotland when Germany capitulated.
She was paid off in September 1945 and sold back to Sopwith in June 1946.
In 1947 she was bought from Sopwith by the Norwegian government for King Haakon II as a measure of the nation's gratitude for his resistance to the Nazis.
She is still (2015) the Norwegian Royal Yacht Norge. (see the left hand photo below) and, as such, was in Cowes for the Squadron's Bicentenary celebrations in June 2015.
Owners