SS Dover Hill was a shelter deck cargo steamship built Northumberland Shipbuilding Co in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to a First World War standard design, launched on 17 December 1917 and completed in March 1918. She had nine corrugated furnaces with a combined grate area of 193 square feet (18 m2) that heated three 180 lbf/in2 single-ended boilers with a combined heating surface of 8,478 square feet (788 m2). The boilers fed a 569 NHP triple expansion steam engine built by North Eastern Marine Engineering Co. Ltd. of Newcastle. She was equipped with direction finding equipment and radio.