HMS Abdiel (N21): The Minelayer the Navy Built Reluctantly

Every navy has a few ships that don't quite fit the story it likes to tell about itself, and HMS Abdiel is a lovely example. 

She was the last vessel the Royal Navy ever built specifically as a minelayer, commissioned in 1967 at a moment when the government's own policy was quietly going off the whole idea of offensive mining. 

So here was a brand new ship, purpose built for a job nobody particularly wanted her to do. She spent the next twenty-one years being extremely good at it anyway, mostly in reverse.

She was the only ship of her class, which sounds grander than it was: essentially, there was one Abdiel, and then there was everything else. 

This sometimes causes confusion with an earlier, far more famous HMS Abdiel, the Second World War fast minelayer sunk with dreadful loss of life off Taranto in 1943. 

The two ships have nothing in common beyond the name and the general concept of "carries mines, is a ship." Our Abdiel was in fact the third Royal Navy vessel to bear the name, after a Marksman-class destroyer launched in 1915 and that ill-fated wartime minelayer. 

All three were named, in the Navy's habitually literary way, after Abdiel, the one loyal angel in Milton's Paradise Lost who tells Satan where to get off. It is a nice name for a ship. Whether it did much for morale after the second one sank in three minutes is a separate question.

The badge went with the name. Approved in 1926 and originally drawn up for that 1915 destroyer minelayer, it shows a naval mine in silver on a green field, given gold wings and trailing its gold mooring cable across two wavy silver bars, above the motto Semper Fidelis, always faithful. For a ship named after the one angel who refused to change sides, that is about as neat a piece of Admiralty heraldry as you will find, and a good deal more thoughtful than her actual job description.

Built by Thornycroft, Named After an Angel

Abdiel was ordered from the Vosper Thornycroft yard at Woolston, Southampton, in June 1965, laid down on 23 May 1966, launched on 22 January 1967, and commissioned on 17 October 1967 under the pennant number N21.

She was not a large ship. Standard displacement was 1,375 tons, rising to about 1,460 tons fully loaded, on a hull 265 feet long with a 38 foot 6 inch beam and a 10 foot draught.

Two 18-cylinder Paxman Ventura diesel engines on twin shafts gave her a combined 2,960 brake horsepower and a top speed of roughly 16 knots, which is a fairly leisurely pace for a ship whose wartime namesake had once outrun destroyers at 40 knots. She carried a Type 978 navigation radar, and went through two refits over her career, in 1977 and 1981. 

Her complement ran to about 98 officers and ratings, seven officers, twenty-two senior rates and seventy-five junior rates on a standard complement, with room for extra mine warfare specialists when exercises called for it.

Weaponry was an afterthought. She carried no gun at all when commissioned, and only picked up a single 40mm Bofors in 1984, almost two decades into her career, as if the Navy had finally remembered she ought to have something to shoot with. 

Her real cargo lived on her mine rails: capacity for around 44 mines, nearly always the dummy, recoverable kind rather than anything that actually went bang, because by the 1960s Britain had largely talked itself out of offensive minelaying as a serious tactic, which makes her a rather odd thing to have built in the first place. 

The arrangement below decks was gloriously low-tech. The minelaying deck ran almost the entire length of the ship, and mines were moved by hand along rails and rolled out through two doors in her stern. No hydraulics, no automation, just a long shed, a set of tracks and gravity. It is worth bearing in mind whenever a modern navy describes minelaying as a high technology problem: for twenty-one years Britain practised it with a trolley rail and a strong back.

By the mid-1960s, Royal Navy mine warfare was almost entirely defensive, all about clearing other people's mines rather than laying your own, and government policy took a dim view of the offensive kind. 

Abdiel was the compromise: a ship that let the Navy keep hold of the practical skill of minelaying, so that nobody forgot how to do it, without ever really planning to use it. Call her an insurance policy with a hull number.

Officially an "Exercise Minelayer"

Her formal title was exercise minelayer, and it suited her well. Her job was to help train Royal Navy personnel in minelaying using inert, instrumented mines that could be laid, recovered, and used again, so crews could rehearse a skill the Navy sincerely hoped it would never need in earnest. 

In practice this made her a floating classroom, working with British and NATO forces to keep minelaying know-how from quietly dying out.

That NATO commitment was more than a form of words. For the entire thirty-three years that Standing Naval Force Channel existed, the alliance's permanent multinational mine countermeasures squadron, Britain kept a vessel assigned to it, and the base ship looking after that contribution was usually Abdiel. A ship the Ministry of Defence had trouble justifying on paper spent much of her working life as the Royal Navy's standing offer to a NATO force.

The Admiralty thought enough of this role to use her in a 1976 instructional film, simply titled Minelaying, originally restricted to service audiences and only declassified and made public years later.

She had a second string to her bow too, acting as a support and forward headquarters ship for mine countermeasures work: helping coordinate minesweepers and clearance divers rather than laying anything herself. 

Half minelayer, half mine-clearance office afloat, she turned out to be a properly useful ship precisely because her nominal wartime job was one she was never actually meant to perform for real.

She got an early taste of the real thing during her 1969 to 1971 commission, joining the First Mine Counter Measures Squadron to help clear a leftover Second World War minefield off Den Helder alongside the Royal Netherlands Navy, useful practice for the rather larger clearance job still to come.

Her Finest Hour Was Clearing Mines, Not Laying Them

Fittingly for a minelayer who mostly avoided minelaying, Abdiel's biggest moment in the spotlight came from the opposite job entirely. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Suez Canal, closed since 1967, remained choked with mines, unexploded ordnance and wrecked shipping. 

The idea came from the British Naval Attaché in Cairo, who suggested on 3 January 1974 that the Royal Navy ought to involve itself. The British Ambassador made a formal offer on 12 February, Egypt accepted, and a task force was assembled under the codename Operation Rheostat to help get the canal open again.

Abdiel led the first mission, Operation Rheostat One, as part of a four-ship force alongside the coastal minesweepers HMS Bossington, HMS Maxton and HMS Wilton.

An advance reconnaissance party flew out to Cairo on 11 March 1974 to establish what the job actually involved, and the answer was: rather a lot.

Abdiel and HMS Maxton sailed from Rosyth on 20 March 1974, Wilton and Bossington having left Portland the day before, and the four assembled at Gibraltar before calling at Malta and reaching Port Said on 7 April. On paper they were Task Group 65.2, commanded by Abdiel's own captain, Commander J D W Husband, who in turn answered to an American, Rear Admiral K J Carroll, as Commander Task Force 65. A British minelayer running a British squadron under a United States admiral in an Egyptian canal is not a sentence anybody would have written in 1956.

The minehunters spent most of April working over the approaches to Port Said and the harbour itself, because entry into the canal proper was deliberately held back to 1 May to let the Americans go first. USS Iwo Jima arrived off Port Said on 21 April with a squadron of CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters embarked to sweep for magnetic and acoustic mines from the air, an operation the US Navy called Nimbus Star.

The original plan had the minehunters searching the full width of the canal to three metres depth at either bank, with the Fleet Clearance Diving Team following behind alongside Egyptian divers to destroy whatever turned up. The sonar had other ideas, proving close to useless against the steep sand banks, so the divers ended up doing the banks themselves by hand, from three to eight metres, while the ships took the deeper water. Crews stayed on task four to eight days at a stretch, twelve-hour days from dawn until dusk, closed up at minehunting stations with short breaks for meals and the occasional hands to bathe, in temperatures regularly over 100°F and reported as high as 106°F.

Abdiel's own moment came on 29 May, when she transited south to a set of specially laid buoys in Lake Timsah and became the first ship of her size to reach Ismailia since the canal closed in 1967. Sitting halfway down the waterway, she could feed, fuel, mend and doctor her minehunters without sending them all the way back to Port Said, which is precisely what a support ship is for. The diving team, who lived aboard her between jobs, later put their gratitude in the plainest possible terms: Abdiel looked after them in every way possible, and it was always nice to come back to a good shower and a good meal.

On 26 June the task group reached the Great Bitter Lake and released the fourteen merchant ships that had been sitting there, stranded, since the canal shut in 1967. HMS Maxton made the first complete transit of the Suez Canal in more than six years on 14 July. By the time the Fleet Clearance Diving Team finished, it had located and destroyed 7,043 explosive items, from .22 rounds up to 1,000lb bombs, twenty-eight of them bombs in the 250 to 1,000lb range, and had also turned up an aircraft, a personnel carrier, several lorries, a sunken corvette and a Blenheim. The divers calculated that they had swum 303 kilometres doing it.

Operation Rheostat One finished on 1 November 1974. Abdiel, Maxton and Wilton left Ismailia, called at Alexandria, and were back at Portsmouth on 21 November, at which point Task Group 65.2 was quietly disbanded. Commander Husband was appointed OBE in the 1975 New Year Honours, with a scattering of MBEs and a BEM going to his officers and ratings. The Times had already summed the job up rather well while it was still going on: clearing the ammunition dump that used to be the Suez Canal.

Beer Cans, Oil Drums and a Lavatory Pan

She came back to lead the follow-up, Rheostat Two, in 1975, this time with HMS Hubberston and HMS Sheraton, working from 19 April to 4 June on a verification sweep of everything already cleared. The haul was gloriously anticlimactic. In place of ordnance the ships brought up old vehicles, oil and petrol drums, an assortment of scrap metal including a healthy quantity of beer cans, and one almost intact porcelain lavatory pan, which is exactly the sort of find that gets recorded in a ship's history and repeated for the next fifty years.

The canal reopened to shipping on 5 June 1975, a mere two hours after the final check sweep finished, and the Egyptians made a considerable fuss of the British officers who had helped get it there. There was one last reminder that this sort of work is never entirely finished: the following month a merchant ship was damaged by what appeared to be a mine explosion. It is a fine, slightly droll footnote that a purpose-built minelayer's proudest achievement was making a waterway safe rather than making one dangerous.

Later Years, and a Spell in the Gulf

Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Abdiel carried on quietly doing what she did best, exercising with NATO mine warfare forces and keeping up a long-standing civic friendship with the town of Hartlepool, which she visited more than once under the Navy's tradition of pairing ships with adopted towns back home.

The bond went further than the usual courtesy visits: her crew were granted the Freedom of the Borough of Hartlepool in 1981, and her battle honours board and a set of practice mines are now on permanent display at Hartlepool Marina, long after the ship herself went for scrap.

Her 1980 visit gives a fair flavour of what those calls actually involved. Brought in by two Hartlepool tugs, she arrived with a rifle shooting competition, a hockey match against Seaton Carew, a rugby match against Hartlepool Rugby Football Club and a football match against Hartlepool Police attached to her, alongside the usual queues to look round the ship and a steady stream of school parties her crew actively encouraged. Three of that year's ship's company, Jim Glew, John Walker and Stephen Radford, were Hartlepool men themselves. When her role formally shifted towards support work the same year, it was her Master-at-Arms who decided the change ought to be advertised, and the town firm Expanded Metal that made the two large signs fitted to her funnel to show the four squadrons she served.

Late in her career she was sent to the Persian Gulf for the mine clearance effort the Royal Navy called Operation Cimnel, running alongside the standing Armilla Patrol that protected merchant shipping through the Iran-Iraq War. Iranian mining had become serious enough by the summer of 1987 that Britain agreed, at the second time of asking, to an American request for help, and on this particular subject the Royal Navy had both the expertise and the hulls: over forty mine countermeasures vessels, a superiority the US Navy itself acknowledged. Four brand new Hunt-class minehunters, HMS Brecon, HMS Bicester, HMS Brocklesby and HMS Hurworth, were ordered east, and Abdiel, by then twenty years old, went with them to provide squadron command and support.

Preparation at Rosyth was frantic. Ship's companies were recalled from summer leave and the Army was drafted into the dockyard to help store ships so that sailors could get on with readying them. Mindful that the Iraqi Air Force had just put two Exocets into USS Stark by mistake, the ships were given radar absorbent panels, chaff launchers, radar warning receivers and inflatable missile decoys, and a reverse osmosis plant was squeezed into an upper deck passageway to keep them in fresh water. They sailed in August, practised against the Mirage and Exocet threat off Portland and against small fast attack craft off Gibraltar, and then proceeded east at the stately pace of a ship one veteran account describes as capable of fourteen knots downhill with the wind behind. It took a month to reach station.

A ship designed for temperate North Sea exercises did not take kindly to Gulf conditions, and her air conditioning is said to have struggled badly with the heat, which cannot have made for a happy ship's company. The Hunts, brand new and purpose built, ended up looking after her at least as often as she looked after them, an irony nobody involved seems to have missed. It was her last deployment.

She had, by this point, become recognisable enough at home that her commanding officer appeared on television during the 1987 Festival of Remembrance broadcast, talking about the realities of naval communications at sea. Not bad for a ship most people had never heard of.

The End, and the Gap She Left Behind

HMS Abdiel was paid off in 1988 and sold for scrap, closing out a career of just over twenty years.

She was given a proper send-off on her final approach into Portsmouth, escorted in by the minesweepers HMS Bronington and HMS Nurton while a Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service tug cascaded water from its fire hoses in salute, and nine of her former commanding officers gathered afterwards to toast a ship they knew, with evident affection, as "a lady with a mind of her own." Her departure left the Royal Navy without a dedicated minelayer of any kind, a gap entirely in keeping with the policy drift that had shaped her whole existence, and one that has never since been filled. No purpose-built minelayer has served in the fleet since.

The gap only widened after she went. Britain kept a stock of sea mines until 1992 and has held none since, and the official position settled into the idea that if minelaying were ever needed again it would be done by suitably modified vessels, which in practice meant submarines. Nearly forty years on, the Royal Navy is once again debating whether it ought to be able to lay mines at all. Abdiel would have recognised the argument instantly, since it is more or less the one that produced her.

There is something quietly fitting in that, Abdiel was built for a war that was never going to happen, in a role the Navy already had mixed feelings about, and she spent most of her working life proving her worth by doing almost anything except her official job, whether that meant clearing the Suez Canal or keeping watch in the Gulf. 

She is not a ship anyone tells dramatic stories about. But she is a rather good reminder that not every naval career needs a battle to matter.

You can find more images of HMS Abdiel here