HMS Alcaston (M1102): From Suez to Thirty Years as HMAS Snipe

A Postwar Minesweeper for a New Kind of War

HMS Alcaston was a Ton-class minesweeper, part of a large and versatile postwar class built to keep the Royal Navy's minesweeping capability current in the early Cold War years. Built by John I. Thornycroft and Company in Southampton, she was laid down on 2 July 1951, launched on 4 September 1952, and completed in December 1953. She commissioned with the pennant number M1102 on 5 January 1954 at Hythe, and arrived at Harwich the following month as the first Ton-class ship to join the newly formed 104th Minesweeping Squadron.

It is worth knowing what a Ton actually was, because the design solves its problem in a wonderfully blunt way. A magnetic mine sits on the bottom counting the steel that passes over it. So do not use steel. A Ton has a double skin of mahogany planking laid over aluminium frames, non-magnetic fittings throughout, nylon sheathing on her bottom to keep the weed off, and a draught shallow enough to pass over a moored mine rather than into it. Over a hundred of them were built in British yards between 1951 and 1960, which makes the class the largest the postwar Royal Navy ever had, and Thornycroft at Southampton acted as parent firm to a group of fifteen smaller builders who did most of the actual work.

Alcaston was Thornycroft yard number 4136 and took twenty-nine months to build. The detail worth noticing in her commissioning is not that she was the first Ton into the 104th but the rank she arrived with: she came to Harwich as Senior Officer's ship of the squadron, which is to say the squadron leader, a considerable compliment to a hull three weeks out of the builder's hands.

A Front-Row Seat at Suez

Alcaston's most significant Royal Navy service came when she sailed for Port Said on 31 October 1956 to take part in Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French military intervention at the Suez Canal following Egypt's nationalisation of the waterway.

Working with the Wire Sweeping Group, she became the second Ton-class minesweeper to enter Port Said's outer harbour, a politically fraught operation that would end in a diplomatic humiliation for Britain and France even as the military side of it proceeded largely as planned.

Wire sweeping is worth explaining, because the phrase does no justice to the job. A minesweeper after moored mines streams a serrated wire behind her, held out to the side and down to depth by a float and a shaped underwater vane, and drags it through the water until it saws through a mine's mooring cable. The mine then bobs to the surface and somebody shoots it. The whole method depends on the sweeping ship going first, through water nobody has yet proved is empty, and the ship in front tows the wire that clears the path for the ship behind. Being the second Ton into the outer harbour at Port Said is a position in a queue that nobody puts their hand up for.

She withdrew to Malta that December, carried out a single patrol off Cyprus in mid-January 1957, and paid off on 14 February 1957 after just over three years of active service.

Sold to Australia

After several years in reserve, Alcaston was sold to Australia in April 1961 along with five other Ton-class minesweepers, part of a broader effort to bolster the Royal Australian Navy's minesweeping fleet with proven, capable British-built hulls, which the RAN would operate under the local designation of the Bird class.

She underwent a substantial modernisation, beginning with a refit at Blyth from September 1961, receiving new Napier Deltic diesel engines, stabilisers, and air conditioning, before making the passage out to Australia that October to December, a remarkably significant upgrade programme that turned her into a considerably more modern vessel than the one that had sailed at Suez.

She commissioned as HMAS Snipe on 11 September 1962 under Lieutenant P. H. James.

Two Decades With the Royal Australian Navy

Snipe went on to have a long and notably useful career in Australian waters and beyond.

In September 1963 she sailed with five sister ships of the newly formed 16th Mine Countermeasures Squadron on Operation Gardening, the RAN's biggest minesweeping operation in sixteen years, clearing a channel into Tonolei Harbour, Bougainville, of magnetic mines American aircraft had dropped there in 1943 and which had sat dangerously in place ever since.

On the night of 10 February 1964 she was one of five sister minesweepers, Snipe, Teal, Hawk, Ibis and Curlew, sent out alongside search-and-rescue launches and helicopters following the collision between HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Voyager, one of the worst peacetime disasters in Australian naval history, a grim reminder that a minesweeper's usefulness was never confined strictly to mines.

The scale of that night bears stating plainly. Twenty miles south east of Jervis Bay, on a moonless evening with both ships showing only navigation lights, the carrier Melbourne had ordered Voyager to take station astern of her as plane guard for night flying. At 8.56pm the two ships collided. Voyager was cut in half and her forward section was gone inside ten minutes. Eighty-two of her people died. Two hundred and thirty-two were pulled out of the water, most of them by Melbourne herself, and it remains the only occasion in Australian history on which two Royal Commissions have been convened over a single event. Snipe and her four sisters were among the ships sent out into the dark to look for whoever was left.

And the carrier did it again. On 3 June 1969, five years and four months after Voyager, Melbourne was exercising in the South China Sea about six hundred and fifty miles south-west of Manila when the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans, changing station from ahead of her to astern, turned the wrong way and ran under her bow at three o'clock in the morning. Melbourne struck her amidships and cut her in half, exactly as before. The forward section went down in about three minutes and took seventy-four American sailors with it; one body was recovered. The after section was secured alongside the carrier, searched, cast off and eventually towed into Subic Bay.

Two destroyers cut in two by the same aircraft carrier inside six years, a hundred and fifty-six men dead between them, and on both occasions the ship that was hit had made the turn. Melbourne's people were cleared of blame in the second case and largely in the first, and it made no difference whatever to how the ship was regarded afterwards: she was, and remained, the unluckiest ship in the Royal Australian Navy, and her crews had to live with it. The underlying problem was the manoeuvre itself. Changing plane guard station at night, in company, close aboard a carrier that cannot alter course while flying is going on, is one of the most dangerous routine evolutions in any navy, and it is done in the dark, by judgement, at speed. Two ships and one hundred and fifty-six lives is what it cost twice.

Snipe was there for the first of them, one of five wooden minesweepers sent out into the dark off Jervis Bay to search a patch of sea for men in the water. It is not the job she was drawn for, and she did it twice more in her career, once when the mines she was built to sweep turned out to be twenty years old and once when the enemy was a small boat crossing a strait at night. Very few warships end up doing the thing on the specification. The useful ones do whatever is in front of them.

During the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, Snipe joined the 16th Minesweeping Squadron on anti-infiltration patrols off the coast of Borneo, earning the battle honour Malaysia 1964 to 1966 across two separate deployments, from May 1964 to January 1965 and again from September 1965 to August 1966, adding genuine operational service to what had already been a long and varied career under two flags.

Anti-infiltration patrol also undersells it. The Association's own record of her service is blunter, describing patrols and gun actions off the coasts of North Borneo and the Malayan peninsula. The work meant intercepting small craft crossing at night to put men and weapons ashore, in shallow water among islands and river mouths, which is precisely the sort of place a shallow-draught wooden ship with a Bofors on the forecastle turns out to be the right tool. It is not what the design brief said. It very rarely is.

Her later career brought a change of role and one last flourish of the job she had always been built for. On 8 February 1971 she recommissioned as a dedicated minehunter, and that May she sailed alongside HMAS Hawk and HMAS Curlew on a Mine Warfare Pilotage Survey through the South West Pacific, providing practical assistance to Papua New Guinea along the way.

Then, on 27 October 1982, barely eight months before she was decommissioned, Snipe and Curlew detonated a genuine Second World War mine on Ribbon Reef near Cooktown in Queensland, a fitting final piece of proper minesweeping work almost thirty years after she had first gone to sea to do exactly that.

A Long Retirement Well Earned

Snipe was finally decommissioned on 3 June 1983, having served for just over thirty years in total across both navies, more than three times as long under the Australian white ensign as she had under the British one. She remained in the Reserve Fleet until she was sold for breaking up in 1985.

It was a fitting long life for a small, unglamorous minesweeper that had quietly done everything asked of her, from a politically charged canal crisis to clearing up the debris of an earlier war on the far side of the world.