HMS Aveley (M2002): Ready for Suez, Sent Home Instead

A Wooden Ship for a Magnetic Problem

HMS Aveley was a Ley-class inshore minehunter built by the White shipyard and launched on 3 February 1954, one of eleven vessels of her class built in the early 1950s.

Eleven of them were built, sharing their basic hull with the Ham class inshore minesweepers and the Echo class inshore survey craft, which was sensible economy in a decade when Britain was building mine countermeasures vessels on an enormous scale. Aveley came from J. Samuel White at Cowes, the Isle of Wight yard that also produced HMS Arethusa, the last warship it ever built, and more than a hundred and thirty lifeboats for the RNLI besides.

The scale of the programme those ships belonged to is genuinely startling and it is the reason the Royal Navy could afford to build a small specialist type at all. Between 1950 and the end of the decade Britain built a hundred and nineteen Ton-class coastal minesweepers, ninety-three Ham-class inshore minesweepers and the small handful of Ley-class inshore minehunters, which is comfortably more than two hundred mine countermeasures vessels in ten years. The acquisition was brought forward to September 1950, which dates it precisely: Korea had broken out that June, the Soviet Union was known to hold the largest mine stockpile in the world, and mining is the cheapest way in existence to close a port. Britain in 1950 was still rationing food and it built two hundred and twenty minesweepers, because the alternative was a country dependent on imported everything with its harbours shut.

The word inshore in her class description is doing more work than it looks. Britain is an island that eats and heats itself on imports, and in the 1950s almost all of that came through a small number of estuaries: the Thames, the Mersey, the Clyde, the Humber, the Forth, Southampton Water and the Bristol Channel. Those are shallow, tidal, narrow and heavily used, which is to say ideal water in which to lay ground mines and very difficult water in which to sweep them. A mine does not even have to work to be effective. A credible report of mining in the Thames stops the port while somebody proves the channel is clear, and stopping the Port of London for a week is a strategic result achieved for the cost of a few weapons dropped from an aircraft. That is why a country with an empire to defend spent the 1950s building small wooden ships to potter about its own estuaries, and why those ships mattered more than their size suggests.

Unlike a conventional minesweeper, designed to cut mine mooring cables in bulk, the Ley class was built specifically to locate individual mines and neutralise them one at a time, essential work in rivers, estuaries and shipping channels where a broad sweep simply wasn't practical.

Minehunting was a genuinely new idea when these ships were built, and it is worth understanding why it had to be invented. A moored mine can be swept: tow a wire through the water, cut the mooring cable, and the mine bobs up to be shot. A ground influence mine cannot. It lies on the seabed, listens for the magnetic field, the pressure wave or the propeller noise of a ship passing overhead, counts if it has been told to, and fires when it chooses. There is nothing for a wire to catch. The only answer is to find each one individually and destroy it where it lies, and that is what the Ley class existed to do.

In 1954 that meant divers. The high-definition sonar that lets a modern minehunter pick a mine out of the clutter on the bottom did not yet exist, so these small wooden ships worked with teams of divers in shallow-water breathing sets, going down to look at each contact by hand and place a charge on it. It is difficult to think of a more nerve-racking way to earn a living. Everything the Royal Navy does now with sonar, remotely operated vehicles and expendable charges, as described in the piece on HMS Atherstone, exists to keep people out of the water. In 1954 there was no alternative to the person.

The diving deserves a paragraph of its own, because the equipment of 1954 shaped the whole job. A clearance diver of that period worked in a rubber suit and, for the closest work, a closed-circuit set breathing pure oxygen rather than compressed air. Oxygen sets have one enormous advantage for this trade, which is that they release no bubbles and therefore do not set off an acoustic fuse, and one absolute limitation, which is that pure oxygen becomes poisonous below a fairly shallow depth. So the man had to work shallow whether he wanted to or not. He also had to work with non-magnetic tools, because a steel spanner near a magnetic mine is a very poor idea, and in the sort of visibility a British estuary offers, which on a good day is a few feet and on a bad one is none at all. Much of the work was done by touch. The suit the previous generation had used was known throughout the service as the Clammy Death. None of this was improved by knowing that the object being felt in the dark had been designed to kill a ship.

She was built using composite wood and non-ferrous metal construction to keep her magnetic signature as low as possible, a sensible precaution for a ship whose entire job involved getting close to magnetically triggered mines, and displaced 164 tons fully laden, armed with either a Bofors or Oerlikon gun and powered by twin Paxman diesels.

Nearly Sent to Suez

Aveley initially served with the 51st Minehunting Squadron, and in 1956 was selected for Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French intervention during the Suez Crisis, specifically earmarked to help clear mines from Alexandria harbour. She deployed to Malta that September for preparatory exercises, only to be withdrawn from active operations and sent home in October, before the main task force ever deployed.

The Alexandria plan she was earmarked for deserves a little more detail, because dropping it was one of the better decisions taken in a badly handled operation. The original scheme envisaged landings at Alexandria as well as Port Said. Alexandria is a very large, very densely populated city, it was where the bulk of the Egyptian army was, and an assault there would have meant street fighting in a place with well over a million inhabitants. The planners looked at it again in September, concluded that the cost in civilian lives would be enormous and the military benefit uncertain, and rewrote the whole operation round Port Said instead. Aveley's job disappeared with the plan.

It was, in its own quiet way, a fortunate reprieve, sparing her crew from what could have been a considerably more dangerous assignment than the training duties that awaited her instead.

It is worth knowing what she would have been walking into. Operation Musketeer was a very large undertaking: something over a hundred British and French warships, five aircraft carriers, an amphibious force built round two carriers used as helicopter ships in the first heliborne assault in history, and a landing at Port Said on 5 and 6 November 1956. The Egyptians blocked the Suez Canal by sinking ships in it, which meant that the clearance job Aveley had been earmarked for did have to be done eventually, just not by her and not under fire: the canal was cleared by a United Nations salvage fleet the following spring. The amphibious side of the operation is described in the article on HMS Anzio (L3003), which was one of five tank landing ships in the armada. Politically the whole thing was a catastrophe for Britain. Operationally it worked, which is a distinction the people involved were entitled to make.

A Long Career Training Others

Aveley spent 1957 in reserve at Rosneath before settling into a training role at Plymouth from 1963 through to 1980, teaching successive generations of sailors the basics of ship handling rather than hunting mines in earnest.

Seventeen years teaching ship handling at Plymouth deserves better than one line, because it is a real job and somebody has to do it. Learning to handle a ship cannot be done from a book: it is a matter of knowing what a hull will do when you put the wheel over and take the way off her, how much a beam wind pushes her, how long she takes to stop, and how all of that changes with the tide. The only way to acquire it is to be given something small enough that a mistake is survivable and made to do it over and over. A hundred-and-sixty-four-ton wooden ship with twin screws is close to ideal for the purpose, because twin screws let a novice learn to turn a ship in her own length, and a wooden hull that touches something is a repair rather than a court martial. Generations of Royal Navy officers learned the trade in exactly that way, and a great many of them did it in Aveley.

She was marked for disposal in 1982 and transferred the following year to the Woolwich Sea Cadet Corps and renamed TS Woolwich, taking on one final educational role, introducing young cadets to naval life, a fittingly gentle final chapter for a small ship that had once been quietly on standby for one of the more fraught operations of the entire Cold War era. She was eventually broken up from November 1986.

The Ley class never did the job it was designed for, and that is not a criticism of the design. No British minehunter has ever cleared a minefield laid against Britain, because nobody has laid one; the entire capability exists to make the attempt pointless. What the class did instead was prove the concept. Minehunting as an idea, finding the individual weapon and destroying it in place rather than dragging a wire through the sea and hoping, was invented in these ships with divers doing by hand what sonar and robots do now, and everything the Royal Navy has built since, the converted Tons, the Hunts, the Sandowns and the autonomous systems now replacing them, descends from what was learned aboard them. It is a small class of small ships with almost no service record and a disproportionate influence, which is a fair epitaph for a prototype.

Her last chapter is worth defending as well. Handing a paid-off warship to the Sea Cadet Corps as a training ship, with a TS in front of the name instead of an HMS, has been the Navy's way of getting a final decade out of a hull for a very long time, and for the children involved it is the difference between a hobby and a first taste of the real thing. A ship that had spent seventeen years teaching sailors to handle a vessel at Plymouth spent her last stretch on the Thames teaching teenagers the same thing. Not every warship gets a second career. Rather fewer get a useful one.