HMS Beachampton (M1007): From Training Vessel to Hong Kong Beat Cop

A Long Build for a Small Ship

HMS Beachampton was a Ton-class minesweeper built by John I. Thornycroft and Company, one of sixteen yards pressed into building the class to meet postwar demand.

Her construction took some 39 months from being laid down to launch on 29 June 1953, and she was completed on 30 July 1954, though she did not formally commission until 29 July 1956, joining the Vernon Training Squadron based at Portsmouth.

The Vernon Training Squadron is worth explaining, because it accounts for the first nine years of her life and it sounds vaguer than it was. HMS Vernon was the Royal Navy's torpedo school, set up at Portsmouth in 1876, and by the 1950s it was the establishment that taught mine warfare to the whole service: how mines worked, how to sweep them, how to hunt them, and how to render one safe once found. A school of that sort needs ships, because none of it can be taught properly ashore, and the Vernon Squadron was the handful of Tons attached to it for that purpose. Beachampton spent from 1956 to 1965 taking classes of officers and ratings to sea and letting them stream gear, plot lanes and make the mistakes it is better to make in the Solent. Vernon itself closed in 1996 and its site is now Gunwharf Quays, which is a shopping centre.

The two-year gap between completion and commissioning is not an error in the record either. The Admiralty ordered a hundred and nineteen Tons in a hurry against a mine threat that never came, and by the mid-1950s it had far more of them than it had crews or work for. Ships were routinely finished, accepted, and then laid up at Hythe or wherever was convenient until somebody needed one. Beachampton was completed in July 1954 and sat until July 1956. The same pattern turns up again and again across the class and is described in the article on HMS Burnaston (M1116).

She displaced 440 tons and carried a crew of 33; her original engines were swapped for a pair of Napier Deltics, completed on 31 January 1959, after which she could make 15 knots, a solid, unglamorous vessel typical of the huge Ton-class fleet built to sweep mines and, as it turned out, do a great deal else besides.

That engine change deserves more than a clause, because a Napier Deltic is one of the strangest machines ever put in a ship. It is a two-stroke diesel with no valves at all, built as an equilateral triangle: three cylinder banks forming the sides, three crankshafts at the corners geared together, two turning one way and the third the other, and two pistons in every cylinder running towards each other and away again. Eighteen cylinders, thirty-six pistons. The point of all that complication was power for weight, and it worked: the same engine went into the Deltic locomotives that hauled expresses up the East Coast Main Line, and the noise they made is still what a certain sort of enthusiast means by the word Deltic.

What she was actually made of matters a great deal for a ship that spent thirteen years in the South China Sea. A Ton has a double skin of mahogany planking laid over aluminium frames, with aluminium upperworks and non-magnetic fittings throughout, because the whole point of the design is that a magnetic mine should not notice her going over the top. Wood in warm water has one obvious enemy, the marine borer, which will quietly eat a hull from the outside in, so the class carried a nylon sheathing called Cascover bonded over the planking below the waterline. It worked, and it still meant that a wooden ship in the tropics needed constant attention: drying out, inspection, replacement of planks, and a shipwright who knew what he was looking at. The Peacocks that replaced the squadron in the 1980s were steel, and one of the reasons was simply that nobody wanted to maintain mahogany in Hong Kong any more.

From Portsmouth to the Persian Gulf

Beachampton spent her first decade as a training vessel before a 1965 refit sent her out to the Persian Gulf, where she carried out patrols and exercises through until 1971, part of Britain's continuing naval presence east of Suez during a period when that presence was rapidly being scaled back elsewhere.

Her six years in the Gulf ended because the policy did. Britain had guaranteed the security of a string of Gulf states since the nineteenth century and kept a mine countermeasures squadron at Bahrain to help do it, and the Ton class did that work in temperatures a wooden hull with no air conditioning worth the name made genuinely punishing. In January 1968 the government announced the withdrawal from east of Suez, and by the end of 1971 the Gulf commitment was gone. Beachampton did not come home. She was sent on to the other end of the same retreat, to a colony Britain had already agreed in principle it would not keep, and spent the rest of her career there.

Thirteen Years Patrolling Hong Kong

On 14 August 1971 she transferred to Hong Kong, arriving on 17 September, and following conversion to patrol craft status in June 1972, with her minesweeping gear stripped out and a second 40mm Bofors gun fitted abaft the funnel, she joined the 6th Patrol Craft Squadron alongside four sister ships, HMS Monkton, HMS Wasperton, HMS Wolverton and HMS Yarnton, going on to serve for an impressive thirteen years, from June 1972 through to January 1985, part of the small but steady Royal Navy presence that helped police the waters around the colony during a remarkably eventful period in its history.

The conversion in 1972 turned her into something quite different from a minesweeper. Five Tons had their sweep gear taken out entirely and a second 40mm Bofors fitted abaft the funnel, and they became the 6th Patrol Craft Squadron at Hong Kong. Their job was threefold: to assert British sovereignty over the colony's waters, to support the police and customs, and to provide what limited defence a very small outpost could be given. A wooden-hulled ship of 440 tons with two Bofors is not a serious answer to the People's Liberation Army Navy, and everybody knew it. She was there to be present, and presence turned out to be a full-time job.

What actually filled the squadron's days was people. Hong Kong sat against a land and sea border with mainland China, and for decades the patrol craft worked Mirs Bay and Deep Bay and the sea approaches intercepting small boats and swimmers crossing at night. Then came the other flow. In 1979 alone, 68,748 Vietnamese arrived in Hong Kong by sea, fleeing after the Sino-Vietnamese war and the persecution of the country's ethnic Chinese, and Hong Kong declared itself a port of first asylum, meaning nobody who reached it would be turned away. Boats came in ten and twelve at a time, many barely seaworthy, most overloaded.

That is a rather different thing to be doing than sweeping mines. A patrol craft meeting an overcrowded fishing boat that has crossed the South China Sea is not intercepting an enemy: she is deciding whether the boat will get in without sinking, taking off anybody who will not, and escorting the rest to a place where they can be looked after. It is seamanship, first aid and judgement rather than gunnery, done repeatedly and at night, by a ship's company of thirty-three. It does not appear on a battle honours board anywhere, and it was almost certainly the most consequential work Beachampton ever did.

That policing job was not always a quiet one, and nor was the weather.

The typhoon detail is worth understanding as well. Hong Kong harbour has designated typhoon moorings and a well-drilled procedure for using them, because the alternative is losing ships. What Typhoon Hope demonstrated in August 1979 is that the procedure only works while everybody else's moorings hold: eleven collisions involving eighteen vessels in one harbour in one day, and a warship secured properly at her buoy hit by three and a half thousand tons of merchant ship that was not. Twelve people died ashore and two hundred and sixty were injured. There is nothing a moored ship can do about that except take it.

On 2 August 1979, at the height of Typhoon Hope, Beachampton was struck at her typhoon mooring by a drifting 3,500-tonne merchant ship, one of eleven separate collisions involving eighteen vessels in the harbour that day, and suffered damage of her own, according to the Hong Kong Observatory's own report on the storm, which killed twelve people and injured 260 across the colony.

She saw out her Hong Kong service still afloat regardless, finally handing over to the newer HMS Starling in January 1985.

Starling was one of five Peacock-class patrol vessels ordered from Hall Russell at Aberdeen and commissioned between 1983 and 1985 specifically to take the Hong Kong job over. They were steel, faster, better armed and designed for the work from the keel up rather than converted into it, and they lasted until the handover in 1997, by which time two had already gone to the Irish Naval Service and the remaining three were passed to the Philippines. What happened to them, and what the job looked like in its final decade, is set out in the article on HMS Peacock (P239). Beachampton had been doing that work in a wooden minesweeper laid down in 1950, with a Bofors on the front and another one behind the funnel, for thirteen years before they arrived.

Scrapped in the Colony She Guarded

Beachampton was relieved of duty and paid off on 4 January 1985, sold to Acorn Shipping of London on 10 May that year, and subsequently scrapped in Hong Kong itself, a fittingly local end for a ship that had spent well over a decade of her career quietly watching over exactly those waters.