HMS Belton (M1199): Fourteen Years of Fishery Patrol, Ended by a Highland Gale

A Grimsby-Built Minesweeper

HMS Belton was built by J.S. Doig and Company at Grimsby, laid down on 23 August 1954 and completing after 33 months of construction on 31 May 1957.

The yard that built her is a good illustration of where Britain's minesweepers came from. J. S. Doig and Company was founded in 1904 by John Salmond Doig, a Scottish boilermaker who set up the Strathtay Iron Works on Campbells Jetty beside No 3 Graving Dock on the Grimsby fish docks, and who in 1934 bought the neighbouring yard of Thomas Charlton and Sons. What Doig built, for most of its existence, was tugs and trawlers, and it built them well enough to acquire a reputation for high-class workmanship among a very demanding set of customers. That is precisely why the Admiralty came knocking: a wooden minesweeper is, structurally, a very large fishing boat built to a higher standard, and the men who could do it were on the fish docks rather than in the naval yards. Doig built wooden minesweepers all through the Second World War and Ton-class ships through the 1950s. The Ross Group bought the business in January 1964, sold it on within five years, and the site was cleared in the 1980s. Grimsby stopped building ships about a decade before it stopped catching fish.

A Ton-class minesweeper, she commissioned on 12 March 1958 for the Fishery Protection Squadron based at Port Edgar, beginning what would prove to be a properly long and steady fourteen-year career.

The squadron she joined has a longer pedigree than almost anything else in the Royal Navy. The Fishery Protection Squadron traces itself to 1481 and is generally reckoned the oldest front-line formation in the service, and its work has always been law rather than war: boarding fishing vessels, inspecting nets and catches, checking logbooks and being visibly present in waters where the alternative is that nobody is watching. Port Edgar, on the Forth, was the Navy's mine warfare base, and a squadron working out of it did fishery protection and minesweeping as two halves of the same posting.

Fourteen Years Guarding the Fishing Grounds

From 1958 to 1971, Belton carried out fishery patrols around the coast of the United Kingdom, interspersed with minesweeping operations, exercises and visits to ports across Britain and northern Europe, exactly the kind of steady, essential presence work that occupied much of the Ton-class fleet's service life.

Her career included some particularly notable moments. A Handley Page Victor bomber, one of the RAF's newest and fastest aircraft, had crashed into the Irish Sea off Wales on 20 August 1959 during a routine test flight, killing its four-man RAF crew and a Handley Page observer after excess paint on a mounting sleeve caused a vital speed-sensing pitot tube to shear away mid-manoeuvre.

Belton joined an eighteen-day stretch of the resulting search that October, part of an operation eventually involving some 1,500 men, 27 trawlers and a dozen naval vessels under HMS Harrier's control, at the time described in official documents as probably the greatest search of its kind ever mounted, aimed at recovering enough wreckage to prove the RAF's whole Victor programme was not fatally flawed.

It is worth understanding why so much effort went into that search, because on the face of it fifteen hundred men and thirty-nine vessels is a great deal for one crashed aeroplane. In 1959 the Victor was one of the three V-bombers, and the V-force was Britain's nuclear deterrent: there was no Polaris yet, no submarines, nothing else. A new bomber breaking up in flight for no discoverable reason is therefore not an accident investigation but a strategic problem, because the alternative to finding the cause is grounding the fleet. Recovering enough wreckage from the bottom of the Irish Sea to identify a sheared pitot tube, and a lump of excess paint as the reason for it, is what kept the aircraft flying.

Later highlights included a Fleet Review by King Olav V of Norway on the Forth in October 1962, Operation Clear Road, a live mine-clearance exercise based out of Esbjerg in Denmark that May 1963, a rather more scenic visit to Karlstad on Sweden's Lake Vänern that June, and Operation New Broom, another live mine-clearance operation off the German island of Borkum in May 1968.

The 1962 review has a little more behind it than a royal visit. King Olav V came to Scotland that October as a guest of the Queen, arriving at Leith in the Norwegian royal yacht Norge, and among the engagements was a trip out to Queensferry and Port Edgar to inspect the ships of the Scottish Command, Belton among them. What gives it weight is where Olav had spent the war. Norway was invaded in April 1940 and its royal family and government got out to Britain; the then Crown Prince spent the next five years in London as the figurehead and eventually the effective military head of the Norwegian forces in exile, a great many of whom were sailors, because Norway's merchant fleet was one of the largest in the world and almost all of it kept sailing for the Allies. So a Norwegian king inspecting British warships in a Scottish estuary in 1962 was not a piece of protocol. It was a man coming back to the country that had housed his government, in a firth from which a good deal of the Norwegian campaign had been supported.

The live clearance operations off Denmark and Germany deserve a note, because the problem has never gone away. Both world wars left the North Sea and the Baltic sown with mines, and after 1945 enormous quantities of surplus ordnance were dumped into those same waters as the safest disposal method available at the time. Something in the order of eighty thousand mines and other explosive remnants are still believed to be down there. Multinational clearance operations of exactly the kind Belton took part in have been running since the 1940s and are still running now, and Royal Navy minehunters go back to the Baltic every year to lift wartime mines off the bottom.

On 1 January 1968 the Fishery Protection Squadron was reorganised into the 4th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, a change that reflected the navy's evolving structure without much altering Belton's day-to-day duties.

The 1968 reorganisation was less cosmetic than the article suggests, and it reflected a real shift. Until then the Fishery Protection Squadron had been doing two jobs with one set of ships: policing the fishing grounds in peacetime and standing ready to sweep mines in war. Turning it into the 4th Mine Countermeasures Squadron put the emphasis the other way round, and it happened because the mine threat had changed. Cheap, sophisticated influence mines were spreading, the Soviet Union held the largest mine stockpile in the world, and the Royal Navy was in the middle of converting a substantial part of the Ton class from sweepers into minehunters. Fishery protection did not stop, and Belton went on doing it, but the squadron she belonged to had been formally told what its wartime job was. The technical side of that change is set out in the article on HMS Kirkliston (M1157), which was the first Ton the Navy converted.

Driven Aground by a Gale

Belton's career ended not through enemy action or old age but through the weather. On 23 October 1971, while at anchor in Loch Maddy on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, she was driven aground in a gale, damage severe enough that she was paid off that same month.

And the way she finished is a reminder that the sea does not need an enemy. Loch Maddy is on the east side of North Uist, open to the Minch, and a westerly gale in the Outer Hebrides in October is not a gentle thing. A ship at anchor in those conditions is relying entirely on her cable and her holding ground, and when either gives way there is very little water between her and the shore. A wooden hull driven onto rock does not come off the same shape it went on. Fourteen years of steady service and then one night at anchor, and that was that.

There is a technical reason the grounding finished her, and it is the same reason she existed in the shape she did. A Ton-class minesweeper was built almost entirely without ferrous metal, because a ship whose job is to work directly over a magnetic mine cannot afford to be magnetic herself. That meant a hull of wooden planking laid over aluminium frames, fastened with copper and bronze, with an aluminium superstructure on top. It is a beautiful piece of boatbuilding and it has one great weakness: it cannot be repaired the way a steel ship can. You cannot cut out a damaged section and weld in a new one. Serious hull damage means replanking, refastening and quite possibly reframing, done by shipwrights who were becoming scarce even in 1971, and the aluminium frames themselves corrode where they meet salt water and dissimilar metals. A steel ship of the same age driven onto a Hebridean rock would have been patched and sent back to sea. Belton was surveyed at Greenock and written off.

She was refloated and taken to Greenock for assessment, but the damage was judged beyond economical repair, and although she never operated under her own power again, her formal disposal did not come until 25 November 1974, when she was sold to Davies and Newman Ltd to be broken up at Gijón in northern Spain, a fittingly unglamorous end for a ship whose career had otherwise been defined by steady, patient service rather than drama.

The three-year gap between the survey and the sale is worth explaining too, because it looks like neglect and is mostly bureaucracy. A ship that is beyond economical repair is not automatically for sale: she has to be formally paid off, stripped of anything worth reusing, struck from the list, offered for disposal and then sold, and each of those steps has its own paperwork and its own queue. Meanwhile she lies somewhere costing very little and doing nothing. When Belton finally went in November 1974 it was to Davies and Newman and then to a breaker at Gijón on the north coast of Spain, which is where a great many British warships of the period ended up: Spanish and Turkish yards could break a ship more cheaply than British ones, and by the 1970s the trade had largely left Britain along with the shipbuilding. She had been afloat and useless for longer than the Second World War lasted.