HMS Bevington (M1108): A Brief Career, a Long Retirement

The Build: Southampton

HMS Bevington was built by Whites of Southampton, her construction spanning some thirty months from the start of work on 13 September 1951 through to completion on 9 March 1954. She commissioned on 10 April 1954, joining the 104th Minesweeping Squadron based at Harwich, one of over a hundred Ton-class minesweepers built to counter the Soviet mine threat in the early Cold War years.

The Ton class was the largest class of warship Britain built after the Second World War, and the reason for the numbers is worth understanding. A minesweeper has to be as close to invisible to a magnetic mine as human ingenuity can make her, so the Tons were built of wood, two layers of mahogany planking laid diagonally over an aluminium frame, with non-magnetic fittings throughout. That had a happy side effect for the shipbuilding industry: a wooden hull of two hundred feet could be built by boatyards and joinery firms that had never gone near a steel warship, so the orders went out to dozens of small yards up and down the coast rather than concentrating in three or four big ones. Whites of Southampton, who built Bevington, were one of many.

Whites is worth a footnote of its own, since it is a slightly misleading name on a Southampton hull. J. Samuel White was a Cowes firm, one of the great Isle of Wight builders, and what it had at Southampton was a ship repairing yard on the Itchen. That it was building minesweepers there at all is a consequence of how the Ton programme was organised: Thornycroft of Woolston was made parent firm to a group of fifteen smaller builders, handed them the drawings and effectively taught them the job. The arrangement is described in the article on HMS Bickington (M1109), a sister ship laid down at the same yard eight days after this one.

The threat that produced all this was not theoretical, and the demonstration had come only a year or two before she was laid down. In October 1950 an American amphibious force gathering to land a Marine division at Wonsan in Korea found the approaches sown with several thousand contact mines, most of them Soviet-supplied and of First World War design, laid from junks and sampans. Three minesweepers were sunk and the landing was held up for the better part of a fortnight while the fleet, in effect, waited outside. The officer commanding the blockading force signalled the Chief of Naval Operations to say that they had lost control of the sea to a nation without a navy, using a weapon that predated the First World War, laid by vessels of a type in use at the time of the birth of Christ. Every Ton-class minesweeper built in Britain in the 1950s is, in a sense, a reply to that signal.

The class was originally meant to be named after insects before the Admiralty settled on villages ending in "-ton" instead, and Bevington herself was named for a "shrunken village," a Warwickshire settlement whose population had been cleared off the land for sheep grazing back in the sixteenth century, a slightly melancholy pedigree for a brand new warship.

The village deserves the fuller version, because it is a properly grim little piece of English history. Bevington is one of dozens of deserted settlements in Warwickshire that were emptied during the enclosures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when landowners worked out that wool paid considerably better than tenants did, pulled down the houses, laid the ploughland to grass and turned the people off. Thomas More wrote about it in Utopia in 1516, in the famous passage about sheep that had become so greedy and wild that they were eating up and swallowing down the men themselves. What survives of these places is usually a set of humps in a field and a name on a map. The Admiralty, casting about in 1951 for villages ending in the right three letters, presumably did not check whether anybody still lived in them.

Exercises in Northern European Waters

Bevington spent her active service conducting exercises and goodwill visits around Northern European waters through 1955, work that was, by the squadron's own admission, frequently disrupted by defects, not an unusual state of affairs for a newly commissioned minesweeper still finding her feet.

Among her more notable duties was taking part in minesweeping demonstrations for NATO staff officers in Norway and Denmark in February 1955, a useful showcase of British mine countermeasures capability to the Alliance's wider membership.

A Short Active Life

Bevington's operational career proved remarkably brief. She paid off in July 1955, barely fifteen months after commissioning, and went into refit and reserve at Hythe, where she would remain for well over a decade, one of the many Ton-class hulls built in numbers that ultimately outstripped the Navy's peacetime need for active minesweepers.

Fifteen months in commission and then a decade at Hythe sounds like waste, and to an extent it was, but there was a logic to it. The programme had been sized for a war that did not come, and a hundred and eighteen minesweepers is a great many ships to man in peacetime when each one needs upwards of thirty people. So the Navy kept a proportion running and laid the rest up against need, and the class went on to become the workhorse of the Royal Naval Reserve divisions, of the Fishery Protection Squadron and of the Hong Kong patrol. A good many Tons that spent their early years in a mud berth were still working thirty years later.

A Second Career in Argentina

HMS Bevington was finally sold to the Argentine Navy on 28 April 1967 as part of a package of six Ton-class boats, and was taken into Argentine service the following year as ARA Tierra del Fuego, joining the fleet's Minesweeping Division alongside three of her sisters, ARA Neuquen, ARA Rio Negro and ARA Chubut.

There is one more turn to the story that the dates rather invite. Six Tons went to Argentina in that 1967 package, Bevington among them, and she was still very much in Argentine commission in April 1982 when the two countries went to war. The Royal Navy, having sold part of its minesweeping force to the other side and finding the remainder unsuited to an eight-thousand-mile passage in the South Atlantic winter, requisitioned five deep-sea trawlers from Hull instead, put naval crews and sweeping gear aboard them and sent them down as the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron to clear the mines off Port Stanley. Cordella, Farnella, Junella, Northella and Pict did the job. Somewhere on the other side of the same ocean, a Ton-class minesweeper built at Southampton in 1954 was flying the Argentine flag.

And there is one more link in that chain, which closes it entirely. The mines the trawlers were sent to sweep had been laid on 15 April 1982 by an Argentine supply ship, the Isla de los Estados, which put down twenty-one moored contact mines in two small fields off Port Stanley. On the night of 10 and 11 May the frigate HMS Alacrity was sent through Falkland Sound to find out whether it was clear, met the Isla de los Estados in the Sound, loaded with aviation fuel, and sank her with her 4.5-inch gun in a short action off the Swan Islands. That night is described in the article on HMS Alacrity (F174).

So the sequence runs like this. Britain built a hundred and eighteen wooden minesweepers in the 1950s against a Soviet mine threat, sold six of them to Argentina in 1967, and in 1982 found that the ones it had kept could not reach the war. An Argentine supply ship laid twenty-one mines off Port Stanley; a British frigate sank that ship four weeks later; and five Hull trawlers with naval crews aboard swept ten of her mines in the last fortnight of June. Bevington was on the other side of that war under another name, flying another flag, and went on serving under it for another fifteen years. There is no tidy moral in any of it. It is simply what happens when a country sells warships, which every country does, and then finds itself at war with the customer.

Whatever "retirement" means in the title of this piece, it was not exactly restful: Tierra del Fuego went on serving actively under her new flag for the best part of thirty years, considerably longer than she had ever managed for the Royal Navy, before all four minesweepers were finally declared obsolete together under Presidential Decree 361/97 in 1997, the paperwork noting drily that keeping them running now cost more than they were worth, and authorising their sale for scrap or use as a naval target instead.