HMS Bickington (M1109): The Minesweeper With Three Different Names

A Slow Build, a Long Career

HMS Bickington was built by Whites of Southampton on the Itchen, with construction beginning on 21 September 1951 and completing 32 months later, on 25 May 1954. She commissioned on 3 October that year for the 101st Royal Naval Reserve Minesweeping Squadron based at Shoreham, going on to serve an impressive 32 years in commission, a properly long working life for a Ton-class minesweeper.

The builder needs a word, because Whites is not the name most people would expect on a Southampton hull. J. Samuel White was a Cowes firm, one of the great Isle of Wight shipbuilders, and what it had at Southampton was a ship repairing yard on the Itchen. That it was building warships there at all is a consequence of how the Ton programme was organised. A hundred and nineteen hulls had to be produced at speed, in wood, by yards that had never seen an Admiralty order; so John I. Thornycroft of Woolston was made parent firm to a group of fifteen smaller builders, handed them the drawings, and effectively taught them how to do it. Bickington is one of the results: a warship built in a repair yard by a firm from another island, to a design signed off by a committee of competitors, and she lasted thirty-two years.

Shoreham is the clue to the whole of her career. From the 1950s the Royal Naval Reserve was rebuilt around mine countermeasures, on the sound reasoning that sweeping mines is a job that can genuinely be taught to a part-time sailor and that in a war there would never be enough minesweepers or enough people to man them. Each Reserve division was therefore given a Ton-class minesweeper of its own, lying in the home port, so that men who spent the week as plumbers, teachers and insurance clerks could go to sea at weekends in a real warship and do a real job in it. It was, for forty years, the most effective piece of reserve training the Royal Navy had.

A Ship of Many Names

HMS Bickington's career is unusual for just how often she changed identity. Allocated to the Sussex Royal Naval Reserve at Shoreham in July 1954, she was renamed HMS Curzon on 30 October that year, before reverting to HMS Bickington in October 1960 for a Deltic engine conversion.

She was then transferred to the Forth Division Royal Naval Reserve at Leith and renamed HMS Killiecrankie on 24 March 1962, before finally settling back into her original identity as HMS Bickington on 7 January 1976 when she transferred to the Fishery Protection Squadron, a confusing paper trail for what was, underneath it all, always the same ship.

That also explains the names, which are less confusing than they look once you know the trick: the name belonged to the division, not to the hull. Each Reserve division had its own ship-name, and whichever minesweeper happened to be allocated to it wore that name for as long as she was theirs, then handed it back when she moved on and the next ship took it up. Curzon was the Sussex Division's name, worn by Bickington and later by Fittleton. Killiecrankie belonged to the Forth Division at Leith, worn by Bickington and later by Derriton. So a ship did not so much change her name as step into and out of other people's. Underneath all of it she was M1109 the whole time, which is why the pennant number is the only thing that never moved.

The Forth Division's choice of name is worth a raised eyebrow. Killiecrankie was fought in a pass in Perthshire on 27 July 1689, when Viscount Dundee's Jacobite Highlanders came down a hillside at General Mackay's government army and broke it in something under ten minutes, killing perhaps two thousand men in the rout that followed. It was also, from the Jacobite point of view, a disaster, because Dundee was shot dead at the moment of victory and there was nobody else who could hold the rising together; it collapsed within a month. A Scottish naval reserve division naming its ship after a battle in which a government army was comprehensively routed is either splendid local pride or a very dry joke, and one suspects the answer is a bit of both.

Exercises, Collisions and an Arrest

Under whichever name she carried at the time, HMS Bickington took part in an annual four-week deployment with the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron to Gibraltar for exercise Rockhaul, alongside routine fishery patrols and, in May 1968, live minesweeping duty off Borkum as part of Operation New Broom.

The one year she missed Gibraltar is the more interesting entry. In August 1965 she went instead to the Royal Review of the Fleet on the Clyde, a partial review held at the Tail of the Bank between the 7th and the 11th, and the lines she anchored in were a good snapshot of a navy changing under its own feet. HMS Dreadnought was there, the Royal Navy's first nuclear submarine, three years old and about to make everything around her look historical; the Queen dined aboard the cruiser Tiger. Somewhere in the same anchorage lay a wooden minesweeper of 1954, crewed by part-time sailors from Leith, wearing a name borrowed from a Jacobite battle. Both of those ships were the Royal Navy in 1965, and only one of them had a future.

Her career included several genuinely varied incidents under whichever name she was wearing at the time: a December 1974 collision with the East German vessel MV Sirrah off Sheerness, the July 1977 rescue of the fishing vessel Artilleryman after she had been seized by the French, the deployment of some of her crew to the Falklands in April 1982 aboard a converted minesweeper, and the September 1985 arrest of the German trawler Scombrus after a North Sea pursuit, a nicely varied résumé for a minesweeper whose day job was usually rather more repetitive than any of that.

And the Falklands detail in that list is easy to skim past. When the task force sailed in 1982 there was no way to get a wooden-hulled minesweeper eight thousand miles to the South Atlantic, so the Navy requisitioned deep-sea trawlers instead and put naval crews aboard them. The people who went were the ones who knew how to sweep, which is to say the ships' companies of the Ton class and the fishery squadron. Some of Bickington's men spent that winter clearing mines off Port Stanley from the deck of a Hull fishing boat.

The trawler in question has a name, and it is worth putting on the record. Bickington's ship's company went south in the Junella, one of five Hull deep-sea trawlers taken up from trade in April 1982, fitted with rudimentary sweep gear, commissioned as the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron and sailed from Portland on the 27th of that month. Between 23 June and 4 July the squadron swept the approaches to Port Stanley and accounted for ten of the twenty-one moored mines the Argentinians had laid there. So the hull stayed at Rosyth and the men went eight thousand miles in a fishing boat to do the job the hull had been built for, which is either an indictment of the class or a compliment to the crew, depending on how you look at it.

The fishery work deserves explaining, because arresting a trawler is a genuinely serious business. A fishery protection ship puts a boarding party across in a small boat, often in weather that makes getting aboard the hardest part of the day, and then goes through the vessel: the log, the position she claims to have been fishing, the size of the mesh in her nets, the species in her hold and the size of the fish in it. If the numbers do not add up, the boarding officer can take charge of the vessel and escort her into a British port, where her skipper will find himself in front of a court and facing a fine large enough to hurt. Doing that to a foreign trawler in the 1970s and 1980s, with fishing rights an open sore between Britain and its neighbours, took a certain steadiness of nerve.

Those two fishery incidents, eight years apart, are a neat illustration of what British inshore work turned into after 1973. The Artilleryman had been seized by the French; the Scombrus was German and was arrested by Bickington after a chase in the North Sea. Both countries were by then partners of Britain in the European Economic Community, and the Common Fisheries Policy had established a principle of equal access to a common resource that nobody on any quayside much liked. What that meant in practice was that fishery protection stopped being a matter of foreign trawlers and became a matter of quota, licence, mesh size, logbook and position, argued between allies, and enforced by small warships boarding the vessels of friendly nations in bad weather. It is thankless, legally intricate work, and the Royal Navy has been doing it continuously since the fifteenth century.

A Final Break-Up

HMS Bickington was paid off on 31 July 1986 and finally disposed of on 23 August 1988, sold to Vickers Dismantling Ltd for breaking up, closing out over three decades of service under three different names but a single, consistently useful career.