HMS Bildeston (M1110): The First Ton-Class Ship Declared Operational

First of a Very Large Family

HMS Bildeston was built by J. S. Doig Ltd at Grimsby, laid down on 18 May 1951 and completed on 28 April 1953, entering service that same day with the Vernon Training Squadron at Portsmouth.

The yard deserves a nod, because it is the sort of detail that explains the whole class. J. S. Doig of Grimsby was a fishing-port firm founded in 1904 by a Scottish boilermaker, and it built trawlers; the story of how a business like that came to be turning out warships for the Royal Navy is set out in the article on HMS Belton (M1199). The short version is that a wooden minesweeper is a trawler-shaped problem, and the yards that could build one at speed were the yards that had spent fifty years building the other. Bildeston went down the ways on 9 June 1952 and was complete twenty-three months after her keel was laid, which for a first-of-class is quick.

She holds a particularly notable distinction: HMS Bildeston was the very first Ton-class minesweeper declared operational, in August 1953, the lead ship, in practical terms, of one of the largest single classes of vessel the postwar Royal Navy ever operated.

HMS Bildeston took part in NATO Exercise Mariner in September 1953, the first NATO exercise any Ton-class ship had ever taken part in, a second "first" to add to her collection within a matter of weeks.

Exercise Mariner was not a modest thing to be sent on as your first outing. It ran from 16 September to 4 October 1953 and was, at the time, about the largest naval exercise ever held: nearly three hundred ships and over a thousand aircraft from nine nations, working across five million square miles of ocean between Iceland and North America. It is also remembered for the weather. The Atlantic produced force 9 and better for days on end, big ships were damaged, and the exercise turned into a genuine test of seakeeping rather than the tactical problem it had been designed as. Bildeston was a five-month-old wooden minesweeper of a hundred and fifty feet. One notes, without drawing any firm conclusions, that a refit for teething defects followed shortly afterwards.

Trials, Reserve, and Three Decades of Service

After early service with the Vernon Training Squadron and a Portsmouth refit to address teething defects, HMS Bildeston moved to the 50th Minesweeping Squadron at Port Edgar for trials work between 1954 and 1958, before spending a full decade, from 1958 to 1968, in extended reserve at Hythe undergoing major refurbishment.

Ten years at Hythe is worth a word, because laying up a wooden ship is not the same as laying up a steel one. A steel hull in reserve mostly needs its machinery preserved and its paintwork watched. A wooden hull sitting in a mud berth has seams that dry and open above the waterline, planking that is a standing invitation to rot wherever fresh water can sit, and a good deal of below-water timber that the marine borers regard as lunch. Bringing one back after a decade meant a genuinely substantial rebuild rather than a wash and brush up, which is why the word used is refurbishment. That the Navy thought it worth doing to a fifteen-year-old minesweeper says something about how good the class was.

She returned to active deployment with the 1st Mine Countermeasures Squadron at Rosyth from 1968, remaining in front-line service for nearly two decades, transferring to the 3rd MCM Squadron in 1984.

In September 1969, while visiting Gothenburg, her crew carried out a genuine rescue, boarding the drifting vessel MV Cooranga in hurricane-force winds and securing her before she became a danger to shipping, a demanding piece of real seamanship for a small minesweeper to pull off.

Her later Rosyth years also included anti-gun-running patrols off Northern Ireland and search and recovery work on lost ships, missiles and aircraft, alongside more conventional route survey duties. She was present at the Silver Jubilee Review at Spithead in 1977, one of the great set-piece naval occasions of the decade.

Route survey is the least glamorous item on that list and quite possibly the most important, and it is worth explaining because the logic is genuinely elegant. Finding a mine on the seabed is hard, because the seabed is already covered in things: wrecks, boulders, oil drums, lost anchors, and eighty years of assorted rubbish, every one of which looks to a sonar rather like a mine might. So in peacetime the minehunters go out and survey the approaches to every important port and base, contact by contact, and build a catalogue of what is down there. Then, if somebody ever does lay mines, the ships do not have to search the bottom at all. They only have to look for what has changed. Years of tedious peacetime steaming up and down the same stretches of water is what turns an impossible wartime job into a manageable one.

The Northern Ireland patrols belong to a part of the Troubles that is rarely discussed. From 1969 the Royal Navy kept ships on the Irish Sea approaches and in the loughs, because a paramilitary organisation with money can buy weapons abroad but still has to land them somewhere, and a coastline of that length with that many small harbours is very hard to close. Minesweepers were well suited to it: shallow draught, capable of loitering for days, small enough to work close inshore, and equipped to board and search. It was cold, monotonous, occasionally tense work, and its successes were mostly measured in the shipments that never arrived.

A Different Ship Wore Her Name to War

Bildeston's own name went to the Falklands War even though she did not.

In April 1982, with no purpose-built minehunters available to spare, the Navy requisitioned five deep-sea trawlers from Hull, fitted them with makeshift minesweeping gear, and commissioned each under the name of a Rosyth-based Ton-class ship whose own company would largely crew her: Cordella became HMS Upton, Farnella HMS Wotton, Junella HMS Bickerton, Northella HMS Soberton, and the trawler Pict sailed as HMS Bildeston in every official respect except her actual hull.

Pict reached South Georgia on 26 May 1982 and, that June, helped sweep enemy minefields at the approaches to Port Stanley, sweeping three mines of her own; on 10 June, when her influence sweep failed during a tense operation in Berkeley Sound, her commanding officer deliberately ran the ship's own machinery at full volume to draw out any mines lying in wait, a piece of nerve that earned him a Mention in Despatches.

The real HMS Bildeston, meanwhile, carried on with rather more routine business back in Scottish waters, an odd sort of war record for a ship that never actually went.

What became of the five is worth following, because between them they went in about as many directions as five identical trawlers possibly could. Cordella sank off Newfoundland in 2005. Junella caught fire, was beached on the Argentine coast, of all the places she might have chosen, and was broken up. Pict, the one that had worn Bildeston's name, went fishing off Namibia under the name Friendship and has since gone for scrap. Northella was taken on by the Royal Navy properly, as a navigation training ship, and served in that role for years before she too was scrapped.

And then there is Farnella, who had swept a single mine off Port Stanley as HMS Wotton and who went on to have the most improbable career of any Hull trawler in history. From 1984 the United States Geological Survey chartered her to map the American exclusive economic zone. The instrument was GLORIA, a British-built long-range sidescan sonar towed behind the ship, and the job was to produce the first proper picture of the seabed out to two hundred miles all the way round the United States. The western survey alone took her ninety-six days and covered something like eight hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres, from the Mexican border to the Canadian one.

She went on to do the same for the Atlantic margin, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, and somewhere in the last of those she found an undersea ridge that nobody had known was there. It is on the charts as the Farnella Ridge. She was later bought by a deep-water salvage company and spent her final working years as the research vessel Odyssey Explorer, looking for wrecks with cargoes worth recovering, before going to the breakers.

So a Hull trawler that spent April 1982 having minesweeping gear bolted to her in a hurry ended up mapping the sea floor of the United States, putting her own name on a permanent feature of the Gulf of Alaska, and then hunting treasure. Bildeston herself, whose name Pict carried south, spent the entire war doing route survey in Scottish waters. It is difficult to say which of the two had the stranger 1980s.

A Well-Earned Retirement

HMS Bildeston was paid off in December 1986 after well over three decades of service and some 250,000 miles steamed since her 1968 recommissioning, by which point she was the Royal Navy's oldest ship still in active service.

Two hundred and fifty thousand miles is worth converting. That is ten times round the world, done in a wooden ship a hundred and fifty feet long, at a cruising speed that would be embarrassed by a modern cross-Channel ferry, and done almost entirely in the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the western approaches rather than anywhere warm. It was accumulated in the course of a job that consists largely of steaming slowly up and down the same water looking at the bottom.

Her own namesake village kept up an affiliation throughout, with crew making regular informal visits, the ship's crest presented to the Red Lion pub in Bildeston in 1984, and a final visit paid on 7 November 1986; her white ensign and ship's bell were formally handed over to Bildeston's parish church the following September, where they remain to this day.

The bell in the parish church is not merely an ornament, either. A ship's bell has a second life aboard as a font: when a child is born to a member of the ship's company it is traditional for the bell to be turned upside down, filled with water and used for the christening, with the child's name afterwards engraved inside it. A good many bells hanging in English parish churches have a list of names cut into the inner surface that has nothing to do with the parish at all. It is, in a service not much given to sentiment, one of the more quietly affecting things the Royal Navy does.

She was sold to Pounds Breakers of Portsmouth on 20 July 1988, before being sold on again to Spanish shipbreakers, closing out the career of a ship whose place in history was secured from her very first day in commission as the trailblazer for an entire class of minesweeper.