HMS Bossington (M1133): From Pitch Stabilisation Trials to Clearing Wrecks From the Suez Canal

Constructed at Thornycroft, Trialled at Vernon

HMS Bossington was built by John I. Thornycroft at Southampton, her keel laid on 1 September 1954 and completed on 11 December 1956, one of the large family of Ton-class coastal minesweepers that formed the backbone of Britain's mine countermeasures fleet through the Cold War.

She commissioned on 25 February 1958 for pitch stabilisation trials as part of the Vernon Squadron, testing the technical performance of the class's hull and equipment before recommissioning on 27 January 1959 for reserve training duties in North European waters, a role she held for more than five years, right through to June 1964.

Pitch stabilisation trials sounds like a footnote and is actually central to what these ships were for. A minehunter's sonar is only as good as the platform carrying it: if the bow is rising and falling several feet every few seconds the beam is sweeping up and down with it, the returns smear, and a small object on the sea bed disappears into the noise. Towed sweeping gear behaves badly for the same reason, snatching and slackening as the ship pitches. The Ton class was a short, light hull that pitched readily, so the Navy spent time at HMS Vernon, its mine warfare school and trials establishment at Portsmouth, working out how much could be done about it. A ship commissioning specifically to be experimented on for a year is not a glamorous first appointment, but the answers fed into every minehunter that followed.

It is worth noting who built her, because Bossington is one of the few Tons that came out of the firm that designed them. John I. Thornycroft of Southampton was the parent firm for the whole class: they produced the drawings, worked out the jigs and the build sequence, and supervised the fifteen smaller yards, trawler builders and boatyards for the most part, that turned out the great majority of the hundred and nineteen ships. That arrangement is described in the article on HMS Hodgeston (M1146). Being built by the parent yard, and then commissioned straight into a trials squadron to be experimented on, means Bossington spent her first year and a half as the class's own laboratory.

A Collision and a Conversion

On 9 October 1962, HMS Bossington was involved in a collision with HMS Sheraton at Portsmouth, an occupational hazard of the close-quarters, densely packed exercises that Ton-class minesweepers regularly conducted together.

She was subsequently converted to a minehunter and recommissioned at Chatham on 1 October 1964 for the 11th Minesweeping Squadron, before making the six-week passage out to Singapore between 19 February and 12 April 1966, where she carried out four Straits Patrol missions totalling 32 days of operational service in the tense waters of Southeast Asia during the Indonesian Confrontation era, work that combined mine countermeasures readiness with general naval presence in a contested strategic chokepoint.

Those Straits Patrols belong to a war Britain fought for three years and has largely forgotten. The Indonesian Confrontation was an undeclared conflict, begun in 1963, over Indonesia's objection to the formation of Malaysia, and most of the fighting was done by small patrols in the jungle of Borneo. But Indonesia also sent parties of infiltrators across the Malacca and Singapore Straits in sampans and small craft to raid the Malayan peninsula, and stopping that meant patrolling a very busy waterway night after night, picking small wooden boats out of a mass of legitimate traffic on radar and going alongside to look. Minesweepers were ideal: shallow draught, decent radar, plenty of endurance, a boat and a boarding party. It ended formally in August 1966, which places Bossington's four patrols right at the finish.

Far Eastern service also brought her considerably further afield than the Malacca Strait: in September and October 1968 she called at Mackay and Cairns on Australia's Queensland coast, a rare stretch of goodwill and sunshine in an otherwise workmanlike career of mine countermeasures duty.

Clearing the Suez Canal

HMS Bossington's most historically significant deployment came between March and September 1974, when she took part in Operation Rheostat, the international effort to clear the Suez Canal of wrecks, unexploded ordnance and mines left over from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which had closed the canal to shipping for eight years.

Eight years is worth dwelling on, because it is by a very long way the longest the Suez Canal has ever been shut. Egypt blocked it deliberately in June 1967, sinking blockships and laying mines at both ends, and it then stayed closed not because nobody could clear it but because the canal had become the front line: for six years the Egyptian and Israeli armies faced each other across a hundred miles of water, shelling one another over it. Nothing could be done about the wrecks until after the 1973 war and the disengagement that followed, which is why the clearance operation happened in 1974 and not in 1968.

And there were ships inside it the whole time. Fifteen merchantmen of eight nationalities had been in transit when the canal shut and found themselves anchored in the Great Bitter Lake with no way out at either end. They stayed there for eight years. Wind-blown desert sand settled on them until they were all the same colour, which is why they became known as the Yellow Fleet. In October 1967 the masters formed the Great Bitter Lake Association, and what followed is one of the more remarkable episodes in maritime history: the crews pooled supplies, ran a church, a cinema and a postal service with hand-designed stamps that are now collectors' items, and in 1968, in parallel with the Mexico City games, held their own Bitter Lake Olympics across fourteen events including sailing, water polo, archery and the high jump. Crews were rotated home in shifts for the better part of a decade. When the canal finally reopened in 1975 only two of the fifteen could still steam, the German Nordwind and Muensterland, and Muensterland reached Hamburg having been eight years, three months and five days out on a voyage to Australia.

The closure also permanently changed the shape of world shipping, which is a rather larger consequence than it is usually given credit for. With Suez shut, every cargo of Gulf oil bound for Europe had to go round the Cape of Good Hope, adding thousands of miles to each voyage. The only way to make that economic was to carry very much more oil per voyage, so owners built tankers on a scale nobody had previously contemplated, ships of two, three and eventually half a million tons. By the time the canal reopened, a substantial part of the world tanker fleet was physically too large to use it and had no intention of trying. The eight years Bossington helped bring to an end had already made the waterway less important than it had been when it closed.

It was painstaking, notably hazardous work, methodically locating and disposing of ordnance in one of the world's most economically vital waterways. Bossington shared the task with the minehunters HMS Maxton and HMS Wilton, the minelayer HMS Abdiel and the Royal Navy's own Fleet Clearance Diving Team, working in blistering heat for the better part of seven months; when the other three ships sailed home to a hero's welcome in Portsmouth that October, Bossington and her divers had been doing every bit as much of the real work, if rather less of the parading.

The task force's commanding officer, Commander David Husband, put the scale of the job in refreshingly plain terms afterwards: the debris hauled out of the canal ranged "from tin cans to tanks", including anti-personnel mines no bigger than a finger and bombs of up to 1,000 pounds, the accumulated wreckage of the 1967 war finally being cleared away one careful, nerve-testing item at a time. HMS Bossington's involvement placed her at the centre of an operation that eventually allowed one of the great arteries of global trade to reopen.

It is also worth noticing who was doing the clearing. The canal and its approaches were cleared in 1974 by British, American, French and Soviet forces, each working its own sections, with HMS Abdiel acting as mother ship to the British minehunters. That is a strikingly cooperative operation for the middle of the Cold War, and it took place barely a year after the two superpowers had gone to nuclear alert over that same stretch of desert during the 1973 war. Everybody wanted the canal open, which turned out to be a stronger motive than everybody wanting to disagree.

A Grounding, and the End

HMS Bossington ran aground at Loch Tarbert on 1 November 1978, an incident serious enough that she had to be towed to Portsmouth for a twelve-month refit before she could return to service, a reminder that the shallow coastal and loch waters minesweepers regularly operated in carried their own navigational hazards quite apart from the mines they were built to hunt.

She returned to the region for further Gulf of Suez deployments in 1984, continuing the mine countermeasures work the class excelled at.

That sentence is doing a great deal of work, because what took her back was one of the strangest incidents of the decade. On 9 July 1984 a Soviet-flagged cargo ship reported an explosion beneath her hull just south of the canal exit. On 27 July three more ships reported underwater blasts in the Gulf of Suez in quick succession, and between 31 July and 1 August three more in the southern Red Sea. By the end of the summer something in the order of twenty merchantmen had been damaged in one of the busiest waterways in the world, and nobody had admitted laying anything.

Egypt asked for help and got it from five navies. British, French, Italian, Dutch and American mine countermeasures forces went in, the British contribution, Operation Harling, being four wooden-hulled ships of which Bossington was one. A Soviet-made mine was eventually recovered and assessed as having been sold to Libya after 1981, and the Egyptians pointed at the Libyan vessel Ghat, which had spent more than a fortnight on a Red Sea voyage that should have taken about a week before coming back into Suez on 21 July. Egypt said in November that it had the evidence. Nobody was ever brought to book. The whole affair, including the mine itself, is set out in the article on HMS Gavinton (M1140).

Consider what that means for this particular ship. In 1974 she spent seven months in the Gulf of Suez clearing up the leftovers of a war that had been fought there and had ended. Ten years later she went back to the same water to clear mines that somebody had laid on purpose, anonymously, in peacetime, against unarmed merchant shipping, and got away with it.

She was finally paid off on 2 March 1987 and sold to Brugse Scheepssloperij for breaking up on 25 January 1989, closing out a career that had taken her from trials in home waters to patrol duty in the Far East and finally to a particularly significant role reopening one of the world's most important shipping lanes.