HMS Brereton (M1113): A Record-Breaking Helicopter Rescue and Thirty-Seven Years of Service

Constructed at Lowestoft, Renamed for Wales

HMS Brereton was built by Richards Ironworks at Lowestoft, her keel laid on 25 September 1951, launched on 14 March 1953, and completed on 9 July 1954 after 34 months of construction, a Ton-class minesweeper displacing 360 tons normal load and up to 425 tons deep load.

The Ton class was built out of wood on aluminium framing, and not for reasons of economy or nostalgia. A magnetic mine is triggered by the steel of the ship passing over it, so the answer was to build a minesweeper that had as little steel in her as the designers could manage. Well over a hundred were built for the Royal Navy, making them one of the largest classes the post-war fleet ever operated, and they were named after English villages whose names end in "ton". Brereton is in Staffordshire. It is a modest way to name a warship, and it suited ships whose work was modest, endless and absolutely necessary.

She transferred that October to HMS Cambria, the South Wales division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve based at Cardiff, and in May 1955 was renamed HMS St David, a name she carried until reverting to HMS Brereton on 19 October 1961, when she went in for a refit at Devonport before spending 1962 to 1964 in reserve at Hythe, a reminder that reserve-division minesweepers were sometimes given local or regional names to strengthen ties with the communities that manned them.

The practice was more systematic than it sounds. A Ton lent to a reserve division took the division's own name for as long as she was there, and handed it back when she was relieved, so the name belonged to the job rather than to the hull. It produced some tangled service records: HMS Bickington answered to Curzon for one division and Killiecrankie for another. Brereton spent six years as St David, which is about as clear a signal of where her ship's company came from as anyone could ask for.

Fishery Protection and a Salvage Job

HMS Brereton commissioned for the Fishery Protection Squadron on 18 January 1965, and that May alone arrested seven fishing vessels for illegal activity in British waters over a single four-week patrol, netting total fines of £3,200, before taking part in salvaging the merchant vessel Lady Serena after a fire on board on 21 October, exactly the kind of practical, hands-on seamanship that Ton-class crews were expected to master.

The fishery work is the Royal Navy's oldest continuous job and is set out properly in the article on HMS Alderney (P278). The salvage job is worth a moment on its own, because the ship she saved outlasted her by seven years. Lady Serena was a two hundred ton steel coaster, a hundred and thirty-six feet long, built by Clelands at Willington Quay on the Tyne and registered to Thomas Watson of Rochester. She was barely a year old when she caught fire in October 1965.

She went on to have a far more interesting life than most warships. She became Milligan in 1977, then Palbro Pride in 1981 under the Palmer brothers of Gravesend, and in 1991 she was bought by the Doolin Ferry Company in County Clare and spent her last years working off the west coast of Ireland. She was broken up at Galway in 1998, thirty-three years after a Ton-class minesweeper put a fire out on her.

Paid off for the work in November 1966, she was converted to a minehunter at Portsmouth between 6 July 1967 and 16 December 1968, when she recommissioned for the 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron based in Bahrain, making the long passage out to the Persian Gulf round Africa between 22 April and 4 July 1969 and serving there until making the return passage home between 1 October and 10 December 1971.

The timing of that homeward passage is worth noticing. Britain had announced in 1968 that it was giving up its military commitments east of Suez, and the deadline was the end of 1971. Bahrain became independent that August. Brereton left the Gulf on 1 October and reached home on 10 December, which means her last weeks out there were spent quite literally closing the place down, and the Royal Navy would not have a standing commitment in those waters again until the Armilla Patrol began at the end of the decade.

Home waters did not mean a rest: by January 1972 she had rejoined the Fishery Protection Squadron, this time based at Port Edgar on the Firth of Forth, picking up where her earlier fishery duties had left off before the Gulf deployment intervened.

A Record-Breaking Rescue

Between 25 April and 13 May 1974, HMS Brereton assisted the deep-diving support ship HMS Reclaim in recovering a ditched Westland Wessex V helicopter from Vags Fjord off Harstad in northern Norway, using Reclaim's underwater television camera to locate the wreck and snag it from a depth of 350 feet, a genuine world record for that kind of recovery and a truly striking achievement for a small minesweeper more usually associated with the patient, unglamorous business of clearing mines than with headline-making rescue operations.

It is worth knowing what HMS Reclaim was, because she is the reason the job was possible at all. Reclaim was Britain's deep diving and submarine rescue vessel, and also, as a piece of trivia the Navy rather enjoyed, the last British warship to be rigged with sails. She had made her name in June 1951 when she found the lost submarine HMS Affray on the bed of the Channel using her then brand-new underwater television apparatus, with Lionel "Buster" Crabb among the divers working on the wreck. Five years later, on 12 October 1956, Senior Commissioned Boatswain George Wookey went down 600 feet from her deck in a Norwegian fjord near Bergen, a record for a diver in standard flexible diving dress that has never been beaten.

So when Reclaim went back to a Norwegian fjord eighteen years later to pick a ditched Wessex off the bottom, she was doing what she had been built and proven to do, and Brereton was there as the ship that let her do it: holding position, working the gear, and generally being the second pair of hands that a job like that cannot be done without. Three hundred and fifty feet does not sound like much until you consider that the object at the bottom of it was a helicopter, that it had to be found before it could be lifted, and that both had to be done from small ships riding the surface of a fjord in April.

The record came with a sting in its tail: as the wreckage was finally lifted clear of the water, the helicopter's rotor head sheared clean off, an anti-climactic finish that meant the record-breaking recovery and the intact helicopter were not quite the same achievement. It stands as one of the more unusual entries in the Ton class's collective service record, a reminder that these versatile little ships were called upon for all manner of tasks well beyond their original mine countermeasures brief.

What none of this explains is what any of them were doing there. The helicopter was a Wessex V belonging to HMS Hermes (R12), which by 1974 had been converted into a combined commando and anti-submarine ship, and Harstad is a long way up: well inside the Arctic Circle, on the Norwegian coast above Narvik.

That was the commitment nobody in Britain talked about much. NATO's northern flank ran from the North Cape down the Norwegian coast, and the plan for defending it rested on the Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade being flown and shipped in to fight in snow, in country where the roads are few and the sea is the only sensible way to move anything. So every year a commando carrier went north with Marines and Wessex helicopters aboard and everybody practised, and the aircraft flew off mountainsides and fjords in weather that would have grounded them anywhere else. Sooner or later one of them went into the water.

Which is the whole reason a wooden minesweeper from the Fishery Protection Squadron and a diving ship built in 1948 were sitting in a fjord above the Arctic Circle in April: because the Navy had put a helicopter into the sea while rehearsing a war in Norway, and getting it back mattered, both to find out why it had gone in and to stop anybody else finding it first. The full story of the ship that did the diving is in the article on HMS Reclaim (A231).

A Collision, a Fire, and a Wartime Mine

HMS Brereton's later career was not without incident. On 12 February 1976, she collided with the Danish fishing vessel Cyrano off Hartlepool, holing HMS Brereton below the waterline and requiring a tow from the Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service tug Kinloss before repairs, which ran from March to August that year. The ship's own official record of proceedings logs the collision two weeks later, on 27 February, most likely because that was the date the paperwork was filed rather than the day it actually happened; one veteran who was on watch in the engine room at the time recalled the earlier date with understandable clarity, having been treated for shock afterwards.

Kinloss is worth explaining, because the Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service turns up all over these articles as the thing that tows, lifts, moors and rescues, and is almost never described. The RMAS was the Navy's own fleet of non-combatant working craft, civilian-crewed and government-owned: tugs, moorings vessels, salvage ships, tenders, torpedo recovery craft and the rest. You could tell one at a glance by the paintwork, black hull with a white beading line and buff upperworks, which is about as far from grey as a naval vessel gets.

Kinloss herself was one of the Kin-class coastal salvage vessels, small, extremely strong ships with lifting horns and heavy rollers built into the bow so that they could pick two hundred tons deadweight straight up over the stem. Eleven were planned, two were cancelled, seven spent time as Royal Fleet Auxiliaries, and in 1971 the survivors were re-rated as Mooring, Salvage and Boom Vessels, which is a very RMAS sort of job title. The service merged with the Port Auxiliary Service in 1976, the same year it towed Brereton in, and it was finally disbanded on 31 March 2008 with the work handed to contractors.

It is the sort of organisation nobody writes books about. It has also never been possible to run a navy without one, and a minesweeper holed below the waterline off Hartlepool by a Danish trawler is exactly the kind of afternoon it existed for.

On 8 June 1978, a major engine room fire caused further damage requiring two months of repairs, and the following January she went into Gibraltar for a much longer refit that kept her there for the best part of a year, not returning to service until 2 November 1979.

HMS Brereton went on to serve with the Tyne Division of the Royal Naval Reserve from 21 November 1979, just three weeks after that refit ended, and the Mersey Division from 6 April 1981.

More positively, in February 1987, while attached to the 3rd Mine Countermeasures Squadron at Rosyth, a posting she had taken up the previous January, HMS Brereton destroyed a German mine dating from the Second World War during an exercise at Scapa Flow, a satisfying full-circle moment for a ship whose entire career had been built around finding and neutralising exactly this kind of ordnance, more than four decades after the mine had first been laid.

The mine is less of a curiosity than it looks. Scapa Flow was the Home Fleet's main anchorage for two wars and the Germans spent a great deal of effort trying to get ordnance into it, by aircraft, by submarine and by minelaying surface craft, most of which never went off and much of which was never recovered. The seabed of northern Scotland is still furnished with the results. A German torpedo turned up in the Flow as recently as 2016, and Royal Navy divers were still blowing up wartime mines in Scottish waters in 2020.

This is the part of the job that never ended. Britain's own clearance programme began in 1943 and ran on for decades; the last defensive beach minefield in the country, at Trimingham in Norfolk, was not released to the public until August 1966. Royal Navy clearance divers are still called out for explosive ordnance somewhere in the United Kingdom on average about once a day. Brereton was thirty-three years old when she found that mine, and she was doing the same work, in the same water, against the same ordnance, that the class had been designed for before she was launched.

Nearly Four Decades of Service

She went on to one final loan spell back to the Fishery Protection Squadron between July 1988 and June 1989, then was finally paid off on 30 April 1991, having clocked up some 37 years of operational service, a remarkable span for a small coastal minesweeper.

She was sold for breaking up to Scheepsslopjeri of Bruges on 28 November 1992, closing out one of the longest and most varied careers of any Ton-class minesweeper in the fleet.