HMS Brinton (M1114): "Best of the Bunch", and Thirty Years of Minesweeping

Built at Beverley, Commissioned at Harwich

HMS Brinton was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell at Beverley, her keel laid on 30 May 1951 and completed on 4 March 1954 after 34 months of construction.

She commissioned on 9 March 1954 with the 104th Minesweeping Squadron at Harwich, a Ton-class coastal minesweeper that would go on to serve the Royal Navy for some thirty years, an unusually long career even by the standards of a class renowned for its longevity and versatility.

Her early service saw her move between various squadrons at Harwich, joining the 10th Minesweeping Squadron on 14 May 1954 and the 105th on 29 March 1955, before paying off for refit and reserve at Hythe in July 1956. She recommissioned for Plymouth Command on 17 April 1963, spending a further three years in service before conversion work began.

A Banana on the Bridge

HMS Brinton was converted to a minehunter between 1966 and September 1968, recommissioning at Plymouth that October for the 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, and made the long passage around Africa to Bahrain between 28 January and 15 April 1969, returning to the UK by the same lengthy route between 2 October and 10 December 1971.

Those two long passages need explaining, because on the face of it they are absurd. A 360-ton wooden minehunter with a top speed of fifteen knots does not sail from Plymouth to Bahrain the long way round the Cape of Good Hope for fun. She did it because the Suez Canal was shut. It had been closed since the Six-Day War of June 1967 and it stayed closed until June 1975, eight years in which every ship going east had to go round Africa, and the story of what that meant to one ship caught inside it is told in HMS Burnaston (M1116). So Brinton went the long way, twice, eleven weeks out and ten weeks back.

What she went out to join was the 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, which is one of the less celebrated corners of the Cold War Royal Navy and deserves better. The squadron had been commissioned at Portsmouth in June 1962 with four Tons, all open-bridge, Mirrlees-engined ships, and reached Aden that September. Their air conditioning is the detail that says everything: they had some, but it was fitted principally to cool the radar and the gyro compass. The equipment got the cold air. The crews got the Gulf.

The base they worked from was improvised out of very little. A tank landing craft was pulled out of reserve, converted into a maintenance and repair craft and berthed at Mina Salman in Bahrain in April 1963, a second followed, a local dhow was taken on, and that, alongside the Army and RAF facilities already there, was the naval base. The job was exercising to keep the oil route through the Strait of Hormuz sweepable if it ever came to it, and supporting Army and RAF operations against guerrilla forces in Oman and Sharjah. A wooden ship built in a Yorkshire market town for the North Sea, doing counter-insurgency support work in the Persian Gulf, out of a converted landing craft and a dhow.

And her passage home in the autumn of 1971 was not a routine relief. In 1968 the government had announced that Britain would withdraw from east of Suez by the end of 1971, and it duly did: Bahrain and Qatar became independent, the Trucial States became the United Arab Emirates, and HMS Jufair, the shore base that had opened at Mina Salman on 13 April 1935, formally paid off on 15 December 1971. Brinton reached the United Kingdom on 10 December, five days before the base she had served from ceased to exist. The Americans took the site over almost immediately and have it still. She joined the Fishery Protection Squadron that same month, which is about as complete a change of scene as the Navy could arrange in one posting.

On 15 May 1976, while under the command of the young Lieutenant Laurie Hopkins in the Fishery Protection Squadron at Rosyth, HMS Brinton acquired a rather more light-hearted claim to fame. Hopkins declared his ship "the best of the bunch", possibly inspired by a Fyffes advert, and had a six-foot fibreglass banana, painted bright yellow, mounted on the front of the bridge.

The joke did not go down well with everyone. Brinton's passage in and out of Rosyth passed close to the residence of the Flag Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland, Vice Admiral Tony Troup, a decorated wartime submarine commander with a reputation as a somewhat scary character, and every ship was required to pipe the salute as it went by. Troup was distinctly unimpressed by the new adornment and ordered it removed at once. Rather than take the banana down, Hopkins had a battleship-grey tarpaulin built for it, complete with zips, so Brinton could steam past the admiral's residence respectably covered up, before the banana was "peeled" for operations at sea. The admiral, it is said, was secretly rather impressed by the initiative, and the Captain of the Squadron gave the whole scheme his blessing.

Hopkins went on to a distinguished career, eventually serving as Commodore Minor War Vessels and Minewarfare from 1991 to 1994, and on retirement was appointed Gentleman Usher, a royal household position dating back to the seventeenth century, serving in that role for both Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III. The banana, meanwhile, stuck with Brinton for the rest of her career, a small but genuinely charming piece of ship's personality.

Surveying a Lost Battleship

Between 11 and 19 December 1974, HMS Brinton conducted a wreck survey of HMS Vanguard in Scapa Flow. This is not the Vanguard most people picture. The last battleship ever built for the Royal Navy was a later HMS Vanguard, pennant number 23, completed in 1946 and broken up at Faslane in 1960. The one lying on the bottom at Scapa is her predecessor, a St Vincent-class dreadnought of 1909, and she has been there since twenty past eleven on the night of 9 July 1917, when she blew up at her anchorage without any warning whatsoever and sank almost instantly.

Of the 845 men aboard, 843 died. Three came out of the water alive, Lieutenant Commander A. C. H. Duke, Marine J. Williams and Stoker First Class F. W. Cox, and Duke died of his injuries afterwards, which left two. Several officers escaped the disaster entirely by chance, having been aboard a neighbouring ship at a concert. The Court of Enquiry sat on 30 July 1917 under Rear Admiral William Nicholson and could not settle the matter: unstable cordite was the likeliest explanation, but sabotage could not be ruled out. What is generally accepted now is that a fire smouldered undetected in a coal bunker or patent fuel space next to a magazine, for long enough to take the cordite on the other side of the bulkhead past the point where it could be saved. Nobody aboard knew anything about it until the ship was gone.

It was a task that put HMS Brinton's mine-hunting sonar and survey skills to a very different, more solemn use, charting the resting place of one of the greatest tragedies in the Royal Navy's history rather than searching for live ordnance, and coming right at the tail end of a legal salvage operation on the wreck that had been running, on and off, since 1957. Vanguard is today protected as a designated war grave.

A decade later, between 16 August and 13 October 1984, HMS Brinton took part in Operation Harling, based at Adabiya in Egypt, an international mine clearance effort mounted after a spate of mysterious explosions, later blamed on Libya, damaged around twenty merchant ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Suez that August. British, French, Dutch and Italian minehunters worked the shipping lanes alongside American helicopter squadrons, returning HMS Brinton to the more conventional business of the mine countermeasures work she had spent her career mastering.

The Red Sea business of 1984 is one of the odder episodes of the late Cold War, and worth setting out. Between 9 July and 15 August that year something in the order of seventeen merchant ships reported underwater explosions in the Gulf of Suez and off Bab el Mandeb, in shipping lanes that nobody had any business mining and nobody had declared dangerous. When mines were eventually located and examined they proved to be Soviet-designed bottom mines of an export pattern, and the trail led back to Libya. The response was pointedly multinational: British, French, Dutch and Italian minehunters, each working its own area under its own national command, with two United States Navy airborne mine countermeasures squadrons sweeping from helicopters overhead.

Brinton and the other Tons worked out of Adabiya with a leased oil rig support ship, the Oil Endeavour, standing in for a proper depot ship and inevitably rechristened Oily D by the ships' companies. HMS Gavinton found the first confirmed mine-like object on 12 September, sitting in forty-two metres of water on the western edge of the southbound lane out of the Suez Canal. It was the sort of job the Ton class had been built for thirty years earlier and, by 1984, one of the few navies in the world still had enough of them to do it properly.

The Last of Her Kind at Rosyth

Her final years were spent shuttling between mine countermeasures squadrons and fishery duties out of Rosyth: the 1st Mine Countermeasures Squadron from November 1979, the 3rd from January 1984, a loan back to the Fishery Protection Squadron from October 1987, a return to the 3rd Squadron in September 1989, and a final posting to fishery protection from April 1991. She earned a small but genuine piece of naval history when she and HMS Sheraton became the last two Ton-class vessels to leave Rosyth, departing together on 21 September 1993, a symbolic final chapter for a class of ship that had, by then, been serving the Royal Navy for the best part of four decades.

HMS Brinton was paid off on 5 October 1993 and eventually sold to Pounds of Portsmouth for disposal in January 1998, bringing to a close a remarkable thirty-year career that had taken her from Harwich to Bahrain, from surveying a lost battleship to clearing mines in the Gulf of Suez, with a banana painted proudly on her bridge throughout much of it.

The four and a bit years between paying off and disposal say something about how the class ended. A hundred and nineteen Tons were built in British yards between 1951 and 1960 and over thirty of them were sold on to other navies, six to Australia in 1961, six to Argentina in 1968, three to the Irish Naval Service in 1971, and others to India, South Africa, Malaysia and Ghana, but all of that happened while the ships were still young. By 1993 there was no market at all for a forty-year-old wooden minehunter, and Brinton sat and waited while the Navy established as much. She went in the end to Pounds, the Portsmouth breakers whose yard swallowed a very large proportion of the postwar Royal Navy, and she was broken up in 1998.

Her sister from the same morning fared no better in the end. Bronington was preserved at Birkenhead by the Warship Preservation Trust from 2002, the trust failed, and on 17 March 2016 she sank at her own moorings. So of the two keels laid down at Beverley on 30 May 1951, one was cut up for scrap and the other went down at a berth in the Mersey, unattended. It is not much of a return on forty years of service apiece, and it is the ordinary fate of small warships, which get the work, get the affection of the men who serve in them, and get almost none of the money that keeps ships afloat afterwards. The banana, one hopes, went to a good home.