HMS Burnaston (M1116): Caught in the Suez Canal When the 1967 War Closed It

Built at Fleetlands, Commissioned at Harwich

HMS Burnaston was built by Fleetlands at Gosport, her keel laid on 3 May 1951 and completed on 3 March 1954 after 34 months of construction, a Ton-class coastal minesweeper that entered service that March with the 104th Minesweeping Squadron based at Harwich.

Fleetlands is an odd entry on a warship's build record and worth explaining. The site at Gosport had opened in 1940 as a Royal Naval Air Yard, repairing and overhauling Fleet Air Arm aircraft, and it is still doing that job today under a succession of names, having spent the last sixty years as one of the principal helicopter maintenance depots for all three British services. In the 1950s it also had a shipyard, and that yard built a run of Ton-class minesweepers, Burnaston among them, alongside Hodgeston, Santon and Hubberston. It is a reminder of how widely the Ton programme was spread. A hundred and nineteen hulls needed building at speed and the Admiralty went to anybody who could do wooden construction: boatbuilders, fishing yards, furniture makers and, in this case, an aircraft repair yard on Portsmouth Harbour that happened to have slipways and shipwrights. Very few of the Tons came from a yard whose name means anything to anybody.

Her early career followed the well-worn pattern typical of the class, moving into reserve at Chatham that November before recommissioning in March 1957 for Portsmouth-based operations, and in September 1958 she underwent Deltic conversion work at Sheerness, fitted with the powerful and distinctive Napier Deltic diesel engines that gave later Ton-class vessels significantly improved performance over their original wartime-derived propulsion.

Mediterranean and Gulf Service

HMS Burnaston deployed to Malta in March 1959 with the 108th Minesweeping Squadron, and that October took part in a search operation off Cyprus that ended with the Turkish vessel Deniz being scuttled. She had been intercepted off the Karpass Peninsula carrying arms and ammunition destined for TMT, the Turkish Cypriot paramilitary organisation, only months after Cyprus's independence agreement had been signed, a tense episode reflecting the complex security situation on an island then only recently independent and still working through the political and communal tensions that would flare into more serious conflict in subsequent years.

The Deniz affair deserves setting out properly, because it is a small incident with a very long shadow. Cyprus had been fought over for four years, the Zurich and London agreements ending British rule had been concluded in February 1959, and the island was due to become independent the following year with a constitution that shared power between its Greek and Turkish communities. On 18 October 1959, with that settlement barely dry, a British naval patrol stopped the Turkish-registered Deniz off the Karpass peninsula and found her loaded with arms and ammunition for the TMT, the Turkish Cypriot paramilitary organisation. Her crew scuttled her rather than let her be taken, and the British recovered some of the weapons from the wreck. Archbishop Makarios responded by suspending negotiations with the Turkish Cypriots altogether. It is a very early demonstration that the settlement everybody had just signed was not going to hold, and it was found by a minesweeper on patrol.

In April 1961, HMS Burnaston was involved in a collision with her sister ship HMS Shavington that caused serious damage to the other vessel, an occupational hazard of the close-quarters manoeuvring that Ton-class minesweepers regularly practised together.

The Shavington collision needs a word in the class's defence, because two Tons hitting each other sounds careless and is largely a function of what they were built to do. Minesweeping is done in formation. Ships sweep in echelon, each one working the water her neighbour has just cleared, at set distances and set bearings, towing gear astern that cannot be manoeuvred around, and any alteration has to be made by every ship together. That is close-quarters work by design, practised constantly, and it is done by eye. A wooden hull also gives no warning: there is no scrape of steel, just a bang. The Tons collided with each other with some regularity throughout their careers, and the reason is not poor seamanship but the fact that the entire tactical method requires ships to spend their working lives a few hundred feet apart doing the same thing at the same moment.

She was paid off at Malta in March 1962 and towed to Gibraltar for an extended spell in reserve, not recommissioning again until September 1965.

Four and a half years laid up at Gibraltar in the middle of her career is worth pausing on too. It was not neglect. The Royal Navy had built a hundred and nineteen Tons in a hurry against a threat that never materialised, and by the early 1960s it had a great many more minesweepers than it had crews or work for; the standard answer was to lay ships up at whichever base they happened to be nearest, in a state that would let them be brought forward again in weeks rather than months. Gibraltar was convenient, dry and out of the way. Burnaston went into that condition in March 1962 at eight years old and came out of it in September 1965 at eleven, and then had four of the busiest years of her life. It is a pattern that recurs right across the class and it is why so many Tons have careers that look like a series of unconnected episodes rather than a continuous line.

Caught by the Six-Day War

HMS Burnaston transferred to Bahrain service with the 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron in September 1965, but her passage there in June 1967 was disrupted in notably dramatic fashion when the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours led to the closure of the Suez Canal while she was actually in transit, forcing a change of plans for a ship that had expected a routine passage through one of the world's most important waterways. Unlike the fourteen merchant ships of the famous "Yellow Fleet" that were caught inside the canal itself and spent the next eight years trapped in the Great Bitter Lake, Burnaston avoided that particular fate, though her own carefully planned passage to the Gulf was still abruptly and indefinitely cancelled.

The Yellow Fleet is worth telling properly, because it is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to a group of merchant ships. Egypt sealed the canal on 5 June 1967 by scuttling hulls in it, dumping debris and laying mines, and fourteen ships that happened to be in transit were simply shut in, at anchor in the Great Bitter Lake, in the middle of a desert, with no way out at either end. They were there for eight years. The ships came from eight countries, Britain, West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, France, Bulgaria and the United States, and the sand blowing over them coated everything until the hulls turned yellow, which is where the name comes from.

What the crews then did about it is the good part. They formed the Great Bitter Lake Association, ran their own unofficial postal service between the ships and printed their own stamps, which are now worth rather more to collectors than the cargoes ever were. In 1968, to coincide with the Mexico City games, they held the Bitter Lake Olympics, including lifeboat regattas. They played football on one of the British ships, watched films on the Bulgarian, held church services on a West German one and swam in the pool aboard the Swedes. Somewhere around three thousand men passed through the anchorage over those eight years, and one woman, a Swedish stewardess the crews knew as the Lady of the Lake. The canal finally reopened on 5 June 1975, eight years to the day after it shut, and two of the ships sailed out under their own power.

For everybody else, including Burnaston, the consequence was simple arithmetic. With the canal shut there was no short route east at all, and every ship bound for the Gulf, the Indian Ocean or the Far East went round the Cape of Good Hope instead, adding thousands of miles to every passage. It stayed that way for eight years, which is a large part of the reason oil tankers grew so enormous during the 1970s: if you are going round Africa anyway, you may as well carry more. A 360-ton wooden minesweeper going the same way round is a rather less efficient proposition, and Burnaston made that passage in the winter of 1968 because there was no longer any alternative.

She was attached instead to the 7th Minesweeping Squadron at Malta for Cyprus patrol duties, before being lent that August to the Fishery Protection Squadron at Port Edgar in Scotland, about as complete a change of scenery from the Persian Gulf as the Royal Navy could offer. She finally rejoined the 9th Squadron at Bahrain in February 1968, necessarily by the long way round via the Cape of Good Hope, before completing her final passage back to the United Kingdom and arriving at Portsmouth in June 1969.

The Bahrain posting she spent so long failing to reach is worth explaining as well. The 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron was the Royal Navy's mine warfare presence in the Persian Gulf, based at Bahrain, and it existed because the Gulf is shallow, narrow, full of oil traffic and extremely easy to mine. Britain was still the guarantor of security for a string of Gulf states at that point, and would remain so until the withdrawal from east of Suez in 1971. Ton-class ships did that job in temperatures that a wooden hull, no air conditioning worth the name and mess decks below the waterline made genuinely punishing. Burnaston finally arrived in February 1968, went round Africa to do it, and was back in Portsmouth by June 1969. Her whole Gulf commission lasted about sixteen months, and she had spent the best part of a year getting there.

The End of the Line

HMS Burnaston was paid off on 9 June 1969 and sold to Metrec of Newhaven for breaking up on 29 March 1971, bringing to a close a career that had taken her from routine Harwich-based minesweeping duties to the middle of one of the defining geopolitical crises of the 1960s, quite literally caught out by a war she had nothing to do with while simply trying to get to her next posting.