HMS Cuxton (M1125): Two Decades in Reserve Before Finally Going to Work

Laid Down at Camper and Nicholson

HMS Cuxton was built by Camper and Nicholson at Southampton, yard number 783, her keel laid on 23 July 1952 and completed on 13 October 1954, a Ton-class minesweeper built in the substantial numbers that characterised this class of coastal minesweeper across the 1950s. Like the rest of her class, she was built almost entirely non-magnetic to survive close contact with influence mines: a double mahogany-planked hull on an aluminium frame, with aluminium fittings and upperworks throughout, a construction method that made her, in a very literal sense, built not to be noticed.

Camper and Nicholson is a name that belongs on a very different sort of vessel, and the pairing is more logical than it looks. The firm began at Gosport in 1782, directly across the harbour from the Portsmouth dockyard, and became the most celebrated yacht builders in Britain: Charles E. Nicholson designed the great British America's Cup challengers of the interwar years, Endeavour and Endeavour II among them, and the yard turned out the large sailing and motor yachts that the Edwardian and interwar rich took to Cowes. A second yard at Northam in Southampton built most of the big motor yachts. Then the war came, Gosport lost something like eighty per cent of its capacity to air raids, and it went on regardless building motor torpedo boats, motor gun boats, landing craft and folding canoes for commando raiding parties.

Which is precisely why the Admiralty gave it a minesweeper to build. A Ton is a wooden ship: a double skin of mahogany planking, carefully laid, fastened without ferrous metal, on aluminium frames, and the skills that produces are yacht-building skills rather than shipyard ones. There were not many firms left in the 1950s who could do that work at all, and Camper and Nicholson had been doing nothing else for a hundred and seventy years. So the yard that built America's Cup challengers for Sir Thomas Lipton and Sir Thomas Sopwith also built Cuxton. She was, in the most literal sense, a warship built by yacht builders, and it is a good part of why the Tons were as sea-kindly as they turned out to be.

The whole story of the class, including the Admiralty's brief plan to name them all after insects, is set out in the article on HMS Crofton.

Rather than entering immediate active service, HMS Cuxton instead spent the years from 1954 to 1961 held in reserve at Hythe, one of a great many Ton-class vessels built in numbers that comfortably outstripped what the peacetime Royal Navy actually needed in commission at any given time.

The reason so many were built is the reason so many were laid up, and it is worth stating plainly. The Tons were ordered against a specific war plan. The Admiralty had watched the Soviet Union build a very large submarine force and had concluded that in a European war the approaches to every British and NATO port would be mined within days, by submarine, by aircraft and by fast surface craft, and that the number of sweepers needed to keep those approaches open ran into the hundreds. So it built hundreds. What it could not do was man them, or pay to run them, in a peacetime navy that was simultaneously shrinking. The answer was to build the hulls while the money was there and put most of them straight into reserve against the day they would be wanted, which is how a brand new minesweeper came to spend the first seven years of her existence tied up at Hythe.

Twenty years is a long time to keep a wooden ship. Mothballing in that era meant sealing the ship up, dehumidifying the interior and greasing everything that would take grease, and it works well enough for steel; a double-planked mahogany hull sitting in the water at Gibraltar for a decade and a half is a different proposition, and somebody had to look after her the entire time. Cuxton was the last Ton of them all to come out of reserve. When she finally commissioned in October 1975 she was twenty-one years old and had never done a day's work.

A Very Long Wait

HMS Cuxton's reserve status continued from May 1962 through to 1975, based at Gibraltar for most of that period, and she holds the distinction of being the final Ton-class vessel to remain in reserve status before eventual recommissioning, more than two decades after her original completion.

It was not until October 1975 that HMS Cuxton finally entered active service in earnest, commissioning for duty with the Fishery Protection Squadron based at Rosyth, a role that finally put her considerable capabilities to genuine practical use protecting British fishing waters.

Fishery protection was not a sinecure either. The squadron she joined is the oldest in the Royal Navy, and the mid-1970s was exactly the period when the job turned unpleasant: the Third Cod War with Iceland ran to mid-1976, and the extension of national fishing limits to two hundred miles that followed handed the squadron an area of responsibility several times the size of the United Kingdom. The history of the squadron is set out in the article on HMS Chichester.

Reserve Squadrons and the Troubles

HMS Cuxton took part in the Spithead Review on 28 June 1977, one of the great ceremonial fleet gatherings of the Royal Navy, before transferring in February 1982 to the 10th Minesweeper Squadron with the Tay Division of the Royal Naval Reserve.

The Spithead review she attended is worth a moment for the arithmetic alone, and for where it put her. On 28 June 1977 the Queen passed down four lines of ships stretching more than seven miles, ninety-nine of her own warships with something like thirty thousand sailors manning them, and ships of the Commonwealth and other NATO navies besides. And somewhere in those lines lay a minesweeper who had been completed in 1954, had spent twenty-one years tied up doing nothing, and had been in commission for twenty months. She was among the oldest hulls present and very nearly the newest ship there.

She deployed to Gibraltar for training in May 1984, and in 1985 was reassigned to the Faslane-based Northern Ireland Squadron, service that placed her directly in support of the ongoing security operations connected to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a truly different kind of duty from her earlier fishery protection work. Operating partly out of Belfast Harbour, the Squadron's small ships were tasked with helping to interdict arms smuggling into the province by sea, dangerous work that saw some of Cuxton's sister patrol vessels come under fire from the IRA in Carlingford Lough during the same period.

The Carlingford Lough work had a name, Operation Interknit, and a particular character. The lough is the border: the northern shore is County Down and the southern shore is County Louth in the Republic, and for twenty-odd years the Royal Navy sat in the middle of it in small ships, stopping boats and searching the twenty-one islands in it, because anything that could be carried across four miles of water did not have to go through a checkpoint. The ships were shot at. An IRA sniper opened up on HMS Vigilant in the lough in March 1977 and the Royal Marines aboard shot back, with nobody hit on either side; the Bird-class patrol craft that did much of the work were fired on repeatedly over the years, and as late as December 1993 HMS Cygnet was engaged with a Barrett .50 rifle. It went on, without a break, for the better part of thirty years, and almost nobody outside it noticed.

In April 1988, HMS Cuxton sustained severe hull damage, requiring five months of repairs at Rosyth before she could return to service, a serious enough incident that it left a real mark on the final years of her operational life.

The End of Service

HMS Cuxton was paid off in 1991, finally bringing to a close an unusual career defined as much by the two decades she spent waiting in reserve as by the fifteen years of active service that eventually followed. She was sold for breaking up at Bruges on 16 April 1992, a quiet end for a ship whose most remarkable feature was, in many ways, simply how long she had to wait before finally being put to work.