HMS Darlaston (M1127): From the Suez Crisis to a Moroccan Earthquake

Built at Beverley

HMS Darlaston was built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell at Beverley, yard number 862, her keel laid on 30 September 1952 and completed on 5 October 1954, a Ton-class minesweeper commissioned on 12 October that year with the 104th Minesweeper Squadron at Harwich, crewed initially by personnel drawn from HMS Appleton.

Cook, Welton and Gemmell was a comparatively small Beverley yard that nonetheless turned out well over a thousand vessels between 1882 and its 1963 closure, mostly trawlers, tugs and minesweepers; among its later Ton-class work was HMS Bronington, the minesweeper a young Lieutenant the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, would command for ten months in 1976, a rather more famous posting than Darlaston herself ever managed.

Through 1955 and 1956, she took part in exercises and goodwill visits across North European waters, routine but valuable work building up her crew's experience.

Marking Channels During the Suez Crisis

HMS Darlaston deployed to Malta in August and September 1956 alongside the 104th and 105th Minesweeper Squadrons, and on 5 and 6 November that year took part in Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French military intervention during the Suez Crisis, serving as a danlayer, the specialist role of laying marker buoys to indicate safely swept channels for the wider invasion fleet, a less glamorous but properly essential contribution to the operation's naval logistics.

Danlaying deserves explaining, because it is the part of mine warfare that decides whether any of the rest of it was worth doing. A dan is a spar buoy: a weighted pole with a flag on the top and a light, anchored so that it stands up out of the water and can be seen for a couple of miles. Sweepers clear a lane through a minefield; the danlayer follows behind them and marks the edges of what has been cleared, buoy by buoy, so that everything coming afterwards knows exactly where the safe water stops. Get the spacing wrong, or lay one in the wrong place, and a convoy commander steers a fleet confidently into water nobody has touched. It is careful, unhurried, slightly tedious work done immediately behind the ships taking the risk, and the whole operation depends on it being right.

What she was marking a channel through is worth recording too. When the invasion came the Egyptians blocked the canal, thoroughly and deliberately, sinking 47 vessels in it and its approaches: a frigate, dredgers, tugs, floating cranes and docks, hoppers, salvage craft, twenty of them in Port Said harbour with their bottoms blown out by explosives. The waterway the operation had been launched to secure was shut within days and stayed shut. Clearing it was handed to the United Nations at the ceasefire on 7 November, under a retired American army engineer, and the Anglo-French share alone came to thirteen wrecks of nearly seventeen thousand tons. The canal did not reopen to shipping until April 1957, five months after the ships that were supposed to be protecting it had gone home.

She returned to Harwich in January 1957 and, her part in Suez behind her, was placed in reserve that November, one of many Ton-class sweepers whose Royal Navy careers were being quietly wound down as Britain's own minesweeping requirements shrank.

The wider story of the class, and of the yard at Beverley that built her, is set out in the articles on HMS Crofton and HMS Coldstreamer.

Earthquake Relief at Agadir

That reserve spell lasted a little over two years. In February 1960, Darlaston was recommissioned with a ferry crew for the long one-way passage out to Singapore, where she was due to be handed over to a new owner, a routine enough voyage that happened to route her through Gibraltar at exactly the right moment.

On 29 February 1960, HMS Darlaston was diverted to Agadir in Morocco to assist with earthquake relief efforts as part of Operation Samaritan, responding to the catastrophic earthquake that had devastated the city that same day and killed a substantial portion of its population, an urgent humanitarian deployment that put her crew's skills to entirely different use than their usual minesweeping duties.

The scale of the disaster was extraordinary for so short and shallow a tremor: a magnitude of around 5.8, its epicentre barely fifteen kilometres down, struck shortly before midnight and killed somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand people, roughly a third of a city of some forty thousand, in under a minute. Darlaston, carrying a doctor and emergency stores, was under way within hours of the news reaching Gibraltar, with the considerably larger repair ship HMS Tyne, eleven thousand tons and properly equipped for treating the injured, following on and delivering further supplies by 6 March; RAF units already stationed at Gibraltar added relief stores of their own once Moroccan authorities cleared them to land. In the Commons on 2 March, the Minister of State, John Profumo, told MPs the government had heard of the destruction "with profound regret", as Parliament moved to release ten thousand pounds in aid from the Civil Contingencies Fund. A fortnight later in the Lords, Earl Howe pressed the government over an apparent early delay in the Royal Navy's response, only to be told by Lord Carrington that Darlaston had in fact sailed the moment the earthquake struck, allied navies with permanent Moroccan bases having simply had less distance to cover.

Agadir never went back. The old city was so completely destroyed, and so many bodies were never recovered from it, that the Moroccan authorities left the site where it was, sealed it, and built the new Agadir about two miles to the south on ground the engineers considered safer. The ruins of the casbah are still up on the hill above the modern town. Morocco introduced the country's first seismic building regulations as a direct result. It remains the deadliest earthquake in North African history, and the ship that got there first was a five-hundred-ton wooden minesweeper on her way to be given away.

Transfer to Malaya

HMS Darlaston was transferred to the Royal Malayan Navy on 24 May 1960 at Singapore, recommissioned as KD Mahamiru, part of the broader pattern of Britain transferring surplus Ton-class vessels to Commonwealth and allied navies as its own minesweeping requirements gradually reduced.

She was formally accepted on Malaya's behalf by the Defence Minister, Tun Abdul Razak bin Hussein, who would go on to serve as the country's second Prime Minister from 1970, an unremarked footnote at the time to a rather bigger career still to come.

The timing of these transfers is the part worth noticing, because they were not a tidy programme of passing on surplus ships. Six Ton-class minesweepers went to the Royal Malayan, and from 1963 Royal Malaysian, Navy, and they went in three separate groups: Darlaston on her own in 1960, three more in 1963 and 1964, and the last two in 1966. Line those dates up against the calendar and they are the Indonesian Confrontation almost exactly. Indonesia opposed the creation of Malaysia in 1963 and spent the next three years landing and parachuting infiltration parties into Malaysian territory, and a country that had been given one minesweeper as a gesture in 1960 abruptly needed a fleet of them.

What they actually did out there was not minesweeping. A Ton in Malaysian service in the mid-1960s was a patrol vessel and nothing else: shallow enough to work close inshore among mangrove and islands, seaworthy enough to stay out in the Malacca and Singapore Straits for days at a stretch, and roomy enough to carry a boarding party and feed them. The six of them, with the former Darlaston at the head of the list, spent the Confrontation stopping small craft, watching the coast and working with the soldiers ashore against men trying to come in by sea. It is not remotely the job anybody at Beverley had in mind in 1952, and it is the job the design turned out to be best at.

The former HMS Darlaston was paid off from Royal Navy service in 1960 following her Far East deployment, having already effectively passed into Malayan hands.

A Long-Delayed End

The former HMS Darlaston was eventually expended as a target in 1980, some two decades after her transfer out of Royal Navy service, closing out the working life of a ship whose relatively brief but notably eventful active career had taken her from the Suez Crisis to earthquake relief in Morocco within the space of less than four years.

There is a small injustice in summing her up that way, though, because the British part of her career was the short part. She was completed in October 1954 and expended as a target in 1980, which is twenty-six years. Six of them were spent under the White Ensign, and two of those six she spent tied up in reserve at Harwich. The other twenty were Malaysian. Almost everything this ship did, she did for somebody else, in seas her builders had probably never given a thought to, in a confrontation nobody had imagined when her keel went down.

That is true of a great many of the hundred and nineteen Tons, and it is the best argument anybody ever made for the design. A cheap, shallow, wooden, non-magnetic boat with a good range and plenty of room inside turns out to be very close to what a new navy actually needs, whatever the specification said it was built for. Britain ordered them to sweep Soviet mines out of the Western Approaches. They ended up chasing infiltrators off Johore, hunting mines in the Red Sea, patrolling Hong Kong harbour and taking a doctor to Agadir.