HMS Hodgeston (M1146): Three Names, Thirty Years and a Rescue Mission

Fleetlands-Built

HMS Hodgeston was built by Fleetlands Shipyard Ltd at Gosport, laid down in September 1952 and completed on 17 December 1954, a construction period of some 28 months, a Ton-class minesweeper commissioned on 1 February 1955 for the 101st Royal Naval Reserve Minesweeper Squadron based in Newcastle.

The yard is worth a word, and so is the arrangement behind it, because a hundred and nineteen minesweepers do not come out of nowhere. Fleetlands Shipyard at Gosport was not a warship builder in any conventional sense; it was one of fifteen small firms, scattered round the coast, that between them built the Ton class. What made that possible was the parent firm system. John I. Thornycroft and Company of Southampton, who had the design, acted as parent to the whole group: they produced the drawings, worked out the jigs and the build sequence, sorted out the problems the first time so that nobody else had to, and provided the technical supervision that let a yard which had never built anything for the Admiralty deliver a warship to specification.

It is an approach the British had learned the hard way in two wars and then, unusually, kept. The alternative is to give the whole order to two or three big yards, which is slower, more expensive, concentrates the work in places an enemy can find, and leaves nothing behind when the order finishes. Spreading it across fifteen firms meant that Fleetlands at Gosport, Doig at Grimsby, Richards at Lowestoft, Cook Welton and Gemmell at Beverley and a dozen others could each turn out warships to a common standard, using their own trawler-building tradesmen, without any of them having to become a naval shipbuilder.

Hodgeston went down the ways at Gosport on 6 April 1954, one of a pair Fleetlands built alongside HMS Santon. The result of all that organisation was a class the Royal Navy could afford in numbers, could give away to the Reserve by the dozen, and was still using thirty-five years later, which is a good deal more than can be said for most things the Admiralty ordered in 1951.

Her early career was marked by a remarkably serious incident: in May 1955, barely three months after commissioning, she suffered severe damage in a collision with the merchant vessel MV Cyprian Prince, requiring her to be towed to the Tyne for repairs, a rocky start to what would become a properly long and varied career. The collision happened on 30 May 1955, off Longstones Light in the Farne Islands.

A Ship of Three Names

HMS Hodgeston's career is unusual for just how many identities she carried: she began life as HMS Northumbria with the Tyne Division Royal Naval Reserve in 1955, before being renamed HMS Venturer when transferred to Severn Division in February 1962, and finally reverting to her original name, Hodgeston, on 1 January 1976, when she was allocated to the Southwest Group. In between, she was not always even in reserve service at all: she paid off in 1960 on being relieved by HMS Quainton, sitting out a couple of years before her Venturer commission began. It was as Venturer, in August and September 1973, that a ship built for weekend exercises on the Severn found herself crossing the Atlantic altogether, taking part in Exercise Maplehaul off Canada's east coast alongside four other RNR Ton-class minesweepers.

There is a straightforward explanation for the three names, and it is a nice piece of naval housekeeping. As the fleet shrank in the 1960s the Royal Navy handed a great many Ton-class minesweepers to the Royal Naval Reserve, so that part-time crews around the country had real ships to go to sea in. The reserve divisions had names of their own, and the practice grew up of renaming the ship after the division she belonged to, so that the Tyne Division's ship was Northumbria and the Severn Division's was Venturer regardless of which hull happened to be filling the billet that year. Move the ship, change the name. It made perfect sense to a reservist in Newcastle and makes the ship lists almost impossible to follow, which is why the same vessel appears three times under three identities. When the practice was dropped in the mid-1970s she simply reverted to the name she had been built with.

It was a particularly unusual pattern of renaming even by the standards of the reserve minesweeper fleet, reflecting her repeated reassignment between different reserve divisions over more than two decades of service.

The class she belonged to was the workhorse of the postwar Royal Navy, with something like 119 built and a hull of aluminium framing planked in double mahogany so that a magnetic mine would not notice her; what they did and where they ended up is set out in the article on HMS Gavinton (M1140). What made them so useful to the reserve is that they were small enough to be handled by a scratch crew, cheap enough to be spared, and genuinely seaworthy: a 360-ton wooden minesweeper crossing the Atlantic to exercise off Nova Scotia, which is what she did as Venturer in 1973, is a considerably bigger undertaking than it sounds and says a good deal about both the ships and the volunteers in them.

Searching for the Lost

HMS Hodgeston took part in a notably sombre operation in September 1976, joining the search for survivors following the sinking of HMS Fittleton, a fellow Ton-class minesweeper that had collided with the frigate HMS Mermaid during a Royal Naval Reserve exercise, a tragedy that claimed the lives of several reservists training aboard her. The two ships had been carrying out a routine mail transfer some 80 miles north of Texel when hydrodynamic suction, the so-called canal effect, drew Fittleton in against Mermaid's much larger hull; despite full power applied to break away, the smaller ship was struck, rolled through 180 degrees and capsized within seconds. Twelve men were killed, eleven of them reservists and one regular sailor, the worst single loss of life the Royal Naval Reserve has ever suffered, while 32 more were pulled from the water. HMS Hodgeston was one of five Ton-class minesweepers, alongside Crichton, Kedleston, Repton and Wiston, that raced to the scene to help HMS Crofton, which had positioned her own stern against Fittleton's upturned hull, ferry survivors across to Mermaid.

The canal effect deserves explaining properly, because it is counter-intuitive and it kills people. When a hull moves through water it pushes water out of the way, and that water has to accelerate to get past. Squeeze two ships close alongside each other and the water in the gap between them has to move faster still, and by Bernoulli's principle faster water means lower pressure. The result is that the pressure on the outboard side of each ship is now higher than the pressure between them, and the two are pushed together. The force is not small, it grows very sharply as the gap closes and as speed increases, and it acts on both ships in proportion to their size, which means the small one does almost all of the moving. A helmsman who tries to steer out of it can make matters worse, because turning the bow away swings the stern in. The correct answer is to take the speed off first and then ease away in small increments, and it is not obvious unless somebody has told you.

What makes the Fittleton disaster so bleak is that nobody aboard either ship appears to have understood any of that. The Board of Inquiry found that the interaction between two ships of such different displacement had simply not been anticipated. Fittleton was drawn in under Mermaid's bow, rolled right over and was gone in seconds, and twelve men died, eleven of them volunteer reservists who had civilian jobs to go back to on the Monday. It remains the worst peacetime loss the Royal Naval Reserve has ever suffered. Her commanding officer was court-martialled and found guilty on one of four charges, of hazarding his ship by not taking the speed off and easing away in small steps. Memorial windows were put up in the church at Fittleton in Wiltshire and at HMS President on the Thames, where a good many of the dead had done their drill nights. HMS Crofton, which put her own stern against the upturned hull so that men could be got off it, has her own account in the article on HMS Crofton (M1216).

It was exactly the kind of unglamorous, difficult work that minesweepers and their crews were sometimes called upon to perform, searching cold, often unforgiving waters for their own.

The phrase searching for their own is exact, and it is why this episode has stayed with the reserve. The five minesweepers that raced to the scene were RNR ships crewed by RNR people; the men in the water were their opposite numbers, from other divisions, doing the identical weekend that they were doing. Reservists are a small world, and a great many of the crews involved knew each other by name. Hodgeston had herself been damaged in a collision within three months of first commissioning, off the Longstones in the Farnes, so her people needed no instruction in how quickly a routine day at sea turns into something else. That she spent thirty years, three names and several different divisions doing this work without ever making the news is the point of her, and of the other 118 like her.

Later Service and the End

HMS Hodgeston served with the 10th Minesweeper Squadron's Northwest Group between 1978 and 1984, before returning to the Tyne with the 10th Minesweeper Squadron in 1985 and finishing out her career with a final posting to the Fishery Protection Squadron that same year through to 1986.

She was decommissioned on 28 July 1986, after some thirty years of continuous service under her various names, and was eventually broken up at Brugse Scheepssloperji in Bruges on 23 November 1988, closing out the career of a minesweeper whose long service had taken her through more identities, and more varied duty, than most ships of her class ever experienced.