HMS Hubberston (M1147): From the Confrontation in Borneo to Hong Kong Patrol

A Long Road to Commissioning

HMS Hubberston was laid down at Fleetlands Shipyard, Gosport, on 29 January 1953, and completed on 14 October 1955 after some 32 months of construction, a Ton-class minesweeper.

The class she belonged to was the largest single group of warships Britain built after 1945, and the numbers explain a great deal about her odd early career. Something like 119 Tons were ordered in the early 1950s, when the Korean War and the discovery that the Soviet Union had inherited an enormous stock of German mine designs produced a genuine panic about mine warfare; they were built with aluminium framing planked in double mahogany so that a magnetic mine would take no notice of them, and they were spread around a great many small yards, including, in her case, a small yard at Fleetlands in Gosport. What they were not was crewed. Britain could order 119 minesweepers a good deal more easily than it could find 119 crews for them, so a large proportion of the class went straight from the builders into reserve and stayed there. The class as a whole, and what the Tons were actually for, is set out in the article on HMS Gavinton (M1140).

Rather than entering service immediately, she underwent conversion to full minehunter status between May 1963 and December 1964 at Chatham, before finally commissioning on 18 December 1964 for the 11th Minesweeper Squadron based in Singapore, a long gap between completion and active commissioning even by the standards of a class built in such large numbers that many hulls spent years in reserve before being needed.

The conversion she waited for is the interesting part, because minehunting and minesweeping are entirely different trades. Sweeping means towing gear behind the ship to cut moored mines free, or to generate the magnetic or acoustic signature that makes a ground mine think a target is passing, and then dealing with whatever comes up. It is a blunt instrument: you clear an area by driving over it and hoping your gear is better than the fuse. Hunting means finding each individual mine on the seabed with sonar, going to it, looking at it and destroying it in place. The Navy had wanted to do that since the beginning of the 1950s, and had actually designed a purpose-built coastal minehunter, but the design was suspended in 1952 and cancelled in 1953 for the simple reason that no sonar then existed that could pick a mine out of a rocky seabed. That changed in the early 1960s with the Plessey Type 193, and the Admiralty went back to the Tons it had sitting in reserve. Hubberston was one of about eighteen taken in hand: the towed sweep gear came out, the sonar went in, along with active rudders driven by electric motors so that she could be held precisely over a contact, two inflatable boats and diving equipment for four clearance divers. So a hull completed in 1955 finally commissioned in December 1964 as something the Royal Navy had wanted for twelve years and had not been able to build.

The Confrontation in Borneo

HMS Hubberston worked up in UK waters between January and May 1965 before making the long passage out to Singapore, joining the 11th Minesweeping Squadron there on 1 July 1965 to take part in the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, the low-level but notably dangerous undeclared conflict fought largely in the jungles and coastal waters of Borneo.

The Confrontation is one of the less understood wars Britain has fought, partly because both sides preferred it that way. Indonesia under Sukarno objected to the formation of Malaysia in 1963, calling it a neo-colonial construction, and set about opposing it without ever declaring war: infiltrators crossed the long jungle border in Borneo, small parties were landed on the Malayan coast, and paratroops were even dropped in Johore. Britain, Australia and New Zealand responded in kind, mounting deniable cross-border raids under the codename Claret that were not officially admitted for another decade. Neither government wanted a real war and neither wanted to be seen to back down, so the whole thing was fought at a deliberately low level, and it worked: casualties on the Commonwealth side over three years were a few hundred rather than a few thousand. It ended in August 1966, not because anybody won on the ground but because Sukarno had been sidelined at home after the coup of the previous year and his successors had no interest in continuing it.

A 150-foot wooden-hulled minesweeper is not, on paper, an obvious choice for jungle warfare, and the Confrontation asked rather more of the Ton class than minesweeping. Alongside anti-infiltration patrols meant to deter small Indonesian craft slipping across the Sumatra Straits and along the coast near Tawau, ships of Hubberston's type found themselves ferrying army personnel and stores up rivers to isolated coastal garrisons, work that called for a fair amount of on-the-spot improvisation from crews never quite trained for it.

Hubberston's own share of that work fell mainly in the first half of 1966: between January and August she carried out Singapore Straits patrols of ten days apiece, a twelve-day patrol off Sarawak, and an eighteen-day stint watching the approaches to Tawau in North Borneo, unglamorous, watchful duty that nonetheless kept her fully occupied for the best part of eight months.

What a wooden minesweeper actually did in that war is worth spelling out, because the patrol names conceal some genuinely difficult work. The Sumatra and Singapore Straits are busy, shallow, tidal and full of fishing craft, and the job was to identify, close and search small wooden boats at night without shooting anybody who happened to be an entirely innocent fisherman. That meant boarding parties away in the dark, searchlights, and long spells at a few knots keeping station on a coastline. The Tawau area in North Borneo was worse: a maze of mangrove creeks and islands on the Indonesian border, where the ships also found themselves running army detachments and stores up rivers to garrisons that had no other way of being supplied. None of this appears in a minesweeper's job description. It got done because a shallow-draught wooden ship with a competent crew and a couple of boats turns out to be the most useful thing in the world in that sort of water, which is exactly why the class stayed in service for forty years.

Hong Kong and Home

HMS Hubberston served with the 6th Patrol Boat Squadron based in Hong Kong from August 1969 to September 1971, useful and varied service maintaining a British naval presence in the colony, before returning to the United Kingdom to join the 2nd Minesweeper Squadron at Portsmouth in January 1972, where she remained, with periodic refits and transfers, for the better part of two further decades.

Coming home in January 1972 meant a complete change of trade, and a rather grander one than it sounds. In 1973 she served with Standing Naval Force Channel, one of NATO's permanent multinational squadrons, in which British, Belgian, Dutch and German mine countermeasures ships operated together as a single unit under a rotating command. The point of the force was that the Channel and the southern North Sea are shallow, narrow, and the route by which any reinforcement of Europe would have had to arrive, which made them the obvious place for the Soviet Union to lay mines from submarines or aircraft in the opening hours of a war. A permanent allied squadron working together year in and year out meant that the ships and their crews already knew each other's procedures. Hubberston spent most of the following two decades on that kind of work: unglamorous, cooperative, and entirely dependent on nobody ever having to find out whether it would have been enough.

Hong Kong in 1969 was a considerably more interesting posting than a phrase like maintaining a British naval presence suggests. The colony had come through the riots of 1967, the Cultural Revolution was in full spate across the border, and the pressure on the frontier was constant: people crossing by land and by sea, and a busy smuggling trade running in both directions through some of the most crowded water on earth. The Royal Navy kept five modified Tons there as the 6th Patrol Squadron, and their job was a mixture of flag-showing, sovereignty patrol and straightforward police work in support of the Marine Police and the customs service, boarding junks and sampans among the islands and in the approaches to the harbour. It was low-level, unending and occasionally very tense, and the Navy went on doing it right up to 1997; the ships that took over the job in the 1980s have their own account in the article on HMS Peacock (P239).

Those two decades were not entirely uneventful: she underwent a lengthy refit at Rosyth between March 1984 and June 1985, and in January 1989 transferred to the 3rd Minesweeping Squadron, a move that took her down to the Mediterranean later that year for Exercise Tridente 89, the very NATO deployment during which her career took its most awkward turn.

A Collision With Her Own Sister

It was during that same Mediterranean exercise that HMS Hubberston suffered her most notable mishap: on 24 November 1989, she collided with her sister ship HMS Iveston while unberthing at Ibiza, a reminder that even two vessels of an identical class, crewed by well trained sailors, could still find themselves involved in an awkward close-quarters accident during routine harbour manoeuvres. Iveston herself came off rather better in the long run: paid off in July 1992, she escaped the scrapyard entirely and was handed over to the Sea Cadet Corps for further service, a considerably gentler retirement than the one awaiting the ship she had bumped into.

Iveston is worth a footnote of her own, because she had form. In July 1970, while lying at Ullapool, she was the scene of what the National Maritime Museum records as the last mutiny in the Royal Navy, an episode involving drink, Irish rebel songs outside the wardroom door and, eventually, three Ross-shire policemen; her account is in the article on HMS Iveston (M1151). Nineteen years later she and Hubberston made contact with each other coming off a berth in Ibiza. Ships of the same class handle identically, which is a considerable help when manoeuvring in company and no help at all when two of them are trying to leave the same wall in a crosswind.

The End

HMS Hubberston was paid off on 21 February 1991, after some 24 years of full operational service, and was finally disposed of on 13 May 1992, broken up at Brugse Scheepssloperij in Bruges, closing out the career of a minesweeper turned minehunter whose service had carried her from the jungles of Borneo to the harbours of Hong Kong and, in her final years, into an unplanned meeting with a sister ship in the Mediterranean.

Set end to end, her career is a fair summary of what the Royal Navy actually did between Suez and the Gulf. She was ordered in a mine-warfare panic, sat in reserve for eight years because there was nobody to man her, was rebuilt for a job that had only just become technically possible, and then spent twenty-six years doing almost everything except sweeping mines in anger: patrolling an undeclared war in Borneo, running stores up rivers to jungle garrisons, boarding junks off Hong Kong, exercising with NATO allies in the Channel, and finally bumping into her sister in a Spanish harbour. Not one shot in anger in thirty-six years afloat. That is not a criticism of her; it is very nearly the highest praise a mine countermeasures vessel can be given, since the entire object of the exercise is that nothing should ever happen.