HMS Iveston (M1151): The Ship of the Royal Navy's Last Mutiny

Built at Dartmouth

HMS Iveston was ordered on 19 March 1952 and built by Philip and Son at Dartmouth, laid down that October, launched on 1 June 1954 and completed on 29 June 1955, a Ton-class minesweeper measuring 152 feet overall and displacing 360 long tons normal, rising to 425 tons at deep load. She was originally powered by two Mirrlees diesel engines producing 2,500 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 15 knots.

A Significant Upgrade

HMS Iveston spent 1956 to 1962 in operational reserve before undergoing significant conversion and recommissioning on 16 October 1964, joining mine countermeasures operations at Port Edgar.

Her original magnetic sweep gear was replaced with Type 193 sonar detection equipment, and her engines were upgraded to Napier Deltic diesels rated at a considerably more powerful 3,000 brake horsepower, transforming her into a properly modern minehunter well suited to Cold War operational demands.

The engines she was given in that conversion deserve a mention, because the Napier Deltic is one of the more extraordinary pieces of British engineering of the period and it looks like nothing else. It is a two-stroke diesel arranged as an equilateral triangle, with three crankshafts, one at each corner, and eighteen cylinders forming the sides, each cylinder containing two pistons that come together in the middle rather than running up to a cylinder head. It has no cylinder heads at all. The point of the arrangement is power for weight and, crucially for a minehunter, a very low magnetic signature and low noise, and it was reliable enough that the same engine went into British Rail's fastest diesel locomotives, which is why enthusiasts of an entirely different sort get excited about it. The rest of the conversion, the removal of the sweep gear and the fitting of the Type 193 minehunting sonar, is set out in the article on HMS Hubberston (M1147). What came out of it was a quiet, precise, non-magnetic ship that could hold station over a mine, and she was the better part of a decade old before anybody thought to do it.

The Royal Navy's Last Mutiny

HMS Iveston earned herself an unusual and rather unwelcome place in naval history on 5 July 1970, at Ullapool, when what has since been recorded as the most recent mutiny in the Royal Navy took place aboard her.

Before the story goes any further it is worth knowing what mutiny actually means in law, because the popular image involves cutlasses and it is nothing of the kind. Under the Naval Discipline Act 1957 mutiny is a combination between two or more people subject to service law either to resist lawful authority, or to disobey it in circumstances that make the disobedience subversive of discipline, or simply to impede the performance of any duty. That is a very wide net. There is no requirement for violence, for weapons, or for anybody to try to take over the ship. Five men sitting down and declining to move, together, is squarely within the definition, and the reason the definition is drawn that wide is that a warship depends entirely on orders being obeyed at once by people who cannot leave. It was also, until remarkably recently, a capital offence. Espionage stopped carrying the death penalty in the armed forces in 1981, and mutiny remained on the list until an amendment to the Human Rights Bill removed the military death penalty altogether in October 1998. Nobody was going to hang five able seamen in 1970. It was still, technically, the charge for which they could have been.

It began, gloriously, over the bacon. Able Seaman Edward Griffiths complained about its condition, was told the galley was locked, and when the ship's coxswain, Chief Petty Officer Stanley Templeton, ordered him below, Griffiths grabbed him with one hand and struck him with the other. What followed was a four-hour sit-down protest in which Griffiths and four shipmates, Able Seamen Kirkbride, Smith, O'Malley and Bowers, staged what witnesses later described as a "humorous mutinous pirate scene", invoking characters from Mutiny on the Bounty and singing Irish rebel songs outside the officers' wardroom for good measure.

For a mutiny, it ended about as gently as one could hope: after four hours, the men were led peacefully off the ship by three local policemen from Ross-shire, no swords drawn and no one made to walk the plank, just a rather awkward escort into a police car at the quayside.

The timing is what makes the whole episode more than a curiosity. Twenty-six days after those five men were walked off the ship at Ullapool, on 31 July 1970, the Royal Navy issued its last rum ration. The decision had been taken in Parliament that January, in a debate the newspapers cheerfully called the Great Rum Debate, on the reasonable grounds that a large measure of neat spirit at midday and a modern warship full of complicated machinery did not belong together. The lower deck did not see it that way. Ships wore black armbands, several held mock funerals and threw their tots over the side, and the day has been called Black Tot Day ever since. That was the summer aboard a British warship in 1970: a service shrinking fast after the withdrawal from east of Suez, pay that had fallen well behind civilian wages, conditions in a 360-ton wooden minesweeper that were fairly grim even by naval standards, and the one daily consolation everybody had grown up with about to be taken away. None of that excuses hitting the coxswain. It does explain rather more about the atmosphere than a complaint about bacon does.

The five were court-martialled at HMS Cochrane in Rosyth on 18 August 1970, reportedly the Navy's first mutiny court martial since 1954, and were found guilty of mutiny and disobedience; Griffiths faced the additional charge of striking a superior officer. All five were sentenced to detention ranging from twelve to twenty-one months and dismissed from the Royal Navy "with disgrace," a notably rare and rather severe outcome for a dispute that had, by all accounts, started with some substandard bacon.

The severity of the sentences makes sense only against the history, and that history is why the Navy has never taken the word lightly. In April 1797 the entire Channel Fleet at Spithead refused to sail over pay, food and the treatment of the sick, and the government conceded almost everything; the Nore mutiny that followed a month later was crushed and twenty-nine men were hanged. Lord Howe, the admiral sent to settle Spithead, has his own place in the article on HMS Howe (32). And in September 1931 the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon refused duty over a twenty-five per cent cut in basic pay, beginning with the stokers of HMS Valiant and spreading through Rodney, Nelson and Hood, until the Admiralty backed down. The consequences of that one were not naval at all: news that the Royal Navy had stopped working caused a run on the pound, and Britain came off the gold standard six days later. That is the institutional memory the court martial at Rosyth was working with. Dismissal with disgrace, as distinct from ordinary dismissal, meant loss of everything, permanent exclusion from the service and a formal stain on the record, and it was handed down to five men in their twenties to make sure nobody else got any ideas.

A Long Second Career

HMS Iveston was decommissioned in 1992 and converted for training duties, becoming TS Iveston on her arrival at Tilbury on 28 August 1993, where she went on to serve the Sea Cadet Corps for more than two decades, giving generations of young cadets their first hands-on experience of a real naval vessel.

The organisation she went to is older than she was and older than most of the Royal Navy's own institutions. The Sea Cadet Corps began in 1854, when sailors coming home from the Crimea set up Naval Lads' Brigades in the back streets of the sea ports to do something for the orphans they found there; the first was at Whitstable. The Navy League took the brigades over in 1910, the Admiralty formally recognised them in 1919, and in January 1942 the Admiralty took on their training outright, George VI became Admiral of the Corps and the name was shortened to what it is now. The wartime expansion to something like four hundred units and fifty thousand cadets happened at the same time as the Warship Weeks, described in the article on HMS Intrepid (D10), with the result that a great many new cadet units took the name of the warship their town had just paid for. The Corps still has over thirty thousand cadets and volunteers. Iveston spent twenty-two years at Tilbury doing that job, which is longer than she spent doing the one she was built for.

Rising maintenance costs and safety concerns eventually caught up with her, and she was sold to ship breakers at Erith in March 2015, though some of her fixtures and fittings were saved beforehand and donated to the Marshlands Maritime Museum in King's Lynn, closing out the career of a minesweeper whose greatest claim to lasting historical notoriety came not from any action against an enemy, but from a single, truly rare breakdown in discipline, and a plate of bad bacon, at a Scottish port in the summer of 1970.

It is worth being slightly careful with the word notoriety. Nobody was hurt, nobody tried to take the ship, and the whole affair lasted four hours and ended with three policemen from Ross-shire walking five young men down a gangway. Set against the Nore, where men were hanged from their own yardarms, or Invergordon, where a fleet stopped work and knocked a currency off the gold standard, it is barely a footnote. What makes it worth remembering is precisely that it is the last one. A navy that mutinied in 1797, in 1931 and, after a fashion, in 1970 has not done so since, which over fifty-five years is a reasonable claim to having got something right. And the ship it happened in went on to spend two decades teaching teenagers how to be sailors, which is either an irony or a rather good joke, depending on how you look at it.