HMS Kedleston (M1153): A Wooden-Hulled Minesweeper of the Ton Class

Built at Sunderland

HMS Kedleston was laid down on 26 November 1952 by William Pickersgill and Sons at Sunderland and completed on 2 July 1955 after a 32-month build, one of 119 Ton-class minesweepers built for the Royal Navy through the 1950s, a large and notably important class that formed the backbone of Britain's mine countermeasures capability well into the Cold War, covered in full in our own guide to the Ton class.

She took her name, in keeping with the class's convention of borrowing British placenames ending in "-ton", from the Derbyshire village of Kedleston, a village so thoroughly overshadowed by its own manor house that the original settlement was largely swept away in 1759 to make room for the grand Palladian pile now known as Kedleston Hall. The Admiralty's first instinct for naming the class had in fact been rather less stately: an early scheme would have christened these minesweepers after insects, Red Ant and Green Cockchafer reportedly among the candidates, before somebody sensibly thought better of it.

The insect scheme is funnier than it looks, because the Royal Navy had in fact used exactly those names before and would have been perfectly serious about using them again. In 1915 the Admiralty ordered twelve shallow-draught river gunboats, intended originally for operations on the Danube, and named them Aphis, Bee, Cicala, Cockchafer, Cricket, Glowworm, Gnat, Ladybird, Mantis, Moth, Scarab and Tarantula. The Danube plan came to nothing and most of them spent the next quarter of a century on the rivers of China instead, patrolling the Yangtze hundreds of miles inland, protecting British traders and missionaries and occasionally being shot at from the bank by whichever warlord held that stretch of the river. So an Admiralty official in 1950 proposing Red Ant and Green Cockchafer for a class of minesweepers was not being whimsical; he was following precedent. Somebody nonetheless decided that a Cold War minesweeping force would command more respect if it were named after English villages, and the Tons ended up sounding like a list of stops on a branch line.

The village she was named for is worth the detour. Kedleston sits about four miles from Derby and it very nearly does not exist: when Sir Nathaniel Curzon set about building a new house there in the 1750s, the old village was in the way of the view, so most of it was demolished and rebuilt further off, which was standard practice for anybody with money and a park in that period. What replaced it was Kedleston Hall, designed largely by Robert Adam and generally reckoned his finest country house, built essentially as a showcase rather than a home. The family produced, a century and a half later, George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India and later Foreign Secretary, who took the title Baron Curzon of Kedleston and filled a room of the house with what he brought back from Asia. There is a certain pleasing symmetry in a 360-ton wooden minesweeper named after a Derbyshire hamlet that was knocked down to improve the view from a Palladian mansion, and in that ship spending her career doing entirely unglamorous work in the North Sea.

Like her many sister ships, she was constructed largely from wood and other non-ferromagnetic materials, a deliberate design choice intended to keep her own magnetic signature as low as possible and so reduce the risk of triggering the very magnetic mines she was built to sweep.

Fourteen years between completion and first commission is the standard Ton-class story and it needs explaining, because it looks like waste and was a deliberate decision. Britain ordered 119 of these ships in the early 1950s in a genuine panic about Soviet mine warfare, and then discovered that ordering minesweepers is a great deal easier than manning them; a large part of the class went straight from the builders into reserve and sat there. What brought Kedleston forward in 1967 was not a crisis but a technology: high-definition sonar had finally made it possible to hunt individual mines rather than sweep areas, and the Admiralty went back to the hulls it had in store and converted them. Out came the sweep gear, in went minehunting sonar and Napier Deltic engines, and a ship completed in 1955 finally went to sea in 1969 to do a job that had not existed when she was built. That conversion and what it involved is set out in the article on HMS Hubberston (M1147), and the extraordinary engine she was given is described in the article on HMS Iveston (M1151).

A Working Life With Little Fanfare

Kedleston's own service record shows exactly why fourteen years separate her 1955 completion and her first commission: rather than going straight to sea, she spent 1967 to 1969 at Devonport being converted into a Deltic-engined minehunter, swapping her original diesels for the more powerful Napier Deltic engines fitted to later Tons and gaining minehunting sonar alongside her sweeping gear. Only once that work was finished did she commission, on 23 January 1969, to join the Fishery Protection Squadron based at Port Edgar, going on to combine minesweeping and minehunting duties with the fishery patrols that gave the class its enduring peacetime purpose.

On 4 September 1975 her crew arrested ten foreign trawlers fishing illegally off the North Yorkshire coast in a single day, every skipper later convicted and fined, a genuinely impressive haul for one ship on one patrol. She moved on from Port Edgar to the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron's North East Group in January 1976, underwent a major refit at Gibraltar between October 1979 and July 1980, and transferred again to the 3rd Mine Countermeasures Squadron at Rosyth in October 1986, before returning to the Fishery Protection Squadron in May 1988. On 9 September that year a serious fire broke out on board that kept her under repair for two months.

A serious fire aboard a wooden minesweeper is a considerably more frightening event than the two-line entry suggests. A Ton is built of double mahogany planking on aluminium frames, with a great deal of timber, paint, varnish, cabling and fuel in a hull 152 feet long, and there is nowhere for anybody to go: a fire below in a small wooden ship can take hold in minutes and, once the structure itself is alight, the ship is finished. Two months under repair for the damage suggests it was caught in time and that it very nearly was not, and it is worth remembering that when a warship catches fire the people fighting it are the same people who live in it, with no way off except into the sea.

Ten arrests in a single day is a genuinely remarkable figure, and the timing makes it more so. September 1975 was the exact moment at which Britain was losing the Third Cod War to Iceland: British trawlers were being chased out of Icelandic waters by gunboats cutting their gear, the Royal Navy was about to send frigates north again, and the whole argument was about whether a coastal state could exclude foreign fishermen from waters it claimed. On 4 September, while all that was going on, a wooden minesweeper off the North Yorkshire coast arrested ten foreign trawlers for doing in British waters precisely what British trawlers wanted to go on doing in Icelandic ones, and every skipper was convicted and fined. Nobody at the time seems to have found this funny. Britain conceded the two hundred miles the following June, and then, from 1 January 1977, drew its own two hundred mile line and spent the next fifty years enforcing it. The squadron that does that work is described in the article on HMS Jersey (P295).

Her final operational chapter was arguably her most serious. From December 1988 to 1991 she was transferred to the Northern Ireland Squadron and flew fourteen patrols under Operation Grenada, the Royal Navy's codename for watching the Ulster coast from Carlingford Lough round to Lough Foyle against arms being smuggled to paramilitaries, working now purely as a patrol vessel with her minehunting gear left idle for the duration.

Her last three years were spent doing something entirely different, and the choice of ship was not accidental. The Northern Ireland Squadron watched the coast from Carlingford Lough round to Lough Foyle for weapons and explosives coming in by sea for paramilitaries on both sides, and the work needed a vessel that could operate in shallow water and narrow loughs, sit for hours at low speed, put a boarding party into a small boat and search fishing craft without being intimidating about it. A minesweeper with her hunting gear shut down was almost perfect. What that squadron did and how long it did it for is described in the article on HMS Itchen (M2009). Fourteen patrols in three years, in water where the border runs down the middle of the lough and the other side of it is a different country, is a good deal more demanding than the phrase patrol vessel implies.

A Quiet End

HMS Kedleston paid off in 1991 and was finally sold for disposal on 20 April 1992, towed away to Bruges in Belgium to be broken up, closing out a service life that, for a ship whose own record turns out to be rather better documented than most of her many sisters, made a genuinely significant contribution to Britain's Cold War naval defences.

The Ton class as a whole represented one of the largest single classes of vessel the postwar Royal Navy ever operated, and ships like HMS Kedleston, many of whose sister vessels have far thinner individual service records, collectively kept British waters clear of a threat that never went away for the better part of four decades.

The yard that built her did not outlive her by much. Sunderland was, for a large part of the nineteenth century, the biggest shipbuilding town in the world, with sixty-five yards on the Wear by 1840 and a habit of launching more tonnage than any comparable place anywhere; William Pickersgill and Sons of Southwick was one of the survivors of all that, and it closed in 1988, in the same round of closures that ended shipbuilding on the Wear altogether after some six hundred years. Kedleston was sold for breaking up four years later. She had been built in a town that no longer builds ships, in a class that no longer exists, to counter a threat from a country that no longer exists, and she spent her last years doing a job in Northern Ireland that has since, thankfully, also ceased to exist. Very little of the world she was made for is still standing, which is the ordinary fate of a Cold War warship and no reflection whatever on the ship.