HMS Kirkliston (M1157): The First Ton Converted Into a Minehunter

Built in Belfast

HMS Kirkliston was ordered on 22 March 1952 and built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast as yard number 1518, laid down on 3 February 1953 and completed on 21 August 1954, a Ton-class minesweeper measuring 152 feet in length and displacing 360 tons standard.

She arrived at Belfast on 25 October 1954 to serve as a tender to the Ulster Division of the Royal Naval Reserve, temporarily renamed Kilmorey for that role, a common practice that saw Ton-class vessels lent out to reservist units under locally meaningful names. She reverted to her own name and full Royal Navy control in 1960, handing the Ulster tender role on to her sister ship HMS Alfriston.

The tender arrangement is worth explaining, because it accounts for the first six years of her life and it looks odd at first glance. The Royal Naval Reserve divisions needed real ships to train reservists in, and the Ton class, of which well over a hundred were built, was exactly the right size and complexity for the job: small enough for a part-time crew to learn end to end, and useful enough that the Navy got something back. What made it slightly strange was the naming. A ship lent to a division was usually given a name that meant something to the place rather than keeping her own, so Kirkliston, a village in West Lothian, became Kilmorey, a name that belongs firmly to County Down. The classic case is her sister HMS Alfriston (M1103), who carried three names in three postings and who took the Ulster job over from Kirkliston in 1960. Kirkliston went to the 101st Minesweeping Squadron at Belfast on 25 October 1954, barely two months after she was completed, and stayed there for the next six years.

Conversion to a Minehunter

HMS Kirkliston reverted to full Royal Navy service and, after conversion to more powerful Deltic engines, commissioned on 7 May 1962 for the 50th Minesweeper Squadron at Portland, redesignated the 3rd Minesweeping Squadron that October.

The re-engining that preceded the conversion mattered more than a line in a service record suggests. The Tons had been built with Mirrlees or Deltic diesels, and the Napier Deltic that Kirkliston received is one of the more remarkable pieces of British engineering of the period: a two-stroke diesel laid out as an equilateral triangle with three crankshafts and eighteen opposed-piston cylinders, giving an enormous amount of power for its weight and size. In a minehunter that mattered twice over, because the ship needed the power to work against a tide while holding station over a contact, and because a compact engine left room for the sonar, the divers and the gear that came with them. What a Deltic actually is, and why it sounds like nothing else afloat, is set out in the article on HMS Iveston (M1151).

She was decommissioned again that November for a more thorough conversion to minehunter configuration at Chatham, a job that ran from December 1962 to September 1964, returning to service that October with the 1st Minehunting Squadron at Port Edgar, now fitted with Type 193 sonar and stripped of her original magnetic sweep gear, a considerably more capable vessel than the ship that had first come off the slipway a decade earlier.

This is the part of her record that deserves to be better known, and it is not what she is usually remembered for. Kirkliston was the first Ton-class minesweeper the Royal Navy converted into a minehunter, which is to say she was the prototype for the whole idea. The distinction between sweeping and hunting matters: a sweeper drags gear behind her and hopes to cut or detonate whatever is down there, while a hunter finds the individual mine with sonar, holds herself over it and sends divers down to deal with it. The Admiralty had wanted a purpose-built minehunter since the early 1950s and had cancelled the design because no sonar then existed that could pick a mine out of a rocky seabed. The Plessey Type 193 changed that, and Kirkliston was the ship it was tried in: the sonar went into the hull beneath her bridge, the magnetic sweep gear came out, active rudders were fitted so she could be held precisely over a contact, and she carried four clearance divers and two inflatable boats. About fourteen more sisters followed her through the same conversion. What it involved in detail is set out in the article on HMS Hubberston (M1147).

She came out of Chatham in the autumn of 1964 not merely converted but promoted. When she joined the 1st Minehunting Squadron at Port Edgar in October she went as Senior Officer's ship, the squadron leader, which is a considerable compliment to a hull that had spent most of the previous decade as a reservist training tender on the Lagan. It also made a certain sense: if the squadron was going to work out how to use a capability nobody in the Royal Navy had ever had, the sensible place to put the man in charge was the ship the capability had been invented in. British minehunting, as a practical discipline rather than a paper proposal, effectively starts with this ship in this year.

A Typhoon Rescue That Earned a Rare Honour

HMS Kirkliston deployed to the Far East, joining the 6th Minesweeping Squadron at Singapore in 1966, where in July the following year she was holed below the waterline while recovering a steel target used for US aircraft bombing practice, an occupational hazard of the job that kept her under repair at Singapore for three months. She later moved with the squadron to Hong Kong in 1970.

The Far East posting took her a long way from mine warfare. By the time she reached Singapore in 1966 the Indonesian Confrontation was ending, and the Ton-class ships out there had settled into the general-purpose small-warship work the class turned out to be extremely good at: patrol, boarding, showing the flag, guard duties and whatever else needed a shallow-draught ship with a boat and a competent crew. Hong Kong from 1970 meant patrolling one of the busiest and most complicated stretches of water in the world, with a border, a very large amount of fishing traffic and a steady stream of people trying to cross by sea. That bombing-target accident is a fair sample of the job: three months of a ship's life disappearing into a repair berth because of a piece of scrap steel nobody was shooting at. Nobody writes despatches about that sort of thing, and it is most of what a small warship on a foreign station actually does.

It was there, during Typhoon Rose in August 1971, that she carried out the action for which she is best remembered. Working alongside two other minesweepers in appalling weather, she pulled 37 seamen from one stricken vessel and, separately, the only four survivors from the capsized Hong Kong to Macau ferry Fat Shan out of the 92 people who had been aboard, a notably dangerous rescue undertaken at the height of a storm that went on to kill 110 people and sink or damage more than 300 boats across the colony.

It is worth understanding what Typhoon Rose actually was before reading what Kirkliston did in it. Rose formed west of Guam on 10 August 1971, crossed northern Luzon on the 14th and came into the South China Sea aimed at Hong Kong. The Royal Observatory hoisted the No. 1 standby signal at five in the afternoon on the 14th, No. 3 at five past five on the morning of the 16th, No. 8 at twenty-five past twelve, No. 9 at ten past nine that evening, and the Hurricane Signal, No. 10, at ten to eleven at night. The maximum gust recorded at the Observatory itself was a hundred and twenty-one knots. At the top of Tai Mo Shan the anemometer registered a hundred and fifty knots before it broke at eleven minutes past two in the morning. A ship in the eye's path measured 953.7 millibars. Two hundred and eighty-eight millimetres of rain fell on 17 August, still the wettest calendar day ever recorded in a Hong Kong August, and the storm surge reached one and a quarter metres at Chi Ma Wan on Lantau, which is precisely where the ferry went over.

The Fat Shan was a Hong Kong to Macau ferry, and she capsized east of Lantau in the small hours of 17 August with ninety-two people aboard. Four came out of it alive. Seventy-three bodies were recovered and the rest were never found. Kirkliston's citation records that she took those four survivors out of hurricane-force wind and sea, and that she separately lifted thirty-seven seamen off another vessel in difficulties in the same area, landing everyone she had rescued on the island by Gemini inflatable so that the shore authorities could take over. Set that against the conditions just described: an inflatable boat, run repeatedly between a minesweeper and a beach, in a hundred-knot wind. Across the colony Rose killed a hundred and ten people, injured two hundred and eighty-six and left five thousand six hundred and forty-four from a thousand and thirty-two families homeless; more than thirty ocean-going ships went aground or collided and about three hundred smaller craft were sunk or damaged.

Her crew's actions were recognised the following year with the Wilkinson Sword of Peace, an honour awarded annually to the unit judged to have made the most significant contribution to peace and international relations, given not just for the typhoon rescue itself but for the ship's company's sustained work on construction and social projects in communities around Hong Kong more generally. It is often said to be the only occasion on which the award went to a Ton-class vessel, and that is not quite right, as the next paragraph explains.

One thing about the award needs putting straight, because it has been repeated so often that it is now attached to her name. The Ton Class Association's own page on Kirkliston says only that "it is believed" hers is the only Sword of Peace ever given to a Ton, and that belief does not survive contact with the association's own records: HMS Soberton, a Ton-class minesweeper of the 1958 vintage, was awarded the Wilkinson Sword of Peace for 1990, nineteen years after Kirkliston, and her story is told in the article on HMS Soberton (M1200). Two Swords of Peace to a single class of small minesweepers is arguably a better story than one anyway. It is also worth reading the citation properly. The award was not made for the rescue alone. It was made for the sustained efforts of the whole ship's company on construction and social projects in communities in and around Hong Kong, with the typhoon singled out for particular recognition. In other words the Navy was rewarding two years of unglamorous voluntary work by a crew of about forty, of which one appalling night happened to be the visible part.

Home Waters and a Long Retirement

HMS Kirkliston returned to Portsmouth in August 1972, later serving with STANAVFORCHAN, NATO's Channel naval force, between August and December 1975, and was employed in 1977 to help evaluate equipment intended for the new generation of Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels then entering development, a fitting final role for a ship whose career had spanned the transition from traditional wartime-style minesweeping to the more sophisticated minehunting techniques that would define the Cold War's closing decades.

The NATO posting is worth a note because the force she joined was a genuine novelty. The Standing Naval Force Channel was activated at Ostend on 11 May 1973 as a permanent multinational squadron of mine countermeasures vessels, normally British, Belgian and Dutch with regular German, Danish and occasionally Norwegian participation, kept together in peacetime and exercising as a unit. The reasoning was straightforward and rather bleak: the Channel and the southern North Sea are shallow, narrow and full of the traffic on which Western Europe depends, and the cheapest way for the Warsaw Pact to close them was to mine them. A standing force meant that the ships and the crews who would have to clear those mines already knew each other, already used the same procedures and were already in the right water. It later became the Mine Countermeasures Force North Western Europe and then, from 2005, Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 1, which is still doing the same job today.

The 1977 work is a neat piece of symmetry that the bare record rather hides. The ship in which the Royal Navy had first tried minehunting thirteen years earlier was now being used to evaluate the equipment intended for the Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels that would replace her class altogether. She helped begin British minehunting and she helped test what came after it. That, rather than a single night off Lantau, is the claim she can make that no other Ton can: she was the first of them to be turned into a minehunter, and the whole subsequent history of the discipline in the Royal Navy runs back through her. She was sold on 20 October 1991 to Brugse Scheepssloperij at Bruges and broken up there, thirty-seven years after she had been handed over at Belfast.

She was finally decommissioned on 2 December 1985 after 26 years of operational service, and was sold for scrap in 1991, broken up at Bruges, closing out the career of a minesweeper who had been the first of her class converted into a minehunter and who, one appalling night off Lantau, pulled forty-one people out of a hurricane.