HMS Laleston (M1158): From Minesweeping to Underwater Trials

Laid Down at Harland and Wolff

HMS Laleston was laid down on 12 March 1953 by Harland and Wolff in Belfast as yard number 1519 and completed on 10 November 1954 after a construction period of some twenty months, entering service in January 1955 attached to the Vernon Training Squadron alongside the crew of her sister ship HMS Bildeston, a fairly typical start for a Ton-class minesweeper in the busy postwar years when the Royal Navy was still working out exactly how best to deploy its very large fleet of these versatile little ships.

Refits and a New Set of Engines

HMS Laleston underwent extensive refit work through 1956, passing through the hands of four different commanding officers in fairly short order, and on 17 November 1959 found herself on the rather more dignified duty of ferrying a party of admirals out to sea, before being paid off in October 1960 for a prolonged conversion that saw her fitted with more powerful Deltic diesel engines, a significant upgrade that considerably extended her useful service life.

She recommissioned in January 1963 as Senior Officer's ship of the 3rd Minesweeping Squadron based at Portland, a position of some seniority within her flotilla, remaining operational until January 1965, when she was paid off into reserve.

A Second Career in Diving Trials

HMS Laleston recommissioned as a diving trials ship on 7 March 1967, a role she went on to fill for over a decade, conducting operations across northern European waters and, in October and November 1971, a deployment to the Mediterranean, in support of the Royal Navy's diving and underwater research programmes, a specialist and rather less glamorous role than conventional minesweeping but one that made good use of a hull and crew already well versed in careful, methodical work below the waterline.

Diving trials ship is a job title that hides the work, so it is worth saying what was actually done to her. The sweep gear came out. In its place went a divers' classroom and changing room and a two-compartment compression chamber, bolted down on the sweep deck where the winches and the float gear had been. In March 1967 she relieved an older vessel, HMS Miner III, as a tender to HMS Vernon, the Navy's diving and mine warfare school at Portsmouth, and her job from then on was to take divers out of the harbour and put them into open water, which is the only place anybody has ever learned to dive properly.

She was not the deep diving ship. That was HMS Reclaim, whose record dives on helium and oxygen and whose submarine rescue work are described in the article on HMS Reclaim (A231). Laleston had the everyday end of the same business: training divers, working dives and equipment trials in northern European water, which is cold, dark, tidal and thoroughly unpleasant, and which is precisely where British divers were going to have to work.

She carried a second and considerably grander duty alongside it. She was the legacy despatch boat for the Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command, which is to say that a wooden minesweeper with a compression chamber on her after deck was also, when required, the boat that took the Commander-in-Chief to sea. It is a very Royal Navy arrangement.

Along the way she found time for rather more ceremonial duties too, escorting Sir Alec Rose's yacht Lively Lady up the Channel on 30 June 1968 as he neared the end of his celebrated solo circumnavigation, and taking part in the Spithead Review on 28 June 1977, marking the Queen's Silver Jubilee.

Sir Alec Rose deserves rather more than half a sentence, because he was not a yachtsman in the usual sense of the word and because he was, in a manner of speaking, one of the Navy's own. He kept a greengrocer's shop in Southsea, a mile or so from where Laleston lay, he had been born in Canterbury in 1908, and he had spent the war in the Royal Navy as a diesel mechanic in the engine room of the convoy escort HMS Leith. He was fifty-nine when he set off.

He had already tried once. In 1966, hearing that Francis Chichester meant to sail round the world alone, Rose decided to go at the same time and make a race of it. Lively Lady was a yawl designed by Frederick Shepherd and built at Calcutta in 1948, and she was struck by a fishing boat; between the damage and a run of mechanical failures he was forced into Plymouth. Chichester himself advised him to give it up. He did, and regretted it, and watched from home while Chichester became the first man to sail round the world alone with a single stop.

He went again on 16 July 1967, on his own, stopping only at Melbourne and at Bluff in New Zealand. He came back into Portsmouth on 4 July 1968, three hundred and fifty-four days after he left, with a flotilla the BBC put at more than four hundred boats around him and Southsea seafront packed solid to watch him do it. Laleston had gone out to meet him four days earlier and brought him up the Channel. He was knighted the day after he got in.

It is a rather good arrangement when you set it out plainly. The Royal Navy sent a minesweeper down Channel to escort home a fifty-nine-year-old greengrocer who had last worn its uniform in a boiler suit on the convoy routes, and got him in past the crowds. Lively Lady survived him and is still afloat and preserved. Laleston went to a breaker's yard at Barking.

A Long Career Comes to an End

In April 1978 she took part in an environmental clean-up operation before joining the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron and the Northwest Sea Training Group that November, finishing out her service there until finally paying off in February 1982 after 22 years of active naval service.

The environmental clean-up operation of April 1978 has a name and it is worth using it: Amoco Cadiz. The supertanker lost her steering in heavy weather and went onto the Portsall Rocks off Brittany on 16 March, broke up over the following fortnight and put 223,000 tonnes of crude oil and 4,000 tonnes of bunker fuel into the Channel. It remains the largest spill ever caused by a tanker running aground. Three hundred and twenty kilometres of the Brittany coast were fouled and the oil worked its way east as far as the Channel Islands.

Something like four thousand four hundred men and fifty vessels worked on it at sea, British ships and British sailors among them, and Laleston was one of them. The British end of that response is set out in the article on HMS Nubian (F131). As a last substantial job it fits her rather well: a ship built to find mines, rebuilt to put divers in the water, finishing up clearing oil out of somebody else's sea.

She was sold to G and T Services of Barking for breaking up on 26 February 1985, closing out the career of a minesweeper whose working life had taken her a very long way from her original purpose, from sweeping mines in home waters to conducting sensitive diving trials across two seas.