HMS Lewiston (M1208): Clearing Old Mines to Make Way for a New Cable

The Build: Buckie

HMS Lewiston was laid down on 19 October 1956 by Herd and Mackenzie at Buckie in Banffshire, a small Scottish yard rather than one of the larger shipbuilding centres more usually associated with Royal Navy construction, and better known locally for turning out steam drifters and seine-net trawlers than warships, and completed on 16 June 1960 after a lengthy 45-month build as the yard's hull number 144, commissioning on 30 August that year as Senior Officer's ship of the 100th Minesweeping Squadron, based at Port Edgar on the Firth of Forth.

The yard deserves a paragraph, because it is the least likely warship builder in the whole programme. Herd and Mackenzie started at Findochty and moved along the coast to Buckie, and what it built was fishing boats: steam drifters and seine-net boats, in timber and in steel, for skippers who lived within a few miles of the slipway. It had form on Admiralty work, mind. During the Second World War it turned out eleven minesweepers, eight of a hundred and five feet and three of a hundred and twenty-six, and it came back to the trade afterwards; HMS Woolaston was the sixteenth minesweeper it built.

That a yard of that size was building ships for the Royal Navy at all is down to the way the Ton class was ordered, with big firms acting as parent to clusters of small ones so that yards which had never seen a warship could turn one out to a common drawing. How that worked is set out in the article on HMS Hodgeston (M1146). It also explains the forty-five months. A wooden minesweeper is a slow, fussy thing to build, and a yard used to laying down a drifter in the spring and launching her before the season was not set up for it.

The firm did not outlast her by all that much as an independent concern. The name went, the slipways passed to Buckie Shipyards, and they are worked today by Macduff Shipyards, still building fishing boats on the Moray Firth. Lewiston is one of the very few Royal Navy ships that can be traced back to a yard whose usual customer was a Banffshire skipper.

Clearing the Way for a Telegraph Cable

HMS Lewiston spent 1961 and 1962 on exercises and visits across North European waters, before undertaking one of the more unusual and practically significant missions of her career between May and July 1963: Operations Clear Road and Cable Way, which saw her clear leftover German mines from the Second World War specifically to allow the safe laying of a new telegraph cable between Britain and Germany, a particularly useful piece of infrastructure work that depended entirely on the kind of patient, careful minesweeping her class had been built for.

That September she took part in Operation Ice Scott, clearing British-laid anti-submarine minefields in the approaches to Iceland, work that removed Britain's own wartime defensive minefields rather than an enemy's.

It is worth saying whose minefields those were, because Operation Ice Scott was the Royal Navy clearing up after itself twenty years late. Between 1940 and 1943 the 1st Minelaying Squadron, working out of Kyle of Lochalsh, sowed the Northern Barrage across the gaps between Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland: an enormous defensive field intended to make the passages into the Atlantic lethal for German submarines. The scale of it, and what it was like to lay, is set out in the article on HMS Adventure (M23).

The trouble with a defensive minefield is that it does not know the war has ended. Those mines sat in the approaches to Iceland for two decades, in the middle of some of the busiest fishing grounds in the North Atlantic, and somebody had to go and take them out again. That somebody, in September 1963, was Lewiston and her squadron. Between Ice Scott and the cable job earlier the same year she spent that whole summer undoing other people's war, first Germany's and then Britain's.

A Long Working Life

HMS Lewiston went through various reassignments following a 1965 recommissioning, serving with different minesweeping squadrons over the following years, before finishing her active career between 1981 and 1983 as a London Division tender for the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron of the Royal Naval Reserve, a role that put her to use training reservists rather than sweeping mines in anger.

A Final Role as a Target

HMS Lewiston paid off in January 1984, and rather than being sold or scrapped in the conventional way, she was expended as a target on the Aberporth Ranges in 1985, a common enough fate for older naval vessels whose hulls could still provide valuable data for weapons testing even once their working lives were over, closing out the career of a minesweeper whose most memorable contribution had been clearing the way, quite literally, for a piece of Cold War telecommunications infrastructure rather than for any single dramatic wartime action.

The Aberporth Ranges are worth a note too, because being expended there put her in some interesting company. The danger area covers roughly two thousand square miles of Cardigan Bay, and the establishment behind it goes back to early 1940, when the Projectile Development Establishment was evacuated out of Fort Halstead in Kent to a quiet bit of the Welsh coast to get on with solid-fuel rockets. Liquid-fuelled missiles followed in 1945, and in 1954 a guided weapon shot down a pilotless target aircraft over the bay for the first time anywhere.

Ships have been part of the furniture there for decades. The hulk of the old destroyer HMS Venus lay in the bay as a target: a Sea Dart development round was fired at her on 15 December 1967, and on 16 February 1968 a Sea Slug fired from HMS Glamorgan (D19) hit her squarely. The frigate HMS Loch Fada (F390) went the other way and became a launch platform on the same range.

So the last thing Lewiston did was stand still in Cardigan Bay and be shot at, in the service of the weapons that had already made her class obsolete. There is a certain symmetry in it. She was built of wood in a fishing yard to hunt a weapon that could not see her, and she was finished off by a weapon that could.