HMS Maxton (M1165): The First Ship Through Suez Since the Six-Day War

The Build: Harland and Wolff

HMS Maxton was laid down at Harland and Wolff's Belfast yard on 23 May 1955, completed on 19 February 1957 after a construction period of 21 months, and finally commissioned on 4 July 1958 for the 104th Minesweeping Squadron based in Malta, a Ton-class coastal minesweeper of the kind that formed the backbone of the Royal Navy's mine countermeasures fleet for decades after the Second World War.

Patrolling a Troubled Cyprus

HMS Maxton was posted to Cyprus between 1958 and 1961, a period of considerable unrest on the island in the run-up to and immediately following independence, and sustained damage there in a collision with HMS Undaunted near Larnaca in 1959, a reminder that even routine patrol duty in busy, crowded waters could carry its own hazards quite separate from the mines she was actually built to hunt.

A Cyprus patrol was a more particular thing than the phrase suggests. The 104th and the 108th Minesweeping Squadrons both lived at Sliema Creek in Malta, eight ships apiece, and took the island in turns. Getting there took about four days to Famagusta. Going round it took about six more. The ships generally lay at anchor through the daylight and worked the coast after dark, stopping caiques and small coasters and looking inside them, over and over, for months.

What they were looking for, and why an island revolt turned into a naval problem, is set out in the article on HMS Crofton (M1216). What it meant for Maxton was three years of night work in crowded coastal water, which is also how she came to be close enough to HMS Undaunted to hit her.

Rebuilt as a Deltic Minehunter

HMS Maxton went into reserve before undergoing a significant conversion between 1964 and 1966, re-engined with Deltic diesels and adapted for the minehunting role rather than pure minesweeping, a modernisation that extended her useful life considerably and reflected the Royal Navy's growing emphasis on precisely locating and neutralising individual mines rather than simply sweeping channels clear in bulk.

A Decade in the Far East

HMS Maxton recommissioned in 1966 and spent much of the following years in the Far East, joining the 6th Mine Countermeasures Squadron based first in Singapore and later in Hong Kong, serving there through until 1971, a long and demanding overseas posting typical of the Royal Navy's continuing presence east of Suez in that period.

First Through Suez Since the Six-Day War

HMS Maxton earned her most notable historical distinction in 1974, taking part in Operation Rheostat as one of a four-strong Royal Navy squadron, alongside HMS Abdiel, HMS Bossington and HMS Wilton, sent to help clear the Suez Canal of war debris and unexploded ordnance left behind since the canal's closure during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The task force worked its way down the canal from May 1974, freeing fourteen merchant ships that had sat trapped in the Great Bitter Lake since the war, before Maxton herself finished the job on 14 July 1974.

On that day she laid claim to being the first vessel to complete a full end-to-end transit of the canal since its closure, more than a year before the canal's wider public reopening in June 1975, a remarkably striking piece of naval history for what was, in most other respects, a fairly ordinary coastal minesweeper simply doing the job she had always been built for.

It is worth knowing what she was transiting. The canal had been shut since June 1967 and was not merely unused but obstructed: mines, unexploded ordnance, wrecked and scuttled shipping, and fourteen merchant ships sitting in the Great Bitter Lake gathering desert sand, whose extraordinary eight-year internment is told in the article on HMS Burnaston (M1116). The wider clearance operation, and how Britain came to be asked to do it, is in the article on HMS Abdiel (N21).

Maxton went from one end to the other. The canal itself did not open to everybody else until 5 June 1975, eight years to the day after the war that shut it, with President Sadat standing on the bridge of a destroyer at the head of the ceremonial convoy out of Port Said. A 360-ton wooden minesweeper from Belfast had done it eleven months earlier, without a band.

A Quiet Contribution to the Falklands

HMS Maxton's own crew were not deployed to the South Atlantic in 1982, but personnel from the ship were detached for service during the Falklands War, a further small thread connecting her long career to one of the defining Royal Navy operations of the late twentieth century.

That thread is thicker than it looks. The Ton class as a whole did not go to the Falklands, and could not: they were small, elderly and built for the Channel, and eight thousand miles of South Atlantic was out of the question, while the first of the new Hunt-class ships were not yet ready. So the Navy took the crews instead. Five deep-sea trawlers were requisitioned from Hull, given rudimentary sweep gear and commissioned under Ton-class names, Cordella as Upton, Farnella as Wotton, Junella as Bickington, Northella as Soberton and Pict as Bildeston, and manned largely by the ships' companies of Ton-class minesweepers.

They sailed from Portland on 27 April 1982 as the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron and between 23 June and 4 July, whenever the weather let them, swept the Argentine minefield laid across the entrance to Port Stanley, recovering ten of the twenty-one moored mines that had been put down. It is one of the least-known jobs of the entire campaign, done by fishermen's ships with minesweeper crews aboard, and it is the reason a Ton-class ship sitting quietly in home waters could still send her people to a war in the South Atlantic.

Twenty-Seven Years of Service

HMS Maxton was finally paid off on 19 August 1988 after twenty-seven years of operational service, a notably impressive span for a minesweeper originally built in the 1950s, and was sold for breaking up by Franciscomata SA at El Ferrol on 17 April 1989, closing out the career of a small, unglamorous ship that had nonetheless found her way into a genuine piece of Middle Eastern history.