HMS Pollington (M1173): The Wooden Warship That Outlived Steel Fashions

Built of Mahogany, Not Steel

HMS Pollington was a Ton-class coastal minesweeper, part of a remarkable family of 119 ships built during the 1950s from a design that deliberately turned its back on modern shipbuilding materials.

Steel, being magnetic, was exactly the wrong thing to build a minesweeper from, so the Ton class was constructed instead with a double layer of mahogany planking over an aluminium and timber frame, a remarkably old-fashioned approach to a thoroughly modern problem.

Pollington herself was built by Camper and Nicholson at Northam as the yard's 795th hull, taking 41 months to complete before being finished on 5 September 1958, armed with a single 40mm Bofors gun and, eventually, a machine gun mounted amidships.

It was an unlikely commission for a firm whose day job, for the better part of two centuries, was building racing yachts for royalty and shipping magnates rather than warships for the Admiralty, though wartime necessity had already given Camper and Nicholson plenty of practice knocking out patrol boats and minesweepers during both world wars.

It is worth knowing quite how odd the pairing was. The Gosport yard was founded in 1782, directly across the harbour from the Royal Dockyard at Portsmouth, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it was the builder the Royal Yacht Squadron went to. Charles Nicholson designed four J-class yachts there, three of which challenged for the America's Cup: Shamrock V for the grocer Sir Thomas Lipton in 1930, and Endeavour and Endeavour II for the aircraft manufacturer T O M Sopwith in 1934 and 1936. The yard also re-rigged George V's Britannia, and in 1948 it built the little Dragon-class Bluebottle that the members of the Island Sailing Club at Cowes clubbed together to give Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip as a wedding present, and which went on to win a bronze medal at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.

And that is precisely why Pollington exists. After 1945 there was very little timber to be had and a good deal less appetite among the sort of people who used to commission ninety-foot racing cutters, and the firm kept going on repair work and government orders for wooden minesweepers. The Ton class was not a curious sideline for Camper and Nicholsons. For a decade it was a large part of the reason the yard was still open, and the mahogany planking and the shipwrights who knew how to lay it were exactly the same ones that had been going into America's Cup challengers twenty years before.

A Ship Named Mersey

Pollington's working life began in October 1959, when she commissioned not under her own name but as HMS Mersey, serving the 101st Royal Naval Reserve Minesweeping Squadron based in Liverpool, a common arrangement in which RNR divisions gave their attached vessels a local, river-named identity for administrative and recruiting purposes.

The naming made a particular kind of sense in Liverpool: the city's own RNR shore establishment had itself been called HMS Eagle from 1904 until 1918, when it handed that name over to a newly-commissioned aircraft carrier and became HMS Eaglet instead, so a reserve minesweeper flying the name of the Mersey was very much in keeping with the local tradition.

Under that arrangement, later renamed the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron in 1962, she spent the 1960s and much of the 1970s doing exactly the kind of steady, unglamorous work a reserve minesweeper existed for: training weekend sailors and reservists in seamanship and minesweeping, while making regular visits to ports around the United Kingdom and northern Europe.

Gibraltar, the West Indies and a Norwegian King

Training duty did not mean Pollington stayed close to home. Between 1963 and 1971 she made near-annual deployments to Gibraltar each August and September, under an exercise series named Rockhaul and Mainhaul, skipping the run only in 1965, 1966 and 1968. In June 1963 she took part in Operation Cable Lay, a live minesweeping operation based at Borkum in the North Sea, and from February to April 1965 she sailed to the West Indies as part of Operation Stop Gap, a deployment of three Royal Naval Reserve minesweepers and a Royal Fleet Auxiliary.

Three years later, in May 1968, she was back off Borkum for a second live minesweeping operation, Operation New Broom, accounting for the last of her missed Gibraltar seasons.

In 1973 she crossed the Atlantic again for Exercise Maplehaul, visiting ports on Canada's east coast.

Perhaps her most charming moment of ceremonial duty came on 3 August 1979, when she embarked King Olav V of Norway for a day so that he could review the Manx herring fleet, a small but memorable piece of royal maritime pageantry involving a Norwegian monarch, a wooden British minesweeper, and the fishing fleet of the Isle of Man.

The visit was no passing courtesy call. 1979 was the millennium year of Tynwald, the Manx parliament that traces its own roots back to Norse settlers and is generally reckoned the oldest continuously-sitting parliament in the world, and King Olav's week-long tour of the island that August, arriving aboard the Norwegian royal yacht KS Norge, was part of a wider millennium celebration that had already seen a replica Viking longship, Odin's Raven, sail from Trondheim to Peel that July with a joint Manx and Norwegian crew. Against that backdrop, a Ton-class minesweeper built of mahogany rather than steel plate seems, in its own quiet way, an entirely fitting vessel to have been standing by for a Viking king's descendant reviewing a fishing fleet with roots stretching back centuries of its own.

From Training Ship to Fishery Protection

Pollington was paid off to reserve in November 1975, but her career was not over.

She was recommissioned at Chatham on 11 February 1978 and spent the next seven years on fishery protection duties, a role that had taken on renewed importance during and after the long-running Cod Wars with Iceland, patrolling British waters to enforce fishing limits and generally keep an eye on a stretch of sea that mattered a great deal to a great many coastal livelihoods, right through until she paid off on 28 March 1985.

A Long Working Retirement

After twenty-two years of varied service, Pollington's final paying-off left her laid up awaiting disposal rather than heading straight for the breakers, a common enough fate for a warship whose fighting days were over but whose actual demolition had yet to be scheduled. A photograph taken as she got under way from Portsmouth on 4 June 1986 catches her a little over a year into that wait, still trim in outline despite having no operational future left.

HMS Pollington was finally sold on 25 March 1987 to SB Queenborough at Cairnryan for breaking up, joining a yard that, only a few years earlier, had already broken up two of the Royal Navy's last conventional aircraft carriers, Ark Royal and Eagle, an odd scrapyard neighbourhood for a wooden minesweeper a tenth their size. It brought to a close the career of a ship built from a material more associated with fine furniture than warships, but which had proved every bit as durable as her steel-hulled contemporaries.

An Unsung Class, Well Represented

The Ton class as a whole quietly did some of the Royal Navy's most important unglamorous work of the Cold War era, from patrols off Borneo and Malaysia to mine clearance in the Suez Canal after the Yom Kippur War, and HMS Pollington's own mixture of reservist training, fishery protection and the odd moment of royal ceremony is a fair reflection of just how flexible, and how quietly indispensable, these wooden little ships turned out to be.

Several of her sisters have their own accounts here. HMS Cuxton (M1125) came out of the same yard three years earlier and sets out the non-magnetic construction in detail; HMS Nurton (M1166) was on Operation New Broom in the same month of 1968 and outlasted the entire class; and HMS Belton (M1199) spent even longer than Pollington on fishery protection and came to a more dramatic end.