HMS Portisham (M2781): The Minesweeper That Rescued a Dutch Aircrew Instead of Sweeping Mines

One of Ninety-Three, Built for a War That Didn't Come

HMS Portisham was a Ham-class inshore minesweeper, one of 93 small wooden-hulled vessels built by the Royal Navy during the 1950s in anticipation of the kind of mine warfare the Cold War might one day demand in home waters. She was built by the Dorset Yacht Company at Hamworthy, near Poole, completed in 1955 and commissioned in 1956, taking her name, in slightly altered form and following the whole class's habit of borrowing place names ending in "-ham", from the Dorset village of Portesham.

It is a fitting namesake for a warship: Portesham was the home village of Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, Nelson's own flag captain aboard HMS Victory at Trafalgar and the man popularly, if not quite accurately, remembered for "Kiss me, Hardy." The 72-foot Hardy Monument still stands above the village on Black Down, deliberately built in 1844 in the shape of a spyglass so it could double as a landmark for passing shipping.

Hardy is worth following past Trafalgar, because almost everybody stops there and he did not. He was made a baronet the year after, commanded on the Lisbon, North American and South American stations, was a rear-admiral by 1825 and in 1830 became First Naval Lord, which is to say the professional head of the Royal Navy. The man who knelt on the Victory's orlop deck and kissed his dying admiral twice, once on the forehead and once on the cheek, before going back up to fight the ship, spent four years running the entire service.

From 1834 he was Governor of Greenwich Hospital, living in what is now Admiral's House with his wife Louisa and two unmarried daughters, and the pensioners there were fond of him. He got them out of eighteenth-century knee breeches and into long trousers, and he disliked handing out punishments. He also had one splendid and entirely unexpected weakness: he would not get on a train. When the London and Greenwich Railway opened in December 1836, Lady Louisa went to the ceremony and thoroughly enjoyed the twenty-minute run. Hardy pronounced travel by steam a needless risk to run, never once boarded a railway carriage, and went up to London by road for the remaining three years of his life. He died on 20 September 1839, taken ill after his usual walk round the hospital grounds, and lies in the mausoleum there.

The Royal Navy has named a succession of ships Hardy after him and exactly one, this one, after his village. The last of the Hardys, HMS Hardy (F54), was the first Type 14 frigate and ended her days being shot at with guided missiles, which is a fate the man who thought a steam train unreasonably dangerous would have struggled to picture.

At just over 100 feet long with a wooden hull built to avoid triggering magnetic mines, she was a modest, purpose-built little ship, and like the great majority of her 92 sisters, she never actually swept a mine in genuine wartime conditions; the war the whole class had been built to fight simply never arrived.

A Training Ship in All But Name

With no shooting war to fight, Portisham's real value turned out to be as a training platform. The Royal Naval Auxiliary Service had been formed in 1963, built around the old Royal Naval Minewatching Service, to give British ports a trained volunteer reserve ready to respond in the event of a nuclear emergency, and by the mid-1960s it had taken on ten mothballed Ham-class minesweepers, Portisham among them, alongside sisters with names like Birdham, Odiham, Pagham, Puttenham and Shrivenham.

It was steady, useful, unspectacular work, keeping generations of RNXS volunteers familiar with real ship handling and seamanship aboard a genuine former warship rather than a simulator or a converted civilian craft. The RNXS itself outlived Portisham's own time in it by a decade, before being disbanded in 1994 under Ministry of Defence cuts and its role picked up almost immediately by the newly formed Maritime Volunteer Service.

An Unexpected Rescue off the Dutch Coast

Portisham's quietest of careers produced at least one moment of genuine drama. On 15 August 1973, Royal Netherlands Navy Breguet Atlantic maritime patrol aircraft number 257 developed an unexplained technical fault mid-patrol and ditched roughly 1,500 metres off Wassenaar on the Dutch coast. Portisham was among the vessels that helped recover all fourteen crew alive, a rescue that put a small British training minesweeper in the unlikely position of coming to the aid of a downed military aircrew from an allied navy.

The aircraft itself was towed ashore but judged damaged beyond economical repair and written off. It is exactly the sort of incident that never makes a ship famous but which, for the fourteen men actually pulled from the water that day, mattered rather more than any battle honour.

Retirement, Neglect, and an Unlikely Second Life

Portisham was finally withdrawn from service in the early 1980s and sold out of naval hands in 1989, after which she sat largely unused in an Essex boatyard for the best part of two decades, the fate of a great many small former naval vessels for whom nobody quite has a plan. Her fortunes changed in 2007, when Shane Kennedy, an electronics engineer, bought her for around €34,000 and spent a further €70,000 refitting her before sailing her across to Ireland.

He brought Portisham into Balbriggan Harbour in north County Dublin in 2010, moving aboard despite Fingal County Council warning him she would not be permitted to stay. The council took him to court in 2012 after he turned down offers of alternative housing, and in 2013 the High Court ruled the vessel unauthorised development, unseaworthy, unregistered and uninsured, a verdict Kennedy disputed, citing his own surveyor's opinion that she was "basically sound."

Kennedy fought the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, and won, after a fashion. In a final ruling on 25 May 2017 the three-judge panel found in his favour, but only on the narrow technical point that the council had failed to prove Portisham actually sat within their jurisdiction over the foreshore. Justice Frank Clarke was careful to add that "nothing in the judgment should be taken as establishing that the vessel's location, and use as a habitation, is lawful," leaving a former Cold War minesweeper's legal status, rather fittingly for a ship that never fired a shot in anger, unresolved but undefeated.

A Small Ship's Quiet Persistence

HMS Portisham never got to do the job she was built for, and by the standards of the Cold War Royal Navy that might sound like an anticlimax.

But between training generations of naval volunteers, rescuing a stranded Dutch aircrew, and outlasting a five-year fight through the Irish courts just to stay afloat as somebody's home, she has arguably had a more varied and useful life than plenty of ships that did see the action they were designed for.