HMS Reclaim (A231): The Last Sailing Warship of the Royal Navy

From Salvage Vessel to Diving Specialist

HMS Reclaim began life on the drawing board as Salverdant, a King Salvor-class ocean salvage vessel intended for the unglamorous but essential work of recovering wrecks and stranded ships, laid down at William Simons and Company in Renfrew on 9 November 1946 and launched on 12 March 1948.

Before completion she was reworked for a rather more specialised purpose, emerging instead as a deep diving and submarine rescue vessel, fitted with underwater television, sonar and echo-sounding apparatus that made her one of the most technically sophisticated small ships in the post-war fleet.

She commissioned in 1949 under her new name and her new mission, at 1,360 tons and just over 216 feet long, with a crew of 92 that included twelve specialist divers, and for a time was the only vessel in the entire Royal Navy capable of true deep diving work.

A Warship That Still Carried Sail

In an era of gas turbines and radar, Reclaim carried an auxiliary sailing rig, a detail that earned her lasting recognition as the last British warship to have sails in Royal Navy service.

The canvas was rarely hoisted in earnest, but by most accounts it could add a useful half a knot to her speed when conditions allowed, a small, almost anachronistic nod to an older kind of seamanship aboard a ship otherwise built for cutting-edge underwater work.

Pushing the Limits of Deep Diving

Reclaim's real purpose was testing how deep a diver could safely go, and her divers repeatedly pushed that boundary further, sometimes within days of each other. On 26 August 1948, Petty Officer Bill Soper reached 451 feet, beating an American record of 440 feet that had stood since 1938, only for Petty Officer Wilfred Bollard to go one better just two days later, on 28 August, with a dive to 535 feet, an extraordinary depth for the equipment and diving physiology understanding of the day.

On 12 October 1956, Senior Commissioned Boatswain George Wookey went further still, reaching 600 feet in Sørfjorden near Bergen in Norway while wearing a standard flexible diving suit, a record for that particular kind of diving dress that has never since been beaten. Wookey was commissioned as a Lieutenant and appointed MBE the following year, part of a sustained programme of deep diving trials that continued into the mid-1960s as the Navy worked to understand the practical and physiological limits of helium-oxygen diving in cold water.

Reclaim also lent herself to some rather more eccentric experiments. In the late 1940s the celebrated wartime frogman Lieutenant Commander Lionel "Buster" Crabb embarked to photograph propeller cavitation, quite literally clinging to a mooring line while the cruiser HMS Amphion steamed past him at various speeds, the sort of assignment that makes Crabb's later reputation for taking on jobs nobody else fancied entirely understandable.

What Became of Buster Crabb

Crabb turns up twice in this ship's story and deserves the end of his own, because it is the strangest thing that ever happened to anybody who dived from her deck. He had been a wartime frogman clearing Italian limpet mines off British hulls at Gibraltar, had a George Medal and an OBE for it, and by the mid-1950s he was in his late forties, out of the Navy, drinking rather a lot and taking the sort of jobs that nobody was going to put in writing.

In April 1956 Khrushchev and Bulganin came to Britain on a state visit, arriving at Portsmouth aboard the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze. Anthony Eden had given a flat instruction that nothing was to be attempted underwater against the Soviet ships while they were here. On the morning of 19 April, before dawn, Crabb left the Sally Port Inn in Old Portsmouth to swim out and photograph the cruiser's hull, her propellers and her rudder. He went down once and came back up complaining he could not see. He went down again. Nobody saw him alive after that.

What followed was a shambles. The Admiralty said he had been testing equipment in Stokes Bay and had failed to return. The Soviets said their watchkeepers had seen a frogman near the ship. Eden was furious enough to tell the Commons that it would not be in the public interest to disclose what had happened, which is not a sentence that reassures anybody. Fourteen months later a body in a diving suit came ashore in Chichester Harbour with the head and both hands missing, and the inquest concluded it was probably Crabb without being able to say so with any confidence.

Seventy years on, nobody knows. He drowned; he was killed by a Soviet diver; he was taken aboard and turned; he defected; he was quietly disposed of by his own side. All of those have been argued in print by people who ought to know. Some papers came out in 2015. The Cabinet files that should have opened in 1985 were ordered closed until 2057, which is the sort of decision that keeps a story alive far more effectively than any of the theories. Ian Fleming, who moved in the same world, took a good deal of it for Thunderball. And it all began about two miles from where Reclaim used to lie alongside.

Finding HMS Affray

Reclaim's most significant operational moment came in 1951, when she took part in the search for HMS Affray, a submarine that had vanished in the English Channel with the loss of all seventy-five men aboard, one of the worst peacetime disasters in Royal Navy submarine history.

Reclaim located the wreck 287 feet down on the edge of the Hurd Deep, and her divers, Crabb among them once more, recovered the submarine's snort mast, the only part of the wreck ever brought back to the surface. A three-month investigation using remote-control television cameras concluded that the mast had failed through metal fatigue, letting in the seawater that doomed the boat, though a rival theory blaming a battery explosion for the damage was never fully ruled out. Further diving on the site was cut short soon after when a lost radioactive source made the wreck too hazardous to approach, a strange coda to an already sobering operation.

Ceremony, Salvage and an Unlikely Film Set

Reclaim's career mixed royal ceremony with hard practical work. In 1950 she helped recover wreckage from the submarine HMS Truculent, lost in the Thames Estuary the previous year, grim, practised work she would draw on again at Affray the following spring. She attended the Coronation Fleet Review in 1953, the same year her crew used a submarine rescue bell to make the world's first underwater delivery of mail, and the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review in 1977, bookending a career that also included particularly demanding salvage jobs, among them ninety-one dives over twenty-six days in 1968 to work on the wreckage of a crashed Aer Lingus Viscount airliner, and the recovery of a Wessex helicopter from Norwegian waters in 1974.

Truculent has an article of her own here, and it is a bleak one: HMS Truculent (P315) had a distinguished war and was then run down by a Swedish tanker in the Thames Estuary in January 1950 with the loss of sixty-four men, most of whom got out of the submarine alive and died in the water in the dark.

In 1971 she found a rather more whimsical role, serving as a filming location for the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils, a curious footnote for a ship whose day job involved matters of life and death beneath the waves.

Retirement After Three Decades

Reclaim was reassigned to mine countermeasures support duties in 1960 as her diving trials work evolved, before finally being paid off in 1979, replaced in the fleet's deep diving role by the purpose-built HMS Challenger.

Her replacement did not go especially well. HMS Challenger (K07) was built for saturation diving and the recovery of things the government would rather nobody else found, never really worked as intended, and ended up mining diamonds off the coast of Namibia. Reclaim, thirty years older and carrying sails, had done the job perfectly well.

She arrived at Bruges in Belgium for demolition on 15 May 1982, closing out three decades of service that had taken her from record-breaking depths off Scotland and Norway to a submarine disaster in the Channel and, improbably, a supporting role in British science fiction television.