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.

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.

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. In 1948, Petty Officer Wilfred Bollard set a diving record of 535 feet, an extraordinary depth for the equipment and diving physiology understanding of the day.

In 1956, Lieutenant George Wookey went further still, reaching 600 feet in the cold waters off Norway, 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.

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, and her divers, including the celebrated wartime frogman Lionel Crabb, carried out the difficult work of examining the sunken submarine, giving the Navy its clearest picture of what had gone wrong and bringing a measure of closure to a tragedy that had gripped the country.

Ceremony, Salvage and an Unlikely Film Set

Reclaim's career mixed royal ceremony with hard practical work. She attended the Coronation Fleet Review in 1953 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.

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.

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.