HMS Shavington (M1180): Twenty-Two Years From Suez to the Fishing Grounds

The Build: Southampton for the Malta Squadron

HMS Shavington was built by Whites Shipbuilding Company at Southampton, laid down in September 1953 and completed in March 1956 after twenty-nine months of construction. She commissioned that June for the 108th Minesweeping Squadron, based at Malta, joining a squadron that would shortly find itself at the centre of one of the decade's most significant international crises.

Sweeping the Suez Canal

Between 31 October and 15 November 1956, Shavington took part in Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, conducting wire sweeping operations to clear the vital waterway, direct and consequential service during one of postwar Britain's most politically fraught military interventions.

The actual sweeping action fell on 5 and 6 November, right at the height of the crisis, and a fortnight later, on 20 November, she was recommissioned into the 104th Minesweeping Squadron as the Royal Navy reorganised its Mediterranean minesweeping forces in the operation's aftermath.

The Strangest Engine in the Royal Navy

That re-engining deserves a paragraph, because the Napier Deltic is one of the oddest pieces of machinery ever put into series production and the Ton class is the reason most people have heard of it. It is a two-stroke diesel with no cylinder heads. Instead of a piston pushing against a fixed head, each cylinder has two pistons that come together in the middle, and the cylinders are arranged in three banks forming a triangle, with a crankshaft at each corner: eighteen cylinders, thirty-six pistons, three crankshafts, all geared together. The Greek letter delta is where the name comes from and it is a fair description of the shape.

The point of all that complication was power for weight, which is exactly what a small wooden minesweeper needs and cannot otherwise get. The same engine went into the fast patrol boats and, later and more famously, into the British Rail locomotives that took its name and its noise, which anybody who stood on an East Coast Main Line platform in the 1970s will not have forgotten. The catch was maintenance: a Deltic has three times the crankshafts and twice the pistons of a conventional engine and every one of them has to be got at. Ships fitted with them spent a good deal of time having them taken apart.

Six Patrols Off Cyprus

Between 1956 and 1961, Shavington conducted six separate patrols off Cyprus totalling around 175 days, part of the Royal Navy's sustained response to the island's ongoing unrest during the Cyprus Emergency, before extending her reach further east with a deployment to Aden and the Arabian Sea between September and December 1961.

Four of those six patrols came early, squeezed in around the Suez operation between July 1956 and January 1957, before Shavington paid off at the turn of 1958 for over a year out of front-line service: a re-engining at Portsmouth between April 1958 and July 1959 that swapped her original machinery for the newer, more powerful Napier Deltic diesels then being fitted across the class. Newly re-engined, she resumed Cyprus patrol duty for two further stints before the Aden deployment above, and her parent squadron was renumbered from the 108th to the 7th Minesweeping Squadron on 1 October 1962, under which title she spent the rest of the decade on exercises and courtesy visits around the Mediterranean, until the squadron's final departure from Malta on 31 March 1969 closed out an era of Royal Navy history that had run since the 1950s.

The squadron leaving Malta on 31 March 1969 was the end of something considerably larger than a minesweeping squadron. The Royal Navy had been based at Malta more or less continuously since 1800, the island was the Mediterranean Fleet, and by the late 1960s the fleet had gone and what was left was a squadron of wooden minesweepers and a run-down dockyard. Shavington was one of the last British warships to work out of Grand Harbour as a matter of routine rather than as a visitor. Her near-twin HMS Sefton (M1178) had done the same job in the same waters and was already scrap by the time Shavington got to the fishing grounds, which is a fair illustration of how differently two identical ships could be treated.

A Collision, and a Dramatic Salvage

Shavington suffered collision damage from the vessel Burnaston on 9 May 1961, serious enough that sister ship Rodington had to be found to cover her duties while she was patched up, one of the routine hazards of a busy operational life that had already, by then, seen her through a full re-engining and half a dozen years of Mediterranean patrol work.

Her later career brought genuine variety. Over three days in early August 1977, running what was officially logged as a Salmon Patrol, her crew carried out multiple boardings along Britain's north-east coast, resulting in four arrests and a prosecution, and on 23 December that year she salvaged the stricken Greek vessel Fast Bird II off St Ives, a dramatic Christmas rescue that showcased just how far her role had shifted from her original Suez and Cyprus deployments.

A Salmon Patrol is a funnier phrase than the job. Drift-netting for salmon off the north-east coast was, and is, tightly licensed, because the fish are heading for particular rivers to spawn and an unlicensed net across the wrong stretch of water can take a season's run out of a river system. Enforcing that means somebody with the legal power to stop a boat at sea, board her, count what is in her hold and inspect her licence, in the dark, in the North Sea, from a small ship. Four arrests and a prosecution in three days is a busy weekend by the standards of a job that mostly consists of being visibly present so that nobody tries it. It is exactly the same work the Fishery Protection Squadron has been doing since 1481, and it is why the Ton class had a second career at all.

From Full Service to the Reserve Fleet

Between the Malta years and the fishing grounds sat a quieter interlude. Shavington paid off to reserve at Gibraltar in April 1969 and stayed there for the best part of five years before recommissioning at Devonport for the Fishery Protection Squadron on 11 October 1974, part of the same Ton-class fleet redeployment that saw several of her sisters take up the same unglamorous but increasingly important role of policing Britain's own fishing grounds.

Her commanding officer through the 1976-77 fishery protection commission was Lieutenant John Lippiett, in charge when Shavington took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead on 28 June 1977. Lippiett went on to a 36-year Royal Navy career that included the Falklands War as second-in-command of the frigate HMS Ambuscade, eventual promotion to Rear Admiral, and a final posting as Commandant of the Joint Services Command and Staff College; after retiring in 2003 he spent thirteen years as Chief Executive of the Mary Rose Trust, leading the project that built the new museum housing Henry VIII's own flagship, a rather neat second career for a man who started out looking after a rather more modest, and equally wooden-hulled, minesweeper.

The Ambuscade in that story is here too, and the coincidence in Lippiett's career is a good one. HMS Ambuscade (F172) was in San Carlos Water in 1982 with Lippiett as her second-in-command, and thirty years later he was running the trust that conserved the Mary Rose and built the museum she now sits in, a few hundred yards from HMS Victory. A man whose first command was a wooden ship of 360 tons spent the last part of his working life looking after a wooden ship four centuries older, in the dockyard he had been trained in.

Add up her active commissions rather than the calendar years and Shavington's own class association counts twenty-two years of full operational service in total, spanning fishery protection duties from 1975, a transfer to the Ulster Division of the Royal Naval Reserve at Belfast in May 1982, and finally decommissioning on 18 March 1985. She was sold to ship-breakers SB Queenborough at Cairnryan on 25 March 1987, closing out over three decades of Royal Navy association.

A Ship That Did Almost Everything Asked of Her

HMS Shavington's career touched an unusually wide range of Royal Navy duties, from the politically charged waters of the Suez Canal to the patrol grounds off Cyprus and Aden, and finally to fishery protection and dramatic salvage work off the English coast, a notably versatile record for a minesweeper originally built for one very specific purpose.