HMS Sheraton (M1181): Thirty-Three Years, and Fired On in the Singapore Strait

Constructed at Southampton, Slow Out of the Blocks

HMS Sheraton was built by Whites Shipyard at Itchen, Southampton, laid down on 23 February 1954 and completed on 24 August 1956 after thirty months of construction. Rather than heading straight into front-line service, she did not formally commission until 27 January 1959, taking up duties for Royal Naval Reserve training out of Portsmouth, a slower and more understated start than many of her Ton-class sisters.

From Minesweeper to Minehunter

After several years of training and North European deployments, Sheraton underwent a significant conversion from minesweeper to minehunter between June 1964 and April 1965 at Portsmouth, recommissioning that April for the 6th Minesweeping Squadron, a reflection of how the Royal Navy's mine warfare priorities were evolving through the 1960s.

The Change That Turned Sweeping Into Hunting

That conversion is worth more than a clause, because it is the biggest change in mine warfare since the First World War. A minesweeper works blind. She tows a wire or an influence sweep behind her, drags it through water she hopes contains mines, and cuts or detonates whatever it catches; she does not know where the mines are and she is, by definition, driving over them. A minehunter does the opposite. She finds each mine individually with a high-definition sonar, stops short of it, identifies it, and sends a diver or a remote vehicle to put a charge on it.

The reason the Navy had to change was that the enemy had. Contact mines can be swept. Modern influence mines, sitting on the bottom and counting the magnetic, acoustic and pressure signature of what passes overhead before deciding to go off, cannot be reliably swept at all, and a ship towing gear over one is simply a target that has arrived. So between June 1964 and April 1965 Sheraton went into Portsmouth as a minesweeper and came out as a minehunter, with the sonar and the diving capability to go with it, and every serious mine countermeasures ship built since has been a hunter first.

Fired On in the Singapore Strait

Sheraton departed Portsmouth on 27 August 1965 bound for Singapore via South Africa, a passage complicated by engine trouble serious enough to need outside assistance along the way. She reached Singapore on 8 October and completed six Singapore Strait patrols by the year's end.

The most alarming moment of her entire career came in May 1966, when she was fired on by Indonesian shore batteries in the Singapore Strait during the tense period of Confrontation between Britain and Indonesia, a properly dangerous incident for a small minehunter operating in contested waters.

The Confrontation deserves naming properly, because almost nobody has heard of it and it went on for four years. When Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo were brought together as Malaysia in 1963, Indonesia under Sukarno refused to accept it and set out to break the new federation by force without ever declaring war: infiltration parties into Borneo, raids on the Malay peninsula, artillery across the water, and a running low-level campaign in the Singapore Strait. Britain, obliged by treaty to defend Malaysia, fought it with the same reticence, and it was largely kept out of the newspapers by both sides.

That is why a small wooden minehunter was in that water at all, and it is why being shelled from an Indonesian shore battery in May 1966 was possible in a conflict nobody was calling a war. The strait is narrow, the Indonesian islands are on the other side of it, and every ship going in or out of Singapore has to pass within range. Sheraton did six patrols of it before the end of 1965 alone. Three months after that shore battery opened up on her, the whole thing was formally ended by a treaty signed in Bangkok, and almost nobody in Britain noticed either the war or the peace.

On to Hong Kong, Then Home

Sheraton spent the rest of the 1960s on exercises around the South China Sea before transferring to the 6th Patrol Craft Squadron at Hong Kong in August 1969, extending her Far East service by a further three years beyond the shore-battery incident that had already made her name. She did not return to the UK until May 1972, joining the 1st Minesweeper Squadron at Port Edgar on the Firth of Forth, a considerably quieter posting after the best part of seven years spent east of Suez.

The Hong Kong posting was a different job again, and a Ton-class speciality. The 6th Patrol Craft Squadron was the Royal Navy's permanent presence in Hong Kong waters, and its work was policing: intercepting boats carrying illegal immigrants from the mainland, chasing smugglers, and being visibly present along one of the most sensitive borders in the world. The class did it for the better part of thirty years and it is described in HMS Beachampton (M1007) and HMS Wolverton (M1193). Seven years east of Suez is a very long deployment for a 360-ton wooden ship.

Two Collisions and a Return to Suez

Sheraton's long career included two collisions, with HMS Bossington in October 1962 and HMS Lewiston in June 1980, the kind of routine hazard that came with decades of continuous small-ship service. Between April and July 1975 she deployed to Port Said for Operation Rheostat Two, her first real business in the Suez Canal region despite having sailed the other way round Africa to Singapore a decade earlier.

Reopening the Suez Canal

Operation Rheostat is a bigger thing than the name suggests. The Suez Canal had been shut since the Six-Day War in 1967, blocked at both ends, mined by both sides and left with fourteen merchant ships trapped inside it for eight years, and after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 Egypt asked for help clearing it. Britain sent minehunters. Rheostat One ran for six months in 1974 with HMS Maxton (M1165), HMS Bossington (M1133) and HMS Wilton, with a Fleet Clearance Diving Team and the support ship HMS Abdiel: Port Said harbour and its approaches first, then into the canal itself from 1 May.

Rheostat Two, from April to July 1975, was Sheraton and HMS Hubberston, with Abdiel again, and it was the half that finished. Between 19 April and 4 June the ships re-searched the whole length of the canal and the lakes, and the assessment at the end of it was that the waterway was ninety-nine per cent clear. The Suez Canal reopened to traffic on 5 June 1975. A 360-ton wooden minehunter from Southampton was one of two ships that made that possible, which is a considerably larger claim than "her first real business in the Suez Canal region".

Both ships she hit are here as well, which is the sort of thing that happens in a class of a hundred and eighteen ships doing the same work in the same waters for forty years: Bossington, who would go on to do the first half of the Suez clearance that Sheraton finished, and HMS Lewiston (M1208). Her near-sister HMS Shavington (M1180), one pennant number away, covers the Napier Deltic engines both of them ran on.

Fishery Protection and Foreign Deployments

Sheraton spent stretches of the 1970s and 1990s on loan to the Fishery Protection Squadron, making two successful arrests during her first spell between 1977 and 1978, and later serving with STANAVFORCHAN, NATO's standing naval force in the Channel, in 1988. Between these commitments she underwent an extended refit at Gibraltar from 1980 to 1982 and continued Mediterranean deployments through the following decade.

She returned to fishery protection duty for a second and final spell from June 1991, seeing out the last two years of her career policing British waters before paying off, a fittingly unglamorous bookend for a ship whose career had opened with rather more excitement than most.

Thirty-Three Years' Service

HMS Sheraton was finally paid off on 5 October 1993, having served the Royal Navy for an impressive thirty-three years across two distinct roles, minesweeper and minehunter, and in waters ranging from the Singapore Strait to the Suez Canal to the English Channel. She was broken up by Pounds of Portsmouth in January 1998, closing out one of the longer careers among her Ton-class contemporaries.