HMS Soberton (M1200): Thirty-Two Years From the Torrey Canyon to the Falklands

The Build: Gosport

HMS Soberton was built by Fleetlands Shipyards at Gosport, laid down on 11 March 1955 and completed on 17 September 1957 after thirty months of construction. She commissioned on 12 February 1958 for the Fishery Protection Squadron based at Port Edgar, and began her first patrol later that month, the start of a career that would run for over three decades.

The name comes from a village, and so does every other name in her class. The Ton-class minesweepers were named after British villages ending in the syllable ton, which gave the Admiralty an almost inexhaustible supply and produced a hundred and nineteen ships called things like Shavington, Bickington and Wolverton. Soberton is a small place in the Meon Valley in Hampshire, about twelve miles up the road from Portsmouth, with a church, a pub and rather fewer people in it than there were sailors in the squadron her ship belonged to. Bear the village in mind, because the article ends up back there.

Clearing the Way off Esbjerg

In July 1960, the Fishery Protection Squadron visited Grimsby for a Freedom of the Port ceremony, one of the more sociable postings in a career otherwise defined by patrol and clearance work. In May 1963, Soberton took part in Operation Clear Road, a clearance operation off Esbjerg in Denmark, part of the Royal Navy's continuing postwar work removing the vast quantities of ordnance still littering the North Sea nearly two decades after the fighting had ended. The following year, in September 1964, she had a rather grander engagement, standing by for the Queen's own opening of the Forth Road Bridge, a fitting appearance for a ship based just along the water at Port Edgar.

Operation Clear Road is the sort of thing that never makes a headline and went on for decades. Two world wars left the North Sea and the Channel carpeted with ordnance: defensive minefields laid by both sides and never fully swept, mines that had broken adrift, bombs jettisoned by aircraft going home, and after 1945 enormous quantities of captured and surplus munitions that were simply dumped over the side in designated areas because nobody had a better idea. All of it sat on the bottom in shallow water crossed by every fishing fleet in northern Europe. Clearing it was the Ton class's real day job for thirty years, and HMS Lewiston (M1208) shows what it looked like when somebody wanted to lay a cable through it.

Firefighting and the Torrey Canyon

Soberton's career included some properly dramatic emergency response work: she fought fires aboard the MV Olympic Thunder in 1962 and earned a salvage claim for her trouble, survived a collision with her sister ship HMS Letterston on 6 January 1967 that damaged her starboard side, and that same year took part in the response to the wreck of the Torrey Canyon, the supertanker disaster that caused Britain's worst oil spill. The Royal Navy's own answer to the wreck was almost as dramatic as the disaster itself: Fleet Air Arm Buccaneers dropped forty-two 1,000lb bombs on the stricken tanker on 28 March, followed by RAF Hunters dropping cans of aviation fuel to keep the resulting fire burning, before Soberton and other small ships were sent in at the end of the month to help mop up what the fire and the bombs hadn't already dealt with, prompting a fundamental rethink of how the country responded to maritime environmental emergencies.

The bombing has been told twice already, by the ships that watched it happen: HMS Carysfort was the first Royal Navy ship on the scene and sat through the lot, and HMS Barrosa (D68) was standing off her as well. What Soberton did is the part that never gets remembered, because it involved no explosives at all. Once the fires were out and the aircraft had gone, somebody had to go and deal with what was left: the slicks still coming ashore, the beaches, the small craft work, the sheer grinding tedium of a clean-up that ran for months along two countries' coastlines. Minesweepers are good at slow, patient, close inshore work, which is precisely why they were sent.

She went on to make sixteen arrests of fishing vessels in 1971, solid, unglamorous fishery protection work that formed the backbone of her career.

Lending Her Crew to the Falklands War

In an unusual arrangement during the Falklands conflict of 1982, Soberton's ship's company was sent to man the requisitioned Hull trawler Northella, one of five deep-sea trawlers, alongside Farnella, Cordella, Junella and Pict, stripped of their fishing gear and hastily fitted out as makeshift minesweepers for the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, while Soberton herself continued her patrol duties with a largely new crew. Northella and her sister trawlers sailed for the South Atlantic that April and, between 23 June and 4 July, swept the Argentine minefield guarding the approaches to Port Stanley, recovering ten of the twenty-one moored mines laid there, a remarkably distinctive contribution for a small minesweeper never sent south herself.

Why the Navy Went to War in Hull Trawlers

The arrangement in 1982 looks eccentric until you understand the problem. The Royal Navy's minesweeping force was the Ton class: 150 feet long, wooden hulled, built for the Channel and the North Sea, with neither the endurance nor the sea-keeping to cross eight thousand miles of Atlantic and then work off the Falklands in the South Atlantic winter. Soberton could not have got there. What could get there were deep sea trawlers, which are built to stay out for weeks in the worst weather in the world and are, in hull form and in what they do, remarkably close to minesweepers already. So the Ministry took up five of them from Hull, Cordella, Farnella, Junella, Northella and Pict, emptied them of fish and fishing gear, fitted sweep wires and put them to sea within days as the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron.

The crews came from the Navy, drawn mainly from the minesweeping squadrons based on the Forth, which is how the ship's company of a fishery protection minesweeper at Port Edgar came to spend the war in a Hull trawler while their own ship carried on patrolling the North Sea with a scratch crew. It was not comfortable. The trawlers had unreliable machinery, next to no armament, and none of the communications or navigation kit a warship takes for granted, and they spent the passage south and the weeks off the islands being thrown about in weather that would have kept a Ton alongside.

The sweeping itself was done after the shooting stopped. Between 23 June and 4 July 1982, whenever the weather allowed, the five trawlers worked the approaches to Port Stanley, where the Argentine forces had laid twenty-one moored mines to close the harbour. They recovered ten of them. Junella accounted for four, Pict for three, one of which surfaced close enough to Northella that she had to throw the wheel over to avoid it, Northella for two and Farnella for one; Cordella swept none at all, because her job was to run ahead of the others with her gear out and clear the water they were about to work in. The remaining eleven had broken adrift or had never left their sinkers, which is its own quiet comment on the state of the minefield.

A Late Salvage, and a Long Retirement

Following a major refit at Chatham beginning in 1978 and recommissioning in December 1979, Soberton continued in service through the 1980s: she stood by again for royalty at the opening of the Thames Barrier in May 1984, and in July 1987 a boarding party sent to inspect a Dutch fishing vessel found themselves briefly locked in its hold, an occupational hazard of fishery protection work the tidier version of naval history tends to leave out. She salvaged the MV Fair Play off Eddystone in October 1989, and the following November was awarded the Wilkinson Sword of Peace for 1990, an honour given annually to the single Royal Navy unit judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to good community relations, a fitting note for a ship that had spent three decades quietly getting on with the job.

The Wilkinson Sword of Peace is awarded once a year to a single Royal Navy unit, and it goes for community work rather than for fighting, which makes the list of winners an unusually good guide to what the fleet actually spends its time on. HMS Sirius (F40) won hers for recovering the dead from a Caribbean ferry disaster, HMS Kirkliston (M1157) is another Ton-class winner, and HMS Fife (D20) got hers out of a hurricane. Soberton got hers for thirty years of turning up.

She made her final fishery patrol on 7 February 1992 and was paid off on 1 March that year after thirty-two years of service, then spent a further five years as a static headquarters for the Woolwich Sea Cadets, berthed off Erith on the Thames, before being sold to Bakkerzonen at Bruges for breaking up in July 1998.

Her ship's bell survives today in the parish church of Soberton, a fitting resting place for a ship that carried the village's name through so much varied service.