HMS St David (M1124): A Reservists' Ship That Rescued a German Cargo Vessel

Grimsby as HMS Crichton-Built

HMS St David began life as HMS Crichton, built at Doig's yard in Grimsby, with her keel laid on 21 April 1952 and completion following on 23 April 1954. She entered service that June with the 101st Royal Naval Reserve Vessel Squadron based at Greenock, a Ton-class minesweeper whose primary purpose was training the weekend sailors who made up the Reserve.

It is worth asking why the Royal Naval Reserve had minesweepers at all, because the answer explains most of this ship's career. The Navy's plan for a war with the Soviet Union assumed that the first thing to happen would be the mining of British ports, and that the regular fleet would be far too small to clear them. The reserves were therefore going to have to do it, and you cannot teach minesweeping in a drill hall. So each Reserve division around the coast was given a Ton-class minesweeper of its own, and its members, who were bank clerks and dockers and schoolmasters during the week, spent their weekends learning to work sweep gear in the Clyde or the Mersey. There were eventually enough of them to form their own squadrons.

Escorting the Royal Yacht

On 10 August 1956, Crichton had the honour of escorting the Royal Yacht Britannia on a tour of Scotland's west coast, a duty that would have made for a proud moment aboard a ship more often occupied with routine training exercises and weekend patrols around the Clyde.

Renamed for Wales

Following a significant overhaul and Deltic engine conversion at Rosyth between 1961 and 1962, the ship was recommissioned as HMS St David for the South Wales Division of the RNR on 6 May 1962, allocated to HMS Cambria, the RNR's Cardiff-based unit and the only one of its kind in Wales, taking on a new identity tied to the patron saint of Wales as her old squadron was renamed the 10th Minesweeping Squadron that October.

That is also why the name kept changing. The ship belonged to the division rather than the other way round, so when the hull was reallocated it took the new division's name with it, and this one went from Crichton to St David and back to Crichton without ever being a different ship. HMS Cambria, which she was allocated to as St David, is not a ship at all: it is the shore establishment at Cardiff that is, and remains, the only Royal Naval Reserve unit in Wales. The same business of names following divisions is set out in HMS Alfriston (M1103) and HMS Bickington (M1109).

Gibraltar, the West Indies and Canada

As St David, she carried out multiple Rockhaul exercise deployments to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean between 1963 and 1967, took on West Indies guardship duty in early 1965, and joined four other RNR Ton-class ships on a deployment to Canada in the late summer of 1973, a wide-ranging itinerary for a small reservist training vessel.

Rockhaul, and the Two Weeks a Year That Mattered

Rockhaul was not an obscure code word, it was the point of the whole arrangement. A reservist gives up his weekends all year and then a fortnight of his annual leave, and a fortnight going round the Isle of Arran is not much of a return on that. So the Reserve took its minesweepers abroad: the Ton Class Association's own record of this ship lists Rockhaul deployments through the 1960s to Gibraltar, Casablanca and Oporto, a West Indies guardship stint in the early months of 1965, and in the late summer of 1973 a crossing of the North Atlantic to the east coast of Canada with four other reserve Tons under the name Maplehaul.

A 360-ton wooden minesweeper crossing the Atlantic is a serious undertaking, and doing it with a crew of part-time sailors is a more serious one still. That is what makes these deployments worth recording: they were real passages, in small ships, in the open ocean, by people who would be back at work on the Monday a fortnight later. The Reserve got its sea time, the Navy got a squadron it could call on, and a good many men got the only ocean crossing of their lives out of it.

Reverting to Crichton

In April 1976 the ship reverted to her original name of HMS Crichton, recommissioned for the Mersey Division of the RNR and given a long refit to ready her for fishery protection duties, a role she carried out from April 1978 through to 1985.

A Commander-in-Chief's Commendation is worth explaining. It is not a decoration and it does not come with a medal or letters after a name; it is a formal written recognition from a fleet commander that somebody did something notably well, and for a petty officer in a small ship it is about as high as recognition goes short of a gallantry award. What it was actually given for is the frustrating part. The Ton Class Association's record has the date, the ship, the casualty and the man's name, and that is all that survives in the public record: a German coaster in trouble somewhere off the British coast on a summer day in 1983, a wooden minesweeper that went to her, and a petty officer named James Boyle who did something aboard her that his Commander-in-Chief thought worth writing down.

A Commendation for Rescue at Sea

It was under this restored name, rather than as St David, that the ship earned her best-known distinction: on 9 August 1983, HMS Crichton received a Commander-in-Chief's Commendation, credited to Petty Officer James Boyle, for the rescue of the German cargo ship MV Dellstedt, a genuine act of seamanship under pressure alongside three successful prosecutions of fishing vessels in each of 1981 and 1982 while on fishery protection duty. She was finally paid off on 4 October 1985 and sold to SB Queensborough for breaking up at Cairnryan on 25 March 1987, closing out over three decades of service under two names and two very different naval identities.