HMS Stubbington (M1204): Earthquake Relief in Sicily, and a Second Name in Dundee

Constructed at Gosport

HMS Stubbington was built by Camper and Nicholson at Gosport, yard number 798, laid down on 15 March 1954, launched on 8 August 1956 and completed that same month, before formally entering service with the 108th Minesweeping Squadron at Malta on 2 December 1957, a Ton-class minesweeper armed with a 40mm Bofors gun forward and a pair of 20mm Oerlikon cannons aft, powered by twin Napier Deltic diesels that gave her a useful 3,000 nautical mile range.

The name is local, in the most literal sense for anybody reading this in Hampshire. The Ton class were named for British villages ending in the syllable ton, and Stubbington is a village between Fareham and Lee-on-the-Solent, a few miles from Portsmouth Harbour and rather closer to the Camper and Nicholson yard at Gosport that built her than most warships get to their namesakes. She is not the only Hampshire name in the class either: HMS Soberton (M1200) takes hers from a village up the Meon valley, and her bell hangs in that village's church today.

Malta, Aden, and Back Again

Stubbington joined the 108th Mine Sweeping Squadron based at Malta on commissioning, spending an accumulated 227 days on patrol off Cyprus during 1958 and 1959 alone, before a September to December 1961 deployment took her through the Suez Canal to Aden and on to Karachi. Back in the Mediterranean, she joined the 7th Mine Sweeping Squadron, a busy schedule of overseas postings typical of the Ton-class minesweepers of the era.

Two hundred and twenty-seven days off Cyprus is a great deal of sea time and almost none of it involved mines. The Cyprus Emergency ran from 1955 to 1959: an armed campaign by EOKA for union with Greece, fought against a British administration that had eighty thousand people in uniform on the island at its height, and the Royal Navy's part in it was almost entirely a policing one. Weapons and explosives were coming in by sea, largely by small craft from Greece and Turkey into a coastline of coves and fishing villages that no army can seal from the land, so the Navy put minesweepers on it. A Ton-class ship is ideal for that work: shallow enough to close the beach, seaworthy enough to stay out in a Levantine gale, with a boat and a boarding party and enough endurance to sit off a stretch of coast for days doing nothing visible whatever.

Relief After the Sicily Earthquake

On 15 January 1968, a devastating sequence of earthquakes struck the Belice valley in western Sicily, killing at least 231 people, quite possibly closer to 400, injuring up to a thousand more and leaving an estimated 100,000 people homeless. Stubbington took part in the relief effort that followed, deployed from 16 to 21 January, a remarkably valuable humanitarian contribution from a small warship better known for her ordinary patrol and minesweeping duties.

What Happened to the Belice Valley

The earthquake deserves more than a casualty figure, because of what came afterwards. It struck on the night of 14 and 15 January 1968 at magnitude 6.5, across the provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento in the poorest part of western Sicily. The Italian civil protection service now puts the dead at 296, with more than a thousand injured and something close to a hundred thousand people made homeless in the middle of a Sicilian winter. Four towns, Gibellina, Montevago, Poggioreale and Salaparuta, were not damaged but destroyed outright. Stubbington was one of the ships that arrived within a day of it, and spent under a week there, which is what a small warship can offer: immediate hands, boats, radios, tents, blankets and organisation, at the point where nothing else has arrived yet.

What followed is why Italians still talk about the Belice. The rebuilding was funded, announced, and then dragged out across decades in a haze of delay and misdirected money; people lived in prefabricated huts for twenty years and more, and half a century afterwards the reconstruction was still being described in Italy as a national disgrace rather than an achievement. The most extraordinary response was artistic. The mayor of Gibellina invited artists to build a new town seven miles from the old one, and in 1985 Alberto Burri did something else entirely with the ruins of the old: he had the rubble compacted where it lay and poured white concrete over it, about five feet deep, following the exact lines of the vanished streets. The Cretto di Burri is one of the largest works of land art on earth. You can walk the streets of a town that no longer exists, in cement, in silence, and it is the only memorial of its kind anywhere.

A New Name for the Tay Division

She paid off for a refit at Gibraltar in January 1969 before making passage back to the UK, recommissioning that August at HMS Vernon as a sea training minesweeper and paying off again at Rosyth in November 1971.

After a spell serving as a navigation tender at Portsmouth, Stubbington joined the Royal Naval Reserve's Tay Division at Dundee in June 1972, part of the Tenth Mine Counter Measures Squadron, taking the name HMS Montrose for her time there until 1976, training reservists under a new identity tied to the Scottish town rather than the Hampshire village she had originally been named for.

The change of name is a Royal Naval Reserve convention rather than anything to do with the ship. Reserve divisions were given minesweepers of their own and the ship took the division's name for as long as she belonged to it, then handed it back, which is how a Hampshire village became a Scottish town for four years and then went back to being a Hampshire village. HMS St David (M1124) did the same thing in Wales and HMS Alfriston (M1103) managed it twice.

Fishery Protection and Scrapping

Following a fourteen-month refit at Chatham Dockyard, the ship, restored to her original name, joined the Fishery Protection Squadron in home waters from 1977, undergoing a further refit in 1979 and remaining on patrol duty for nearly a decade before finally paying off on 30 July 1986. She was sold for scrap three years later, arriving at Bilbao on 26 September 1989 to be broken up, ending over three decades of varied service under two different names.