HMS Walkerton (M1188): Survived a Shark Strike and Left Malta Last

Built by Thornycroft

HMS Walkerton was laid down by J I Thornycroft in Southampton on 4 July 1955, completed on 10 January 1958 and entered service on 24 February that year as Senior Officer of the 104th Minesweeping Squadron, based at Malta, a Ton-class minesweeper that would go on to give the Royal Navy twenty-six years of active service.

Patrols From Cyprus to Kuwait

Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Walkerton conducted numerous patrols off Cyprus and further deployments to Aden, Bahrain and Kuwait, part of the Royal Navy's extensive East of Suez commitments during a period of near-constant regional tension.

What Cyprus, Aden and Kuwait Actually Meant

Numerous patrols off Cyprus covers a specific and rather grim job. Between 1955 and 1959 the EOKA campaign was running in Cyprus, arms and men were coming in by sea from Greece, and the Royal Navy was ordered to stop them. That meant a cordon of small ships working the coast night after night, stopping and searching caiques, fishing boats and anything else that moved, in the certain knowledge that the great majority of them were exactly what they appeared to be. It is police work with a naval gun on the forecastle, and it is described from another deck in HMS Crofton (M1216).

Aden, Bahrain and Kuwait were something else again. In the summer of 1961 Iraq claimed Kuwait, which had just become independent, and Britain put troops ashore under Operation Vantage to prevent an invasion; a hundred and fifteen degrees of heat, no notice, and a naval force assembled from whatever happened to be in the Gulf. Small ships did the inshore work: surveying, sweeping approaches, marking channels, carrying people about. That is what a coastal minesweeper was for east of Suez, and it is why one was in the Red Sea in August 1961 in the first place.

A Gale, a Shark, and the Six Day War

Walkerton's service produced two memorable incidents: a severe gale north of Crete in 1959 during which she rolled a startling fifty degrees, and a collision with a large shark in the Red Sea that caused underwater damage, a reminder that hazards at sea were not always man-made.

Fifty Degrees

A startling fifty degrees is worth pausing on, because it is very close to the end of the story. Roll a ship far enough and she reaches an angle beyond which the righting moment falls away instead of increasing, and she does not come back. For a small vessel that angle is often somewhere in the fifties or low sixties. A fifty-degree roll means the deck is steeper than a house roof, everything not bolted down is in the scuppers, the funnel is nearly in the water and the boats are under it. It happened to Walkerton in a gale north of Crete on the night of 28 and 29 January 1959, and it did her real damage.

The Ton class were particularly good at it, and the reason is deliberate. They were built of wood and aluminium to keep the magnetic signature down, which makes them light for their size; they had a broad, shallow hull to work in confined water; and they carried a lot of gear high up. A light beamy hull is a stiff hull, and a stiff hull does not roll slowly and gently, it snaps back fast and far. Men who served in them talk about the motion the way other people talk about a road accident.

The shark has a date: 26 August 1961, in the Red Sea. Hitting a large shark at speed in a wooden ship is not comic. A minesweeper's hull is laid-up timber over frames with the propellers and shafts hanging below it, and the damage recorded was underwater; something of that size going through a bronze propeller or into a shaft bracket will bend or crack it, and a bent shaft means a vibration that gets worse until somebody docks the ship. It is a very unusual entry in a defect log and it cost real dockyard time.

She went on to serve through the 1967 Six Day War before departing Malta in March 1969 with the last of the Royal Navy’s Malta-based minesweeping squadron, which sailed for Gibraltar on the 31st.

Training Duties and the Reserve

After paying off from active service in April 1969, Walkerton moved into training duties at Dartmouth between 1970 and 1979, before joining the Royal Naval Reserve, during which time she experienced minor collisions during refits and carried out salvage operations, the kind of steady, unglamorous work that filled out the later careers of so many Ton-class ships.

What Actually Ended at Malta in 1969

The Malta departure needs correcting and is worth getting right, because the real story is longer.

What sailed on 31 March 1969 was the Royal Navy's Malta-based minesweeping squadron, bound for Gibraltar, where most of the ships paid off into reserve. That was the end of a minesweeping presence at Malta which went back to the war, and for the men in those ships it was the end of an era; Malta had been the home port of a British minesweeping force for a very long time.

It was not the end of the Royal Navy at Malta. British forces stayed on the island for another decade under a defence agreement, and it was only when that agreement expired that the connection finished. The last Royal Marines left on 30 March 1979. The Union Flag came down on 31 March 1979, which Malta now keeps as Freedom Day. The last British warship to leave was the destroyer HMS London, on 1 April 1979, ending more than a hundred and eighty years of continuous British presence that had begun when the islanders threw the French out in 1800 and asked for British protection instead.

Walkerton's claim is still a good one; it is simply a different claim. She was among the last of the Royal Navy's minesweepers to leave the base that had defined the class's whole Mediterranean career.

Sold for Scrap

HMS Walkerton finally paid off on 11 July 1985 and was sold to Ogdens of Middlesbrough for breaking up on 20 December 1990, closing out a long and eventful career that had carried her from Mediterranean gales to the historic final departure from Malta.