HMS Walney (M104): The Minehunter Nobody Would Buy

Built at Woolston

HMS Walney was ordered from Vosper Thornycroft on 27 July 1987 and laid down at their Woolston shipyard in Southampton in May 1990, launched on 25 November 1991 and commissioned on 20 February 1993, a Sandown-class minehunter built for the precise, painstaking work of clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from British and allied waters.

The Walney Before Her

There had been an HMS Walney, and what happened to her is one of the hardest things the Royal Navy did in the whole war.

She was not built in Britain. She was the United States Coast Guard cutter Sebago, one of ten American cutters handed over in 1941 because they had the endurance and the accommodation the Royal Navy needed for the long southern convoy routes; her sister HMS Totland (Y88) has her own account here. Fifteen hundred tons, one five-inch gun, sixteen knots on a good day, and built in 1930 to rescue people.

On the morning of 8 November 1942, in the opening hours of the Allied landings in North Africa, HMS Walney and HMS Hartland were ordered to break into Oran harbour and seize the port before the Vichy French could scuttle the ships in it. The plan required them to ram a two-hundred-yard floating boom across the harbour mouth and go alongside with American infantry aboard, in a basin containing French destroyers, submarines and shore batteries, in daylight, having announced themselves first over a loudhailer.

It went exactly as anybody could have predicted. Walney went in first and was hit repeatedly at point-blank range by French warships and shore guns; every officer on her bridge but one was killed; she burned, drifted to the western end of the harbour and sank. Hartland was set on fire by coastal artillery and destroyed. Of the American soldiers embarked, roughly half were killed, missing or wounded. Royal Navy losses in that one action came to a hundred and thirteen dead and eighty-six wounded.

It is the sort of operation that gets ordered when nobody senior enough to stop it has looked at a chart of the harbour, and the men who carried it out did so knowing perfectly well what was going to happen. That is the name this minehunter was given in 1993.

A Wartime Bomb in the Mersey

On 15 May 2006, Walney and HMS Atherstone discovered a 1,000-pound unexploded Second World War bomb while conducting a survey of the River Mersey, a striking reminder that more than sixty years after the war's end, its ordnance could still be quietly lurking beneath British waterways, waiting for exactly the kind of specialist ship Walney was built to be.

What Is Still Down There

The Mersey bomb should not really surprise anybody, and the numbers explain why. Liverpool was the western terminal of the Atlantic convoys and the most heavily bombed British city outside London; the Germans dropped high explosive on it for months and also laid parachute mines into the river to close the port. A proportion of everything dropped in the war failed to go off, and a proportion of that ended up in soft mud where nothing has disturbed it since.

That is why British minehunters spend a good deal of their peacetime disposing of German ordnance. It is also why the job takes a ship rather than a diver in a boat: a thousand-pound bomb in silt has to be found with sonar, identified, examined by an underwater vehicle, and then either lifted or blown up in place by people who are somewhere else at the time. Her sister HMS Pembroke (M107) spent twenty-five years at the same work.

Decommissioned at Clyde

HMS Walney was decommissioned on 15 October 2010 at HMNB Clyde, after which she was moved to Portsmouth Naval Base and formally listed for sale in 2014, part of the broader drawdown of the Sandown class as the Royal Navy's mine countermeasures fleet was restructured.

An Auction With No Bidders

In a properly unusual postscript, Walney failed to attract a single bid when auctioned off for scrapping, leaving her final fate uncertain and the ship still sitting at Portsmouth Naval Base as of the most recent reporting, a quietly strange end for a vessel that had once helped make British waters safer from the ordnance of a war fought long before she was built.

Why Nobody Bought Her

An auction with no bidders sounds like a comment on the ship and is really a comment on the market, and the reasons are worth setting out because several of her sisters sold perfectly well.

A Sandown is a very specialised object. The hull is glass-reinforced plastic rather than steel, because a steel hull sets off magnetic mines; the machinery is mounted to keep noise down for the same reason; she is propelled and positioned by Voith Schneider units rather than ordinary propellers, so that she can hold a spot over a mine in a tideway; and she carries a variable-depth sonar and a remotely operated disposal vehicle rather than any of the equipment a normal small warship has. She cannot sweep mines at all. She is a hunting platform and nothing else.

That makes her almost worthless to anybody who is not a navy with a mine problem, and to a navy she is only worth having if she still works. Walney had been out of service since 2010 and had been progressively stripped: most of her equipment gone, her engines taken out, sound enough to tow and not to steam. Buying her would have meant buying a plastic hull and then paying to put a minehunter back inside it.

The sisters that found homes went while they were still running. Three went to Estonia, two were given to Ukraine, and HMS Blyth and Pembroke were sold to Romania in 2023 and are working in the Black Sea now, in exactly the water where the ability to hunt a mine is currently worth the most. Walney had simply been laid up for too long, and a ship that is laid up for long enough stops being a ship and becomes a very expensive hull.