HMS Wolverton (M1193): From Cyprus Patrol to the Hong Kong Dragon Squadron

A Long Build at Montrose

HMS Wolverton was built by the Montrose Shipyard, with construction beginning on 28 September 1954 and taking a notably lengthy forty-two months to complete on 25 March 1958, commissioning that September for the 100th Minesweeping Squadron based at Portsmouth, a Ton-class minesweeper built for the steady work of coastal mine countermeasures.

A Warship Yard on the Angus Coast

Montrose Shipyard is worth explaining, because Montrose is not a place most people associate with warships and there is a good reason a small yard there was building them.

Montrose sits on the Angus coast between Dundee and Aberdeen, on a tidal basin behind a narrow entrance, and it had built boats for a very long time without ever being a naval town. When the Admiralty ordered the Ton class it ordered a hundred and nineteen of them, which no established warship builder could deliver in any sensible time, so the work was spread across sixteen yards and a good many of those had never built for the navy before. A wooden minesweeper of four hundred and forty tons is, from a builder's point of view, a very large boat rather than a small ship, so yards that could build trawlers and coasters could build these.

That is also most of the answer to the forty-two months. The class was ordered against a Soviet mine threat in a hurry, then built out at a pace set by budgets rather than urgency, and the Royal Navy ended up with far more minesweepers than it had crews for. Hulls sat finished and waiting. Wolverton was completed in March 1958 and commissioned in September, which by the standards of her class is prompt; several of her sisters waited years.

The Cyprus patrol she went out to is the other end of that story, since a fleet of small ships built to sweep Soviet mines spent the 1950s and 1960s doing almost anything but. What the Cyprus work involved is described in HMS Crofton (M1216) and HMS Kellington (M1154).

Cyprus and European Exercises

Wolverton deployed to Malta for Cyprus patrol duty in September 1958, before spending the years from 1959 to 1964 taking part in exercises throughout North European waters, including a further Malta deployment in 1960, part of the steady operational rhythm that defined so much of the Ton class's service life.

Converted Into a Patrol Craft

After an initial pay-off in 1964, Wolverton recommissioned in June 1965 and continued minesweeping duties before undergoing a significant conversion into a patrol craft at Rosyth Dockyard between August and November 1971, emerging under the new pennant number P1093, a transformation that gave the ageing minesweeper an entirely new operational role.

Fourteen Thousand Miles the Long Way Round

Made the long passage around Africa to Hong Kong is four months of the hardest sea time in her whole career, compressed into eleven words, and it is worth taking apart.

She went round the Cape because there was no alternative. The Suez Canal had been closed since the Six-Day War in June 1967 and would stay closed until 1975, which turned every passage east of Suez into a passage round Africa and added something over four thousand miles to it. What the closure did to the ships caught by it is in HMS Maxton (M1165).

So: Portsmouth to Hong Kong the long way, roughly fourteen thousand miles, in a four-hundred-and-forty-ton wooden ship with a designed range that means stopping for fuel every few days, a crew of thirty-odd, and no air conditioning worth the name. Down the Atlantic, round the Cape of Good Hope in the southern autumn, up the Indian Ocean and across the Bay of Bengal into the South China Sea in the north-east monsoon. Small ships do not cross oceans comfortably; they cross them slowly, wet, and with everybody aboard extremely tired. It took her from January to April 1972.

What she found at the end of it, and what the 6th Patrol Craft Squadron actually spent its days doing, is set out in detail in HMS Beachampton (M1007), who made the same journey a few months earlier and served alongside her for thirteen years.

A Long Way to Hong Kong

Between January and April 1972, Wolverton made the long passage around Africa to Hong Kong, joining the 6th Patrol Craft Squadron and going on to serve there for over a decade, taking part in local patrols and regional visits throughout the South China Sea as part of what became known as the Hong Kong Dragon Squadron, a particularly distinctive and long-running chapter in the ship's career.

Her Own Hong Kong

Three things in her Far East service belong to her rather than to the squadron.

In May 1975 the Queen visited Hong Kong, the first reigning British monarch ever to do so, and went to HMS Tamar, the shore establishment that was the navy's home in the colony. Wolverton was there for it. That is the sort of thing that gets a ship's company scrubbing paintwork for a fortnight and then gives them something to talk about for fifty years.

In 1981 she went to South Korea and Japan. A patrol craft based in Hong Kong did not often get north of the Taiwan Strait, and for a converted minesweeper whose entire design brief had been the shallow water off the English coast, Inchon and the Japanese ports were about as far from the drawing board as it is possible to get.

And in March 1983 she ran aground in Hong Kong harbour and damaged her propellers. It is worth saying out loud rather than skating over, because it is the sort of thing that happens in one of the most crowded, most reclaimed and most constantly re-dredged harbours in the world, where the shoreline moved every few years and the chart was always slightly behind the bulldozers.

She paid off in September 1985 under her last commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Tim Curd, eight months after Beachampton, which makes her one of the last two of the five converted Tons still working the colony before the purpose-built Peacock class took the job over.

The town she was named after deserves a line. Wolverton, now part of Milton Keynes, is a railway town: the London and Birmingham Railway put its locomotive works there in 1838 and Wolverton Works went on to build railway carriages for well over a century. Among the things it built, and still maintains, is the Royal Train. So a ship named for the place that builds the Queen's carriages spent an afternoon in 1975 with the Queen aboard the establishment next door, which is the kind of coincidence nobody arranges.

Sold for Further Use

HMS Wolverton was finally paid off in September 1985 after twenty-six years of full operational service. In 1986 she was sold locally in Hong Kong and converted into a floating restaurant, a second career that ended when fire destroyed her in 1991, closing out the career of a ship that had travelled from Cyprus to Hong Kong in service of three very different roles.

A Floating Restaurant in Hong Kong

Converted into a floating restaurant sounds like an indignity and in Hong Kong in 1986 it was very nearly a promotion.

The colony had a genuine tradition of them. The great floating restaurants of Aberdeen Harbour, on the south side of Hong Kong Island, were institutions: enormous, ornate, three storeys high, lit up like fairgrounds, seating over two thousand people, reached by sampan, and famous enough to appear in films. Smaller conversions filled in around them, and a decommissioned warship with a clean wooden hull, a working generator and a great deal of usable deck was an obvious candidate.

It did not last. She burned in 1991, five years in, which is the risk a floating restaurant runs and which several of the more famous ones ran too. A wooden hull, commercial kitchens and a great many customers is not a combination anybody would design from scratch.

Twenty-seven years, then, from a tidal basin in Angus to a berth in the South China Sea by way of Malta, Cyprus and the Cape of Good Hope, and then five more selling dinner in the harbour she had spent thirteen years patrolling. There are worse ways for a minesweeper to finish.