HMS Woodlark (formerly HMS Yaxham, M2780): A Minesweeper Reborn as a Training Ship

One of Ninety-Three Sister Ships

HMS Yaxham was built by J. Samuel White, launched on 21 January 1958 and completing on 19 March 1959, one of ninety-three inshore minesweepers of the Ham class, all named after villages ending in the suffix ham, in this case Yaxham in Norfolk, a naming convention that gave the class its collective identity across dozens of near-identical small ships.

What an Inshore Minesweeper Was For

Ninety-three of anything is a lot, and it is worth knowing what problem the Admiralty thought it was solving, because a Ham is not simply a small Ton.

The fear in the early 1950s was that the Soviet Union would mine British coastal waters, and not the deep approaches, where a proper fleet minesweeper could work, but the shallow ones: the Thames estuary, the Humber, the Mersey approaches, the Solent, the mouths of rivers, the water immediately outside every commercial port in the country. Mines laid there by aircraft or by small craft would close the ports, and a country that imports most of what it eats cannot have its ports closed. A Ton class sweeper of four hundred and forty tons draws too much water to work in the places that mattered most, so the Admiralty ordered a second, much smaller class to go in behind her.

A Ham is about a hundred and twenty tons and a hundred feet long, wooden hulled on aluminium frames like her larger sisters, and shallow enough to sweep in water that would put a Ton on the putty. They were cheap, they were quick to build, and they were ordered in enormous numbers and spread across a scatter of small yards up and down the country, most of them boatbuilders rather than shipbuilders. The class as a type is described in HMS Flintham (M2628), and the ship whose pennant number was one along from hers is in HMS Portisham (M2781).

The mines never came, which is why the story of the class is one of ships being sold, lent, converted or laid up almost as fast as they were finished. Some were never commissioned at all. Some went straight to foreign navies. Others became tenders, training ships and survey craft, which is what happened here: Yaxham was six years old when the Royal Navy decided it had a better use for her.

Her builder is worth a note. J Samuel White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight built these small wooden hulls alongside destroyers, lifeboats and, later, hovercraft; the yard and what else came out of it are described in HMS Winchester (L55).

Sweeping the Channel and the Baltic

Yaxham served with the 50th Minesweeping Squadron at Portland from 1959 to 1962, before transferring to the 3rd Minesweeping Squadron.

The Trials Ship at Portland

Served with the 50th Minesweeping Squadron at Portland is accurate and does not say what she was actually doing there, which is more interesting than squadron work.

From 1960 to 1962 she was attached to the Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland, the Admiralty's laboratory for torpedoes, mines, sonar and countermeasures. An establishment like that needs ships in the way a car manufacturer needs test tracks: somebody has to take the new equipment out into real water, stream it, tow it, break it, and come back and say what happened. That is what she was for.

Her service included a visit to Great Yarmouth and a trip to Brest to collect new sweeping gear for trials, as well as exercises in the Baltic that took her to Swedish ports including Uddevalla before returning home through the Kiel Canal, a notably well-travelled few years for a small inshore minesweeper.

Which explains the trip to Brest, which reads in the original as a curiosity and was nothing of the kind. She went to collect new sweeping gear for trials. The French had been developing their own minesweeping equipment and NATO navies swapped and tested each other's, so a small British sweeper crossed to a French naval base, loaded somebody else's kit, brought it home and found out whether it worked. Two years of that is why she then knew rather more than most ships her size.

The Baltic exercises are worth a moment too. A hundred-and-twenty-ton wooden ship crossing the North Sea, working through the Danish belts, exercising with the Scandinavian navies, calling at Uddevalla on the Swedish west coast and coming home through the Kiel Canal is a considerable amount of sea for something designed to sweep the mouth of the Thames. Small ships do that sort of passage slowly and uncomfortably, and the people aboard remember it for the rest of their lives.

Renamed and Reborn as Woodlark

In 1964, Yaxham underwent conversion and was renamed HMS Woodlark, becoming an Inshore Survey Craft and taking on an entirely new role away from minesweeping.

The Least Celebrated Job in the Fleet

Becoming an Inshore Survey Craft is the kind of line that sounds like a demotion and is in fact one of the most quietly consequential things a small ship can be given to do.

Every chart the Royal Navy and the merchant fleet use has to come from somewhere, and inshore, where the water is shallow and the bottom is sand and mud, it does not stay put. Sandbanks migrate. Channels silt. Dredged approaches fill in. Wrecks appear. A survey of an estuary is out of date almost as soon as it is printed, and the whole edifice of safe navigation rests on somebody going out in a small boat, week after week, running lines, taking soundings, fixing positions and sending the results to the Hydrographic Office at Taunton.

That is what the conversion gave her: survey launches, echo sounders, a plotting space and the accommodation for a survey party, in place of the sweep gear. It is patient, repetitive, unglamorous work done in bad weather in unattractive places, and there is not a mariner alive who has not benefited from it.

She did not do it alone. HMS Powderham, another Ham built at the same Cowes yard and another member of the same 50th Minesweeping Squadron, was converted at Chatham in the same year and renamed HMS Waterwitch. The two of them worked as a pair for twenty years.

She went on to serve for years as the training vessel for Southampton University's Royal Naval Unit, giving generations of undergraduate officer cadets their first taste of life at sea before eventually being replaced in that role by the P2000 patrol vessel HMS Blazer.

A Quiet Second Career

HMS Woodlark's transformation from minesweeper to training ship reflects a common and sensible pattern in Royal Navy ship management, finding continued useful service for a well-built small vessel long after her original operational role had run its course, helping shape the naval officers of tomorrow rather than simply being scrapped once her minesweeping days were done.

Two Ships, Two Universities

The endings of the pair are the neatest thing about them, because they finished the way they had started, together.

Woodlark became the training ship for Southampton University's Royal Naval Unit. Waterwitch became the training ship for Liverpool's. Both paid off in 1985, after around twenty-one years in the survey and training role and twenty-six or twenty-seven years afloat. Waterwitch had a last moment of glory on the way, taking part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977.

What a University Royal Naval Unit is, and why the Royal Navy runs one at fifteen universities, is set out in HMS Blazer (P279), which is the boat that took the Southampton job over. The difference in size is the point. Woodlark was a hundred feet of wooden minesweeper with a survey plot; Blazer is a twenty-metre fast patrol boat built for the job. A generation of Southampton undergraduates learned to take a ship to sea in a vessel older than they were, built for a war nobody fought, converted for a job nobody thanks anybody for.

What became of her afterwards is not well recorded, and it is better to say so than to invent something. Her sister lay for years at Camber Dock and Portchester Creek while volunteers tried to make her seaworthy again, was last logged at North Shields in 1997, and was probably broken up in 2006, though even that is marked unconfirmed on the National Historic Ships register. Small ships are like that. They are worked hard, sold cheaply and disappear quietly, and the records that would settle it were never kept by anybody whose job it was.