HMS Wotton (M1195): Fishery Protection, Rescues, and a Falklands Connection

A Long Build at Dartmouth

HMS Wotton was built by Philip and Son at Dartmouth, with construction beginning on 25 June 1954 and completing after thirty-six months on 13 June 1957. She entered service on 18 April 1958, assigned to the Fishery Protection Squadron based at Port Edgar, a Ton-class minesweeper that would go on to spend much of her career protecting Britain's fishing grounds rather than clearing mines.

Philip and Son of Dartmouth is worth naming properly. It was a Devon yard on the Dart, better known for tugs, ferries, trawlers and yachts than for warships, and it is a good example of what the Ton class programme actually was: a hundred and nineteen wooden minesweepers ordered in a hurry and spread across every yard in the country that could work in timber, because no naval shipbuilder had the capacity and because wooden hulls needed shipwrights rather than platers. Philip and Son also built HMS Iveston (M1151), whose career took a rather more dramatic turn.

What the Fishery Protection Squadron did with her, and why the Royal Navy's oldest squadron spends its life inspecting other people's fish, is described in HMS Belton (M1199).

Patrols and Hovercraft Trials

Wotton spent her early years conducting fishery patrols and exercises around the United Kingdom, including making multiple arrests of fishing vessels for illegal activity, and took part in hovercraft trials in 1968, part of the Royal Navy's ongoing experimentation with new technology even aboard its more traditional minesweeping fleet.

Why the Navy Wanted Hovercraft

The hovercraft trials of 1968 look at first like the sort of thing a service does when somebody has been to a trade fair, and they were nothing of the kind. There is a very good reason a minesweeper was interested in hovercraft, and it is the whole reason the machines exist.

A hovercraft is not in the water. It sits on a cushion of air above it, and the consequences for mine warfare are enormous. An influence mine is triggered by a ship's magnetic field, by the noise of her machinery, or by the pressure wave a moving hull pushes ahead of it through shallow water. A hovercraft has almost no magnetic signature in the water at all, produces very little pressure signature, and can pass directly over a mine without setting it off. It can also cross a beach, work in three feet of water, and travel at fifty knots, none of which a wooden minesweeper can do.

Britain had invented the practical hovercraft in 1959 and spent the 1960s working out what to do with it. An Interservice Hovercraft Unit was set up at Lee-on-Solent, and the Royal Navy tried the machines for minesweeping, for logistics over beaches and for fast patrol. The idea never quite took: the craft of that generation were fragile, noisy, thirsty and appalling in a seaway, and a skirt is not a thing you want to maintain on a warship. But it was not a silly line of enquiry. Mine countermeasures work today still uses unmanned surface craft on exactly the same principle, which is to keep the manned ship away from the mine.

Rescues at Sea

Wotton's crew carried out genuine rescue work over the years, salvaging the fishing vessel Tina Louise in 1973 and standing by the burning fishing vessel Storgen in 1978, before conducting deep armed team sweep operations off Gibraltar between 1975 and 1976.

The two rescues deserve their proper weight, because they are the sort of thing that fills a small ship's life and never reaches a history book. On 6 and 7 June 1973 she salvaged the fishing vessel Tina Louise off Portland. In 1978 she stood by the burning Storgen. Standing by a burning ship is not a passive act. It means putting a boat in the water, taking people off, fighting the fire from alongside with hoses across a gap in a seaway, and staying while it is decided whether the thing is going to explode. A minesweeper's company of about thirty does that with the equipment it happens to have aboard.

What a Deep Armed Team Sweep Is

Deep armed team sweep operations is the most technical phrase in her whole record and it is worth unpacking, because it describes a piece of seamanship of real elegance and considerable nerve.

A moored mine floats at a set depth on a wire anchored to the seabed. To sweep it you do not go looking for the mine, you go looking for the wire. Two minesweepers steam in company on parallel courses, some distance apart, towing a single sweep wire strung between them. The wire is held down at the right depth by a kite, a weighted paravane device that dives when towed, and it is fitted at intervals with explosive cutters. The pair then drag that wire across the seabed contours until it catches a mine mooring, at which point the cutter fires, the mooring parts, and the mine bobs to the surface, where it is destroyed with rifle and machine gun fire.

That is the team sweep. The armed part is the explosive cutters. The deep part means using a bigger, heavier kite to take the wire further down, so that mines moored below the reach of the ordinary sweep can be caught as well. The Ton class carried the Wire Sweep Mark 3 for this, and the whole business was later taken deeper still with the Extra Deep Armed Team Sweep in the River class of the 1980s.

Two things follow from that description. The first is that it takes two ships to do anything at all, working to the yard, hour after hour, holding station on each other while towing several hundred yards of wire at a set depth in whatever the weather is doing. The second is that the whole point of the exercise is to bring live mines to the surface a few hundred yards from you and then shoot at them.

Gibraltar is where a great deal of that training happened, because it has deep water immediately outside the harbour, a NATO ally on either side, reliable weather and a British base to come home to. The Mediterranean approaches to the Strait are also exactly the sort of chokepoint a hostile navy would mine in a war, which is why the Royal Navy kept practising there.

A Falklands Connection

During the 1982 Falklands conflict, the majority of Wotton's crew transferred to the converted trawler FARNELLA for service in the South Atlantic, a reminder of how the Royal Navy drew on experienced small-ship crews from across the fleet to crew the improvised vessels needed for that unexpected campaign.

The Fourteenth of April 1982

The Falklands entry is stranger than it reads and worth setting out, because the ship stayed at home and her people went to war in somebody else's hull.

The task force sailing south had no mine countermeasures ships that could get there. A Ton class minesweeper is a hundred-and-fifty-foot wooden vessel with an endurance measured in days; the South Atlantic is eight thousand miles away. So the Admiralty took five deep-sea trawlers out of Hull, Cordella, Farnella, Junella, Northella and Pict, fitted them with sweep gear at North Shields in about a week, and manned them with the crews of five Ton class minesweepers, who walked off their own ships and onto the trawlers. They became the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron.

The majority of Wotton's ship's company made that move on 14 April 1982 and sailed in Farnella. What they then did, which included a good deal more than minesweeping, is set out in HMS Soberton (M1200) and HMS Alfriston (M1103).

It is worth pausing on what that was like from the inside. A ship's company is a machine that takes a year to build: everybody knows the ship, the ship knows them, and the whole value of the thing is in the accumulated familiarity. On 14 April these men were told to leave the ship they knew, take their kit to a fishing trawler in a Tyne shipyard, learn her in a fortnight and take her to the far end of the Atlantic to look for mines. Most of them had never seen her before. It worked.

A Second Life With the Sea Cadets

HMS Wotton was paid off in November 1984 after twenty-five years of full operational service, and was loaned to the Woolwich Unit of the Sea Cadets between 1986 and 1989, giving young cadets hands-on experience aboard a genuine former Royal Navy vessel, before finally being sold to Brugse Scheepssloperij for breaking on 19 November 1992.

Loaned to the Woolwich Unit of the Sea Cadets is a good ending and not a token one. A Sea Cadet unit with a real ship alongside is a different proposition entirely from one with a drill hall and a rowing boat: cadets learn to keep a gangway, to run a watch, to work in a real engine room and a real galley, on a vessel that has actually been somewhere. Three years of that, for a ship the Royal Navy no longer needed, is a great deal better than three years on a mooring.

She was sold on 19 November 1992 to the Bruges shipbreakers and taken across to Belgium, thirty-five years after she came down the slip on the Dart. She never swept a live mine in anger. Almost nobody in that class ever did, and that is the point of them: the class existed so that if the mines came, the answer already existed, and they never came.