HMS Yarnton (M1196): Riding Out a Cyclone in the Persian Gulf

Built at Sunderland

HMS Yarnton was built by William Pickersgill and Sons in Sunderland, with construction spanning from October 1954 to January 1957, launched on 26 March 1956 and commissioning on 11 May 1957 for the 100th Minesweeping Squadron based at Portsmouth, a Ton-class minesweeper built for the steady work of coastal mine countermeasures.

William Pickersgill and Sons is worth a line. It was a Sunderland yard on the Wear that had been building ships since 1838 and whose ordinary trade was tramp steamers and colliers, not warships. The Ton class programme was so large, a hundred and nineteen hulls, and so specialised, since it needed shipwrights who could work in timber rather than platers who could work in steel, that the Admiralty had to spread it across the whole country. Sunderland, which in the 1950s was still the largest shipbuilding town in the world, built its share.

Cyprus and NATO Operations

Yarnton's early service took her on a Cyprus patrol deployment in 1958 and into several NATO operations including Operation Clear Road, Operation Cable Way and Operation Ice Scott, as her squadron relocated to Port Edgar in 1959 and was renumbered the 2nd Minesweeping Squadron in 1962.

Weathering a Severe Cyclone

After a major refit at Chatham, Yarnton sailed to Bahrain in October 1966 to join the 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, and that November encountered a severe cyclone which lasted more than twenty hours and at one point passed the ship directly through its eye; two of her engine room crew, working for over three hours in the flooded bilges by torchlight while the ship listed ten degrees, were later given a Commander-in-Chief's Commendation for keeping her switchboard running, a dramatic episode that speaks to the real hazards these small ships faced far beyond the reach of any enemy.

Force Twelve, Gusting Thirteen

The cyclone is the reason anybody remembers this ship, and the account of it deserves the ship's own words, because they are better than any paraphrase.

Her log for 10 November 1966 reads: now passing through eye of cyclone, winds cyclonic, Force 12, gusting to 13, waves 55 ft high.

Take that apart. Force 12 is the top of the Beaufort scale and simply means hurricane; there is no Force 13 on the scale as officially defined, so a log recording gusts to 13 is a way of saying that the instruments and the scale had both run out. Fifty-five-foot waves are the height of a five-storey building. And Yarnton was a wooden coastal minesweeper of four hundred and forty tons, a hundred and fifty-three feet long, designed to sweep mines in the shallow water off an English estuary and not to be more than a day or so from a harbour.

She was disabled and drifting through the whole of it, which lasted over twenty hours. That means no engines, no steerage way, and therefore no ability to hold her head into the sea, which is the only thing that keeps a small ship alive in weather like that. A vessel lying beam-on in a fifty-foot swell rolls until something gives.

What had gone was the main switchboard. Bilge water, thrown about inside the hull as she rolled, had reached the electrical connections and started a fire. Without the switchboard there is no power, and without power there are no pumps, and without pumps a wooden ship with water in her takes on more water until she does not come back up.

Two men fixed it. Petty Officer Malcolm Allard and Electrician's Mate Mike Smith spent over three hours in the bilges, standing in the water, working by head torch, with the ship listed ten degrees to starboard and rolling in a hurricane, on live electrical gear that had already caught fire once. Both were given a Commander-in-Chief's Commendation. It is difficult to think of a set of circumstances in which anybody would less like to be handed a screwdriver.

She survived, which is the whole point, and she survived because two people did an unpleasant job very carefully for three hours in the dark.

Patrolling the Gulf and Converting to Hong Kong Service

Between 1967 and 1971, Yarnton conducted patrols and exercises throughout the Gulf and Indian Ocean, including operations near Aden, before the 9th Squadron's disbandment in 1971 saw her transfer to Hong Kong and convert to a patrol craft under the new pennant P1096, taking on a new role far from her original minesweeping duties.

Aden, 1967

Operations near Aden covers a great deal, because 1967 in Aden was as bad as it got.

Aden had been British since 1839, was one of the busiest bunkering ports in the world, and was the hinge of the whole position east of Suez. By 1963 it was in open revolt, with two rival nationalist movements fighting the British and each other. By 1967 the situation had become impossible: in June the local armed police and part of the federal army mutinied and twenty-two British servicemen were killed in a day. In November the last British troops left, and the Royal Navy took them off, which is the sort of operation that requires ships offshore for weeks doing nothing visible and then everything at once.

A minesweeper in that role is doing inshore patrol, boarding dhows, watching the approaches, and being available. It is also, in a harbour full of small craft and hostility, exactly the ship you want if somebody starts putting explosive charges on hulls, which is a thing that had already happened elsewhere in the region.

The Gulf years that followed her cyclone are described from the deck of a squadron mate in HMS Beachampton (M1007), and the closing of the Bahrain commitment in HMS Maxton (M1165).

From One End of the Retreat to the Other

The move to Hong Kong is the neatest illustration of what the 1970s did to the Royal Navy, and it is worth being precise about the sequence.

The 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron at Bahrain existed because Britain had guaranteed the security of the Gulf states for a century and a half. In January 1968 the government announced that it was leaving east of Suez, and by the end of 1971 the Gulf commitment was gone and the squadron with it. Yarnton did not come home. She was sent on to the other end of the same withdrawal, to a colony Britain had already agreed would be handed over in 1997, and there she stayed.

Her conversion to a patrol craft, with the sweep gear taken out and a second Bofors fitted, was done at Hong Kong itself between July and December 1973, and she became P1096 in the 6th Patrol Craft Squadron. What that squadron did, and the extraordinary years it did it through, is in Beachampton's account and in HMS Wolverton (M1193).

Twenty-Six Years of Service

HMS Yarnton remained fully operational for twenty-six years, conducting patrols across Southeast Asia until being paid off on 12 November 1984, before finally being sold for scrap disposal in 1986, a particularly long and geographically wide-ranging career for a small coastal minesweeper.

She paid off on 12 November 1984, the first of the five converted Tons to go; Beachampton followed in January 1985 and Wolverton in September. The purpose-built Peacock class took the job over, and the Ton class era at Hong Kong ended after thirteen years.

Twenty-six years is a very long time for a wooden ship, and hers took her from a Sunderland slipway to Cyprus, the Firth of Forth, the Persian Gulf, Aden, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, through a hurricane that should probably have killed her. She was sold in 1986. Somewhere in the record of that November night in 1966 there is a small, precise piece of evidence about why ships survive, and it is not about the ships.