Battle to save veteran of the Dardanelles (From Western Telegraph)

Battle to save veteran of the Dardanelles

ON May 5th, 1924, the monitor M33 arrived at Pembroke Dock, for what proved to be almost the last job undertaken at the naval dockyard before closure was announced the following year.

The work involved removing the armament and magazines and much else for conversion to a minelayer at a cost of £22,909 - some £820,000 in todays terms.

This was not the first visit by M33 to Pembroke Dock. A six-inch gun monitor, built at Harland and Wolff, Belfast, she called here on her first voyage in June 1915 to take on stores at the dockyard. It was a busy time. Her sisters M29 and M32 had just left and the massive 14-inch gun monitors Raglan and Havelock were also in port.

M33 left Pembroke Dock at the end of June and sailed for the Mediterranean - a slow voyage for she could only make about seven knots in the open sea. Her destination, along with her sisters and larger siblings was the Dardanelles, where she fired her first shots in action early in August as the Allied forces made one final effort to wrest the Peninsula from the Turks - an operation as epic as it was disastrous. Had it succeeded might it have opened the way to Constantinople and a speedy conclusion to the end of the war?

Alas this was not to be and with the campaign coming to an end in December and January she remained in the Mediterranean and Aegean until the end of the war.

Then, to a complete change of scenery and climate, M33 sailed to Northern Russia and saw action along the River Dvina against the Bolsheviks.

Following her mid-1920s conversion at Pembroke Dock to a coastal minelayer and renaming as Minerva she had a further chequered history, in and out of reserve followed by service as a tender to the cruiser HMS Effingham. Then she was a floating office in wartime for Wrens, a boom defence workshop and finally a floating workshop and office until laying up in 1984. The Navy certainly had their moneys worth.

For the past 15 years valiant efforts have been made to preserve this remarkable ship with its Pembroke Dock connections, first at Hartlepool but for much of the time in Portsmouth, where she now resides sealed in her dry-dock hard by Nelsons Victory. Despite this, her future remains uncertain - largely the need for £600,000 to match a hoped for £600,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Meanwhile, a 24 page, well-illustrated booklet by Ian Buxton provides an excellent history of an almost forgotten warship. Are there photographs in existence of M33 during her visits to Pembroke Dock one is moved to ask? Do readers have memories of her - even of working in her during the mid-1920s?

q His Majestys Monitor M33 1915-2001 by Ian Buxton is published by Hampshire County Council (ISBN 1 85975 513 5) at £2.