HMAS Snipe
1952 modified Ton-class minesweeper
HMAS Snipe (M1102) (formerly HMS Alcaston) was a Ton-class minesweeper which served in the Royal Navy (RN) and Royal Australian Navy (RAN).
Construction
The ship was constructed by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Southampton and launched on 4 September 1952.
Operational history
United Kingdom
The ship was completed on 16 December 1952, and commissioned in the Royal Navy as HMS Alcaston, being allocated the pennant number M.1102. Alcaston served with the 104th Mine Sweeping Squadron, and in November 1956 took part in Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French attack on the Suez Canal. In 1961 she was sold to Australia along with five other Ton-class minesweepers.
Australia
Following her sale, the ship was refitted with her engines replaced by Napier Deltic diesel engines, stabilisers being fitted and air conditioning added to better suit the ship for Australian service. The ship recommissioned as HMAS Snipe on 11 September 1962.
In September 1963, Snipe took part in Operation Gardening, a large scale operation by Australian minesweepers to clear magnetic mines laid during the Second World War in the approaches to Tonolei harbour, Bouganville. On 10 February 1964, the aircraft carrier Melbourne and destroyer Voyager collided, sinking Voyager. Snipe took part in search for survivors from Voyager.
“HMAS Snipe” enters the record as 1952 modified Ton-class minesweeper. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what HMAS, Snipe and modified can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5630574. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1102, 1956 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMAS Snipe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.