Rusted hull of historic HMCS Sackville being restored in Halifax

After a decorated career fighting German U-boats during the Second World War, the HMCS Sackville, the last remaining ship of the Flower-class corvettes, eventually made its way to the Halifax waterfront to connect people with a piece of Canadian history.

“She was one of 120 ships that were built here in Canada prior to and during the Second World War,” said Bill Woodburn, chair of the Canadian Naval Memorial Trust, a non-profit charity organization dedicated to preserving and sharing naval history.

“They had a crew of about 85 personnel onboard and the beauty of them was they could be manufactured very quickly,” he said, adding they were built in, “British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.”

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Woodburn says the corvettes played an integral role in ensuring convoys of merchant ships were able to safely cross the Atlantic during the Second World War.

“The main job they had was to defend against submarines and how they would do that is try to force the submarines deep so that they couldn’t properly make an attack on the merchant ships but in so doing, we lost 10 of our Canadian ships in battle,” he said.

The ship has been in the hands of the trust since 1983 and has been open to the public ever since.

After decades of sitting in salty ocean water, her hull was in need of repair.

“She was getting to the point where the hull was starting to deteriorate,” Woodburn said. “We had to do something about it.”

He says the trust came up with a solution in collaboration with the fleet maintenance facility of the Royal Canadian Navy in Halifax.

Once the Sackville was placed into drydock, crews began welding new steel plates over top of the old, rusted ones.

“This will give her many more years of service and allow us the ongoing task of eventually doing a whole reskinning of the hull. And that will, in the long-term, give her life for decades to come,” he said.

Woodburn says quarter-inch steel plates are being welded onto the hull, up to the water line of the ship.

Woodburn says the trust collects charitable donations to support the work and preservation of the Sackville.

For him and other members of the trust, it’s a chance to connect all Canadians with a historical glimpse into the role these class of ships played in safeguarding Canada during Atlantic ocean battles.

“After she’s refitted she gets back into her routine of going down to the waterfront. She spends down her summers down there telling the story of the Second World War,” he said.

Woodburn says the crews are aiming to have the hull refitted by this May.