HMS Alderney (P278): Born From the Cod Wars, Retired to the Bay of Bengal

A Warship Modelled on a Fisheries Boat

HMS Alderney owed her design to an unusually practical piece of naval history.

The Island class she belonged to was originally developed for the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency, based on the ocean-going trawlers FPV Jura and FPV Westra, sturdy, seaworthy vessels built for exactly the kind of grinding, weather-beaten patrol work the North Atlantic demanded; Jura herself was briefly loaned to the Navy as HMS Jura before the class proper was ordered.

After the Royal Navy's own bruising experience during the Cod Wars with Iceland, in which lightly built frigates had struggled against Icelandic gunboats in a dispute nobody had quite planned for, the Navy decided the fisheries protection design had the right idea, and ordered seven vessels to the same pattern.

The bruising deserves describing, because it was a genuinely odd conflict. The third and worst of the Cod Wars ran from November 1975 to June 1976, set off by Iceland extending her fishing limit to two hundred miles. The Icelandic Coast Guard's weapon of choice was not a gun but a trawl-wire cutter, a device towed across the warps of a British trawler to sever them and set her nets adrift. When the Royal Navy put frigates between the cutters and the trawlers, the Icelanders simply rammed the frigates. Icelandic sources count thirty-five ramming incidents in that dispute against fourteen in the one before it. HMS Diomede came into Rosyth in March 1976 with a twenty-foot gash in her side after the gunboat Baldur had hit her four times.

None of which a Leander was designed for. A frigate of that generation is a fine anti-submarine ship and an expensive bumper car, and the Navy was steadily wrecking its own hulls in a dispute it could not win at sea anyway: Iceland held the trump card of NATO membership and the GIUK gap through which Soviet submarines had to pass, and Britain settled in June 1976. The lesson the Admiralty drew was blunt and correct. If you are going to spend years in the North Atlantic being shoved by fishing boats, buy something built like a fishing boat.

Alderney was one of them, built by Hall, Russell and Company, laid down on 11 June 1978, launched on 27 February 1979, and commissioned on 6 October 1979. She cost around £3 million to build, displaced 925 tons standard and up to 1,250 tons fully loaded, and could make 16 knots on her twin diesel engines, with a range of 7,000 miles at a cruising 12 knots and a crew of around 39.

That is essentially what an Island is. Take a deep, heavily framed stern trawler hull, put a naval crew and a Bofors in it, and accept sixteen knots as the price of being able to stay out in weather that sends prettier ships home. Seven were built by Hall Russell at Aberdeen, Alderney being yard number 984: Jersey, Orkney, Shetland, Guernsey, Lindisfarne, Anglesey and Alderney herself. They were slower than most of what they were sent to chase, which mattered less than it sounds, because a fishing boat has to go home eventually and a patrol vessel with seven thousand miles of range does not.

The names on that list are all British islands, and six of them are the kind of place people go on holiday. The seventh is not, and it is worth knowing why. Alderney is the northernmost of the Channel Islands, eight miles off the Cotentin peninsula, and in June 1940 it was the only one of the islands to be evacuated completely. On 23 June, with a few hours' notice, almost all of its fourteen hundred and fifty inhabitants were taken off by sea, leaving a handful behind. A small German force landed on 2 July and found an empty island, which was in some ways the worst possible outcome: an island with nobody on it and no witnesses.

What was then done with it is the part of the story that took Britain a very long time to look at. Alderney was built into the Atlantic Wall, and the labour was brought in: four camps were established for forced labourers shipped from across occupied Europe, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Jews among them. From March 1943 until June 1944 two of those camps, Lager Sylt and Lager Norderney, were placed under SS control, which makes Alderney the site of the only SS-run camps on British soil. How many people died there was argued over for eighty years. A panel of thirteen international experts convened for the United Kingdom's special envoy on post-Holocaust issues has since concluded that the likely figure lies between six hundred and forty-one and one thousand and twenty-seven, on an island whose entire pre-war population was fourteen hundred and fifty.

The islanders came back from 1945 onwards to houses that had been stripped and a landscape covered in concrete, and the naming of a Royal Navy patrol vessel after the place in 1979 is not the smallest thing that has happened to it. Alderney is one of very few British communities that has been emptied by war in living memory, and the only one on which that was done by an enemy. A ship carrying the name spends her life doing exactly the sort of unglamorous work, patrolling, boarding, being visible in home waters, that exists so that it does not happen again. It is not the reason the Admiralty picked the name, which was simply that the class was to be named after islands. It is the reason the name is worth more than the others.

Two Decades of Unglamorous, Necessary Patrol Work

Alongside her sister ships, Alderney formed part of the backbone of the Fishery Protection Squadron, whose job was to patrol the Atlantic fishing grounds around the British Isles and safeguard the North Sea's oil and gas installations, a role that carried little of a destroyer's wartime glamour but a great deal of genuine, ongoing importance to Britain's economic security.

The squadron she served in has a decent claim to being the oldest front-line formation in the Royal Navy, traced back to 1481 and by some accounts a century further. Its business is not fighting but law: boarding fishing vessels, inspecting nets, gear and catches, and checking logbooks, plus keeping a surveillance eye on the oil and gas installations in the North Sea. It is one of the very few naval jobs where the ship exists to enforce a statute rather than to sink anything, and where the person who matters most on the day is a fishery officer with a clipboard rather than a gunner.

Most of it really was patrol after patrol without incident, though not always: on 4 July 1981 she tried to escort an offending French trawler into Grimsby, only for its crew to threaten her boarding party with knives and an acetylene torch and make a run for Boulogne instead.

In the chase that followed, the trawler collided with a second French vessel, attempted to ram Alderney, and then struck her anyway while cutting across her bow, an escapade that eventually cost its owners a fine of £6,796 plus a further £2,000 for the damage done to a Royal Navy warship. In 1998 she was involved in the rather gentler business of rescuing two yacht crew west of Lundy Island.

A New Flag in the Bay of Bengal

Like most of her class, Alderney's Royal Navy career wound down through the 1990s as the fleet was gradually decommissioned. She was acquired by Bangladesh on 31 October 2002 and commissioned into the Bangladesh Navy on 4 May 2003 as BNS Karotoa, joining four other Island-class sister ships sold to Bangladesh around the same time, in a new life patrolling entirely different waters on the other side of the world.

As Karotoa, she has continued in active service under the Commodore Commanding Bangladesh Navy Khulna, carrying a 40mm Bofors gun and modern surface search radar into a second career that has now, remarkably, outlasted her first.

There is a neatness to where they all ended up. The Bangladesh Navy names its patrol vessels after rivers, and five of Alderney's six sisters followed her out to the Bay of Bengal to take up river names of their own: Shetland, Lindisfarne, Anglesey and Guernsey all went, and Jersey became a training ship. A class conceived in the North Atlantic to survive being rammed by Icelanders now spends its days in the warm brown water off the Ganges delta, which is not a career any of the seven could reasonably have expected.

A ship built to a fishing boat's hull design, in response to a very British dispute with Iceland over cod, has ended up serving a South Asian navy for longer than she ever served the one that built her.