HMS Anglesey (P277): The Patrol Vessel That Saved Sailors From the Fastnet Storm

Built for an Expanding Fishing Zone

HMS Anglesey owed her existence to a change in international law rather than any military necessity. When Britain extended its Exclusive Economic Zone to 200 nautical miles, the Royal Navy needed more patrol vessels to enforce it, and ordered a further two Island-class ships, Anglesey and her sister Alderney, in October 1977, built to the same rugged fishing-boat-derived design as the rest of the class.

It is worth being precise about that change in the law, because it did not come out of nowhere. Britain extended her fishery limits to two hundred miles at the beginning of 1977, in step with the rest of the European Community and in the direct wake of the third and worst of the Cod Wars, in which Iceland had claimed exactly that limit and Britain had eventually conceded it. Having lost the argument at sea and then adopted the same rule, the country now had an enormous area of water to police and not nearly enough hulls to do it with. Anglesey and Alderney were ordered together in October 1977 to fill part of that gap, which makes them, in a roundabout way, the last two ships Iceland caused Britain to build.

Built by Hall, Russell and Company in Aberdeen, Anglesey was laid down on 6 February 1978, launched that October, and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 1 June 1979, joining the Offshore Division of the Fishery Protection Squadron.

Hall, Russell is a name worth pausing on, because the yard that built her is the reason the design works. The firm was founded in Aberdeen in 1864 by two of Alexander Hall's sons with a Glasgow engineer named Thomas Russell, and it began by building engines and boilers before turning out its first ship in 1868. What it then did for the next century was build trawlers. As Aberdeen's fishing industry expanded from the 1890s the yard became one of the principal suppliers of the boats that worked the northern grounds, and something like a thousand vessels came off its slipways over a hundred and twenty-four years. That is the pedigree behind an Island-class patrol vessel: not a warship yard trying to build something small, but a trawler yard building what it had always built, with a gun on the front. The yard went into receivership in 1986, changed hands, delivered the passenger ship St Helena in 1990 and closed in 1992, the last shipbuilder in Aberdeen.

The design itself came into the Royal Navy sideways, which is unusual and rather sensible. The Scottish fishery protection service had two ships built at Hall, Russell in 1973 and 1975, Jura and Westra, and during the Cod Wars the Navy borrowed Jura and used her for two years to see how a purpose-built fishery vessel compared with sending a frigate. The answer was that she was very much better at it and enormously cheaper to run: a converted trawler hull has the seakeeping to stay out in weather that keeps a fast warship in harbour, the endurance to remain on station for weeks, and a crew of about thirty rather than two hundred and fifty. So the Navy ordered seven of its own to the same design, and Anglesey and Alderney were the last two. That evaluation, and the ship that was borrowed to do it, are described in the articles on HMS Jersey (P295) and HMS Alderney (P278).

A Rescue in the Middle of Disaster

Anglesey had barely finished working up before she was called into one of the defining maritime tragedies of the era. In August 1979, the Fastnet yacht race was struck by a ferocious, unforecast storm that killed 15 competitors and became one of the deadliest events in the history of offshore sailing.

The scale of what happened that August still takes some absorbing. Three hundred and three yachts had started from Cowes on 11 August. On the night of 13 to 14 August a depression deepened far faster than anyone had forecast and put storm force winds gusting to hurricane strength across the south western approaches, into a fleet of small boats spread over a very large area of sea. Five yachts sank. Twenty-four crews abandoned their boats. Around two hundred vessels got into difficulty of some kind, and only eighty-five of the three hundred and three finished the race.

Fifteen competitors died, along with four members of the rescue services who went out after them. A hundred and thirty-two people were lifted out of the water or off their boats by Royal Navy and RAF helicopters, RNLI lifeboats and the Irish Naval Service, in what was the largest peacetime rescue operation these islands had mounted since the Second World War. Anglesey had been in commission for ten weeks.

Anglesey was among the first Royal Navy vessels on the scene, helping save seven sailors from the stricken yacht Bonaventure II as part of what became the largest peacetime rescue operation Britain and Ireland had ever mounted, involving around 4,000 people, the entire Irish Naval Service, RNLI lifeboats and helicopters, a remarkably dramatic piece of real-world seamanship for a ship whose day job was the considerably less glamorous business of checking fishing licences and monitoring North Sea installations.

The consequences reached a long way past the yachts involved. The Royal Yachting Association and the Royal Ocean Racing Club commissioned a joint inquiry into what had gone wrong, and its findings changed offshore sailing permanently: VHF radio made compulsory, safety harnesses required to take a two-hundred-kilogram load, hulls redesigned for greater stability and, most tellingly of all, crews advised not to leave the boat until she is actually sinking. A striking number of those who died had abandoned yachts that were later found still afloat. Every offshore racing rule written since has that storm somewhere behind it.

Two Decades of Quiet Patrol Work

Beyond that single dramatic episode, Anglesey's Royal Navy career followed the steady, low-key pattern typical of her class.

The other half of her job is the half nobody mentions, and by the 1980s it was arguably the more important one. The Island class were given responsibility for the security of the British oil and gas fields in the North Sea, and the reason is uncomfortable to state plainly: a fixed production platform cannot be defended in any meaningful sense. It sits in one place, it is enormous, it is full of hydrocarbons under pressure, it is manned by a few hundred civilians, and by the end of the 1970s British national revenue depended on a few dozen of them. There is no fence to put round the North Sea. What a patrol vessel provides instead is presence and response: somebody with a radar picture of who is in the field, the authority to ask what they are doing there, and a hull that can be alongside within hours. It is the same argument as fishery protection, applied to something worth a great deal more, and it is why the ships were kept in commission long after the fishing disputes that prompted them had died down.

What life aboard was actually like deserves a mention as well, because these were not comfortable ships. An Island class displaced about twelve hundred tons, made sixteen knots flat out, carried a single 40mm gun and about forty people, and had no helicopter, no missile and no sonar worth the name. What she did have was endurance, and a hull shaped by people who built boats for the North Sea in winter, which meant she could stay out in conditions that would have driven a frigate home. That is a mixed blessing for the crew. A ship that can keep the sea in a force nine is a ship that does keep the sea in a force nine, for weeks at a time, rolling, while everybody aboard tries to eat, sleep and board fishing vessels. Fishery protection is regarded in the service as one of the harder sea-going jobs precisely because it never stops and nothing about it is dramatic enough to be exciting.

She was still serving in the Offshore Division of the Fishery Protection Squadron a decade later, part of the Royal Navy's order of battle for 1989, and went on patrolling British waters and protecting fishing grounds and offshore installations for a total of over two decades, unglamorous work that nonetheless mattered a great deal to the country's economic interests at sea.

A New Flag in South Asia

Anglesey was paid off by the Royal Navy on 31 July 2003, sold to the Bangladesh Navy on 28 August that year, and renamed Gomati on 9 September 2003, before being formally commissioned into Bangladeshi service as BNS Gomati on 3 October 2004.

In her new role she has continued to earn her keep, taking part in Exercise Aman 2013 at Karachi and paying goodwill visits to Colombo and Visakhapatnam that same year, carrying the same basic hull and purpose, patrol and presence, into an entirely different ocean from the one she was originally built to watch over.

Her Bangladeshi career has now run longer than her British one, and it is doing much the same work for much the same reason. Bangladesh has a coastline on the Bay of Bengal, an exclusive economic zone of its own to enforce, a very large fishing industry, a maritime boundary dispute with two neighbours that took until 2012 and 2014 to settle in international tribunals, and a chronic problem with cyclones. A long-endurance patrol ship with a small crew, good seakeeping and a boat is exactly the right tool for all of that, and it costs a fraction of what a frigate would. BNS Gomati has been at it for over twenty years and has been out into the wider Indian Ocean while doing it, exercising at Karachi and calling at Colombo and Visakhapatnam. A hull built in Aberdeen by a trawler yard to police a limit Iceland forced Britain to adopt is now policing the same kind of limit off the Sundarbans.

There is a neat symmetry in where the two of them finished up as well. Anglesey and Alderney were ordered on the same day, built by the same yard, spent their careers doing the same job in the same waters, and both ended up in the Bay of Bengal under the Bangladeshi ensign, patrolling that country's own two-hundred-mile limit. The law that caused them to be built in the North Sea is the same law they now enforce eight thousand miles away.

She remains in active Bangladeshi service today, based at Khulna and helping protect the country’s own exclusive economic zone in the Bay of Bengal, a fitting echo of the very reason she was built in the first place.