HMS Atherstone (M38): Three and a Half Years Without Coming Home

The Tenth of Her Class

HMS Atherstone was built by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston, Southampton, launched on 1 March 1986 with Amy Jarvis serving as sponsor, and commissioned at Portsmouth on 17 January 1987, the tenth Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel built for the Royal Navy.

The most remarkable thing about a Hunt is what she is made of. The hull is glass reinforced plastic, moulded in one piece, and when they were built these were, and to a large extent still are, the largest warships in the world constructed that way. The reason is the same reason the wooden Tons were built the way they were: a mine listens for steel, and a hull with no magnetic signature does not set one off. Plastic also has a useful second property that wood does not, which is that it flexes. A GRP hull shrugs off the shock of an underwater explosion considerably better than a steel one, which matters a great deal when your job description involves being close to mines going off.

It was not cheap. Thirteen were built between 1980 and 1989, eleven of them by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston and two by Yarrow, and each one cost something in the region of forty million pounds in the money of the day, which was frigate money for a six-hundred-ton ship. Moulding a sixty-metre hull in one piece is a genuinely difficult industrial process and the fittings inside have to be non-magnetic too, down to the engine mountings and the tools. They were designed to sweep as well as hunt, and in later years the sweeping gear came out and they concentrated on hunting, which is where the real value had always been.

The name is a deliberate inheritance. Like the wartime Hunt-class escort destroyers, these ships take their names from British packs of hounds, and this Atherstone shares hers with the very first of that earlier class, the ship whose inclining test in 1939 revealed that the whole design had been drawn round guns the hull could not carry. Two ships of the same name, forty-odd years apart, both first or near-first of a class, both prototypes for something the Navy went on to build a great many of.

There have in fact been three of them, and the town has a better naval record than most places its size. The first HMS Atherstone was a minesweeper launched in April 1916 who served in both world wars and was not broken up until 1952 at Dover, which is thirty-six years of work for a First World War sweeper. The second was the escort destroyer, and she did rather more than fail an inclining test: she was one of the escorts for Operation Chariot, the St Nazaire raid of March 1942, in which the old destroyer Campbeltown was driven into the lock gates of the Normandie dock packed with explosives, and she went on to the invasion of Sicily. She was scrapped in November 1957. Then this one, from 1987 to 2017. A minesweeper, a destroyer and a minehunter, a hundred and one years between the first launch and the last decommissioning, all named for a Warwickshire market town chiefly famous for hat-making and an annual Shrove Tuesday football match played through the streets with almost no rules at all.

She was fitted with the SeaFox mine disposal system and diver-placed charges for actually dealing with the mines she found, alongside a 30mm gun, miniguns and machine guns for self-defence, and maintained close ceremonial ties with the town of Atherstone throughout her service.

The SeaFox system is worth explaining, because it changed what minehunting costs in human terms. Traditionally a mine found by sonar had to be dealt with by a diver, swimming down to an object designed to explode and placing a charge on it by hand. SeaFox is a small remotely operated vehicle, run out on a fibre-optic cable, that swims to the mine, sends back pictures so the ship can confirm what it is, and then detonates a shaped charge against it, destroying itself in the process. It is expendable by design. Every one used is a diver who did not have to go down, and any ship that can put an object rather than a person next to a mine will do so every time.

Built as Yard No. 4255 and displacing 625 tons, she began her career with the 3rd Mine Countermeasures Squadron based at Faslane in Scotland before later moving south to join the 2nd Mine Countermeasures Squadron.

Two Years Watching the Gulf

Atherstone's most demanding period of service came between 2013 and December 2015, when she deployed continuously to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Kipion, conducting mine-countermeasure surveys along the region's main shipping routes, work intended to provide reassurance to merchant shipping passing through some of the world's most strategically sensitive and mine-vulnerable waters.

The Gulf work is worth putting in context, because it is not an abstract precaution. The narrow water at the Strait of Hormuz carries a very large share of the world's oil, and it is shallow, confined and exactly the kind of place a handful of cheap mines can close for weeks. It has been mined before, in the tanker war of the 1980s and again in 1991, when two American warships were badly damaged by mines off Kuwait. The Royal Navy has kept mine countermeasures vessels in the region more or less continuously since, and a ship surveying the shipping lanes is not looking for mines so much as establishing, and being seen to establish, that there are none. Deterrence by survey is an odd job. It is also one very few navies can do at all.

The way she did that job is worth explaining, because it is not how navies normally work and it is the reason the phrase deployed continuously means what it says. The four minehunters forward-based at Bahrain do not come home. The ship stays in the Gulf for years at a stretch, tied to a support ship and a shore organisation there, and the people are flown out instead: the Mine Countermeasures Squadron holds a pool of numbered crews, and in August 2014, for instance, MCM2 Crew 6 took Atherstone over from whoever had her before. It is an efficient use of a very expensive hull and a hard way to run a ship's company, because every crew inherits somebody else's defect list and nobody gets the long, slow work-up that used to bind a company together. By the time she came home in December 2015, three and a half years after she went out, she had covered 51,220 nautical miles, put in more than 8,630 hours of operational tasking and visited twelve countries on three continents. The same arrangement is described from another ship in the article on HMS Quorn (M41).

That commitment has since ended, which puts her three and a half years in a different light. The Royal Navy kept minehunters in the Gulf continuously from 1980, through the tanker war, the 1991 clearance of the Kuwaiti approaches and everything after, and in 2026 the last of them came home. Forty-six years of unbroken presence, finished. The end of it, and what it means for a navy that has spent four decades being the one everybody called when there were mines in the water, is set out in the article on HMS Middleton (M34). Atherstone's Gulf years were, it turns out, near the end of something rather than in the middle of it.

She also took part in the 2014 International Mine Countermeasures Exercise, working alongside partner navies from across the region to hone the kind of specialist skills that minehunting demands.

A Quiet Decommissioning

Atherstone was lifted from the water for a planned refit in December 2016, but the refit never happened; instead she was decommissioned on 14 December 2017 after three decades of service. Advertised for sale in June 2020, the stripped vessel was eventually sold in June 2022 to the Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff, best known for building Titanic.

Rather than sailing again herself, Atherstone's role was to be a parts donor: her sister ship HMS Quorn, sold on to Lithuania, was being restored to sea-going condition under a £55 million contract known as the M55 Regeneration Project, and the two ships shared enough common components that having Atherstone available to strip for spares significantly reduced the risk to that programme.

It is worth following the Lithuanian end of that, because it is a better ending than being cut up. Lithuania has been buying decommissioned Hunts from Britain since 2008, when Dulverton and Cottesmore went east and became Skalvis and Kursis; Quorn is the third, and the fifty-five million pound contract covered new main engines, generators and propulsion gear, upgraded mission and sonar systems, an added search and rescue capability and a full refit of hull, accommodation and electrics, with the new engines going in during December 2023. A NATO ally on the Baltic, whose own coast is thoroughly littered with the mines of two world wars and a Cold War, now has three British minehunters, and one of the three is sailing on parts that came out of Atherstone at Belfast: a pump here, a valve there, a length of cable somewhere behind a panel. It is a peculiar sort of afterlife and a considerably more useful one than a floating restaurant, which is what she was advertised as in 2020.

It was a somewhat unglamorous final chapter in her own right, but a genuinely useful one, for a ship that had spent two solid years quietly keeping some of the busiest and most contested shipping lanes in the world safe from mines.