HMS Bicester (M36): Twelve Years of Hunting Mines

Built by Vosper Thornycroft

HMS Bicester was built by Vosper Thornycroft, launched on 4 June 1985 and commissioned into the Royal Navy in May 1986, joining the 2nd Minehunter Squadron as one of the Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels that combined the roles of minesweeper and minehunter in a single glass-reinforced plastic hull, a design choice that kept the ship's own magnetic signature to a minimum, precisely the quality you want in a vessel whose job is to get close to naval mines without setting them off.

A Purpose-Built Minehunter

Displacing 750 tons and measuring 60 metres in length, Bicester was powered by two Napier Deltic diesels delivering 3,540 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 17 knots, and carried a ship's company of 45, six officers and thirty-nine ratings.

She was armed with a 30mm automatic cannon, and her real business end throughout her Royal Navy career was a pair of PAP-104 remotely operated submersibles and diver-placed explosive charges, used to neutralise mines once her Type 2193 sonar had found them; the SeaFox disposal system and Minigun close-in weapons now associated with the class weren't fitted fleet-wide until 2006 and 2007 respectively, some years after Bicester herself had already left British service.

It is worth knowing what she was actually hunting, because mines come in two very different sorts and each needs a different answer. A moored contact mine sits on a cable a few feet under the surface with horns on it, waiting to be bumped, and it can be swept: run a wire behind the ship, cut the mooring, shoot the mine when it bobs up. A bottom influence mine lies in the mud in shallow water and fires on the magnetic, acoustic or pressure signature of a ship passing overhead, and there is nothing to cut and nothing to sweep. That one has to be found by sonar, looked at, identified and then destroyed where it lies. Minehunting, as opposed to minesweeping, is a search of the seabed one small square at a time, and a competent job is measured in weeks per square mile.

Twelve Years of Service

Bicester served the Royal Navy for twelve years, part of the standing fleet of Hunt-class vessels that carried out the painstaking, unglamorous work of mine countermeasures around British and NATO waters throughout the 1990s.

She was one of only four Hunt-class ships, alongside HMS Brecon, HMS Brocklesby and HMS Hurworth, ordered straight to the Gulf when the 1991 war broke out, sailing under the command of the exercise minelayer HMS Abdiel after a hurried, all-hands programme of maintenance at Rosyth that recalled ship's companies from summer leave.

Sending four sixty-metre wooden-hulled ships six thousand miles is not a trivial undertaking either, which is why they went in company with HMS Abdiel. A minehunter carries forty-five people and not much else: no workshop worth the name, limited stores, limited fresh water and no capacity to fix anything substantial. A support ship gives the squadron somewhere to sleep, eat properly, get a shower and have a part machined, and keeps them fuelled and stored so that they can work rather than steam back and forth to a port. Abdiel had been built as an exercise minelayer, a ship whose peacetime job was to lay practice mines for other people to find, and she spent the Gulf War as mother to the ships doing the finding for real.

She is credited with neutralising 75 mines during that deployment, precisely the sort of quiet, essential work that rarely makes headlines but keeps shipping lanes safe.

Seventy-five is a very large number in that context, and the reason lies in what Iraq had done to the northern Gulf. Something over twelve hundred mines were laid off the Kuwaiti coast, the largest minefield anybody had put in the water since Korea, a mixture of moored contact mines and Italian-designed Manta bottom mines. On 18 February 1991 the American assault ship USS Tripoli, which was at that moment serving as the flagship of the coalition's own mine countermeasures effort, struck a contact mine that tore a hole some twenty-five feet across in her starboard side. Within a couple of hours the Aegis cruiser USS Princeton, one of the most sophisticated warships afloat and worth well over a billion dollars, set off two Manta mines and was very nearly lost. Neither weapon had cost more than a few thousand pounds.

The consequences went a long way beyond two damaged ships. A large Marine force was standing offshore ready to land on the Kuwaiti coast, and the mines are the principal reason the assault was cut back and finally not made at all. A weapon that sits still and does nothing had shut a fleet out of the northern Gulf and cancelled an amphibious operation, which is the oldest lesson in mine warfare and the one most reliably forgotten between wars. Everything that reopened those waters afterwards, every mine Bicester and her sisters found and destroyed, was the work of ships costing a fraction of the ones the mines had stopped.

And the remotely operated vehicle does not always finish the job. When the ground is too foul for it, or the object needs a human eye, a clearance diver goes down to the mine and places the charge by hand. He uses non-magnetic tools and breathes from a closed-circuit set that releases no bubbles, because bubbles make noise and an acoustic mine is listening. He works alone, on a live weapon, usually in water where he cannot see his own hands. It is one of the few jobs in the modern armed forces that has barely changed in seventy years, for the straightforward reason that nobody has thought of a better way to do it.

A Second Career With the Hellenic Navy

HMS Bicester was decommissioned and formally delivered to Greece on 31 July 2000, sailing from Portsmouth under her own steam that August and arriving at Salamis Naval Base on 8 September 2000 to join the Hellenic Navy's 3rd Minesweepers Squadron as HS Evropi, pennant number M62, extending the working life of a well-built minehunter by many more years under a new flag, part of a broader tradition of Royal Navy vessels finding useful second careers with allied fleets once their British service comes to an end.

That second career has now run more than twice as long as the first. Evropi is still on the Hellenic Navy's list of mine countermeasures vessels, working out of Salamis, more than a quarter of a century after she left Portsmouth and forty years after she was commissioned. Greece has as much reason as anybody to keep minehunters: the Aegean is shallow, island-strewn and was mined comprehensively in two world wars, the sea bed is still full of what was left behind, and a country with fifteen thousand kilometres of coastline and a great deal of ferry traffic cannot afford to guess about it. A glass-reinforced plastic hull also ages remarkably well, which is the quiet reason these ships keep going: there is nothing in it to corrode.

She is not the only Hunt in Greek service and the fate of the other one is worth recording. HS Kallisto, the former HMS Berkeley (M40), went out to Greece as well and was lost in 2020 in a collision with a merchant ship. Berkeley had been in the Gulf in 1991 clearing the same minefield as Bicester. Two sister ships, the same war, the same buyer, and one of them ended thirty years later under the bow of a container vessel, which is a fair summary of what actually kills warships in peacetime. It is almost never the enemy.