HMS Blackwater (M2008): Watching Northern Ireland's Waterways for Smuggled Arms

A Minesweeper Repurposed for Home Waters

HMS Blackwater was a River-class minesweeper, one of twelve built by Richards Shipbuilders at Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth during the 1980s, launched on 29 August 1984 and commissioned at Rosyth on 5 July 1985, steel-hulled vessels originally designed as deep-sea team sweepers intended to counter Soviet mines in the open ocean, using the Wire Sweep Mark 9 system to combine mechanical and influence sweeping techniques.

The steel hull is the interesting thing about her, because it is the exact opposite of what a mine countermeasures vessel is usually built from, and there is a good reason for it. A minehunter goes and stands more or less on top of the mine while a remotely operated vehicle deals with it, so she has to have almost no magnetic signature and is built of glass-reinforced plastic at enormous expense. A deep team sweeper does nothing of the kind. She works in pairs, towing a long sweep between two ships that stay well clear of the mines themselves, cutting moorings or generating an influence field at a distance and letting the weapons go off a long way astern. If you are never going to be close to the mine, you do not need to be invisible to it, and you can build the ship out of ordinary steel in an ordinary yard for ordinary money. That is why Blackwater came out of a Lowestoft yard that mostly built trawlers.

They were built largely for the Royal Naval Reserve. The divisions had spent thirty years going to sea in Ton-class minesweepers that were by the 1980s thoroughly worn out, and the Rivers were their replacement: bigger, steel, easier to maintain and well suited to a ship's company that assembled at weekends. It was the last time the Reserve had ships of its own.

Except for one, and it was this one. Eleven of the twelve went to the Royal Naval Reserve divisions. Blackwater went to the regular Royal Navy, the only ship of the class that was never a Reserve unit, and she spent her career being lent out to whoever needed a steel hull that could stay at sea: the Fishery Protection Squadron, then Northern Ireland, and the sweeping in between. That is why her record looks so different from her sisters' and why she was available to go to Ulster in 1993 while the rest of the class was tied to drill nights in eleven different ports.

The sweep itself had a name and it is worth knowing, because it explains the whole design. Wire Sweep Mark 9, used for Extra Deep Armed Team Sweeping: two ships in company towing a single sweep wire strung between them, the wire weighted and set to follow the contour of the seabed rather than run at a fixed depth, cutting the mooring wires of mines laid far deeper than anything a conventional sweep could reach. The mines, freed, come to the surface some distance astern, and are then shot to pieces with the Bofors. It is a crude and enormously effective piece of engineering, it needs two ships working as one, and the Soviet deep-laid mine in the Atlantic approaches was the only thing anybody ever seriously expected to use it against.

Displacing 850 tons and carrying a crew of around 28, she was armed with a single 40mm Bofors gun and two general-purpose machine guns, a modest fit reflecting her specialist rather than combat role.

A Different Kind of Patrol

Rather than spending her career hunting mines in open ocean, HMS Blackwater was assigned in 1993 to the Northern Ireland Squadron, joining a small group of River-class vessels that replaced the older Ton-class minesweepers patrolling the province's loughs and inland waterways during the Troubles.

Her role there involved close cooperation with the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, helping to prevent the illegal trafficking of arms by sea, close-quarters, watchful work carried out in truly difficult and politically sensitive waters, a considerable distance in character from the open-ocean anti-Soviet mission the class had originally been designed around. Her sister ship HMS Itchen, serving in the same squadron around the same period, is recorded as command platform for Operation Interknit, patrolling Carlingford Lough on the border with the Republic, and Operation Grenada, sweeping the coast north from Carlingford round to Lough Foyle and Londonderry, giving a good sense of the ground Blackwater herself would have covered.

The reason anybody was watching those waterways at all is worth setting out, because it was not a precaution. The sea was the principal supply line. In 1973 the Irish Naval Service took the Claudia off the Waterford coast with five tons of Libyan weapons aboard. In October 1987 the French intercepted the coaster Eksund off Brittany carrying something like a hundred and fifty tons of arms from Libya, including heavy machine guns, surface-to-air missiles and a quantity of Semtex. The seizure was a considerable success. What it revealed was rather worse: four earlier shipments over the previous two years had already been landed without anybody noticing, and a comparable tonnage of Libyan weaponry was already in Ireland. Every patrol after 1987 was carried out in the knowledge that the shipments you intercept are not the ones that matter.

The geography made it harder still. The international border runs down the middle of Carlingford Lough and along Lough Foyle, so a small boat can change jurisdiction in a few minutes and a naval vessel cannot simply follow it, which is why the work had to be done jointly with the Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and, on the far side of the line, the Irish Naval Service. And nobody serving in those waters needed the stakes explained. On 27 August 1979, at Narrow Water at the head of Carlingford Lough, eighteen soldiers were killed by two bombs, the worst day the British Army had in the entire Troubles. The same morning Lord Mountbatten was killed by a bomb placed aboard his boat at Mullaghmore, forty miles away on the other coast. Both attacks were made on or beside the water.

An Army Information Services film shot in 1995 has her own captain interviewed about the work, discussing her refit at the Harland and Wolff yard in Belfast, the very shipyard that had built the Titanic, and her role taking over from the ageing Ton-class boats, footage that survives today in the Imperial War Museum's collection.

Her five years with the squadron ended in 1998, when the River class was replaced there by Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels.

The class went almost as quickly as it had arrived, and the reason was the peace dividend. The Rivers had been built for one specific job, sweeping deep-laid Soviet mines from the Atlantic approaches in a war with the Warsaw Pact, and by 1993 there was no Warsaw Pact. Ships barely ten years old and in perfectly good order suddenly had no mission, and the Royal Naval Reserve was reorganised out from under them. So they were sold, and Brazil, which has some seven thousand kilometres of coastline and a permanent need to chart it, got a bargain: a well-built steel hull with plenty of deck space, good endurance and a working life ahead of her.

HMS Blackwater's own headlines rarely came from combat, the natural fate of a minesweeper doing exactly the quiet, watchful job it was built for, but her story didn't end at Portsmouth. She was decommissioned on 10 July 1998 and handed over to the Marinha do Brasil at Portsmouth the very same day, becoming the patrol ship Benevente, pennant P-61, a second career that has already run considerably longer than her first.

The Benevente is worth following, because she is still there. She is one of four Rivers that Brazil converted to patrol ships rather than survey vessels, the Bracuí class, named for Brazilian rivers exactly as she had been named for an English one: Bracuí, the former HMS Itchen, along with Babitonga, Bocaina and Benevente herself, all four incorporated in 1998. Three more went into the Amorim do Valle class as hydrographic ships. Seven of the twelve, in other words, ended up in the same navy at the same time, which is what happens when a class is scrapped wholesale in perfect condition and somebody with a long coastline is paying attention.

She is the second Brazilian ship to carry the name, after the river Benevente in Espírito Santo. Her work is naval inspection, patrol, search and rescue and keeping an eye on Brazilian territorial waters, and she belongs to the southern naval patrol group of the 5th Naval District, which covers the coast of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. So a ship designed in the early 1980s to drag a wire across the bottom of the Atlantic in a war against the Soviet Union, which never happened, and which instead spent five years stopping small boats on a contested lough in Ireland, has now spent rather longer than either of those careers patrolling the southern coast of Brazil.

It is a decent answer to the question of what to do with a warship nobody needs. She was ten when the threat she was built for evaporated, thirteen when the Royal Navy let her go, and she has been usefully employed by somebody else ever since. Very few of the ships in this series managed that. Most of them went to a breaker's beach, and the ones that did not were mostly sunk on purpose to find out what a missile does. Blackwater simply changed flags, changed hemispheres and carried on, and she has now been Brazilian for considerably longer than she was ever British.