HMS Blazer (P279): A Foxhound's Name, Now Training Tomorrow's Naval Officers

A Name With an Unusual Pedigree

HMS Blazer is the seventh Royal Navy vessel to carry the name, a tradition that stretches back to 1797, when the First Lord of the Admiralty named the original gunboat after a favourite foxhound from his own pack, giving HMS Blazer one of the more charming ship-naming stories in the entire fleet list.

She is in good company, too. The Royal Navy has always named its small, fast craft as though it were writing out a hunting field, and her own class is the proof: Blazer, Ranger, Trumpeter, Charger, Dasher, Puncher, Pursuer and Express all read like entries from a kennel book or a card at a point-to-point. The habit goes further than the P2000s. The Hunt class minehunters are named, quite literally, after fox hunts. There is something very English about a service that will name a nuclear submarine after a predator and a training boat after somebody's dog.

The current HMS Blazer was built by Watercraft Marine (with Vosper Thornycroft also credited in the design and building record) and commissioned in 1988, an Archer-class patrol vessel, one of a family of small, purpose-built training craft designed from the outset to introduce officer cadets to life at sea rather than to fight.

Training the Next Generation

HMS Blazer's core mission has always been sea training, principally in support of the Southampton University Royal Naval Unit and, at various points, the Portsmouth University Royal Naval Unit, running weekly drill evenings during university terms before heading off on more adventurous deployments during the holidays.

Despite her modest dimensions, just 21 metres long and 54 tonnes displacement, HMS Blazer gives officer cadets their first experience of taking the helm and working towards navigation qualifications, and her small size means she can reach ports and harbours that far larger fleet units simply cannot enter, making her a properly useful training platform even if she will never make headlines for firepower.

She carries a minimum crew of five, made up of one lieutenant, two chief petty officers, a leading hand and an able seaman, and can accommodate up to twenty people aboard, with an endurance of 550 nautical miles at 22 knots, and has ranged as far afield as the Baltic Sea despite her size.

She is currently commanded by Lieutenant F. Howes, one of 16 Archer-class vessels now assigned to the Coastal Forces Squadron, and typically deploys twice a year, around Easter and again in summer. Her passenger list over the years has included royalty, with Prince Michael of Kent among those to have been aboard.

Seized Off Cherbourg

The trouble had been brewing since 1992, when Britain persuaded the European Union to carve out exclusive fishing zones around the Channel Islands, a three-mile band reserved for Channel Islands boats and a further band out to six miles reserved for the Channel Islands and Britain, shutting French vessels out of grounds they had long fished. French anger only grew after the minesweeper HMS Brocklesby began inspecting French boats for compliance, and it was into that tense atmosphere that HMS Blazer sailed on 29 March 1993.

French trawlermen surrounded her, boarded, forced her young crew below decks, and rather than simply holding her where she was, sailed the Royal Navy vessel themselves into Cherbourg harbour, where they burned the White Ensign on her own deck in front of the men they had just confined. French authorities eventually stepped in and arrested those responsible, releasing the crew after three hours. Britain's Fisheries Minister, David Curry, did not mince his words afterwards, warning that "if they are going to receive this sort of provocation, then the next time the French are going to meet with something just a little bit more severe." The dispute itself was resolved with a compromise allowing French boats to use crab and lobster pots on the nearby Schole Bank, and French ports duly reopened to British trade.

It is worth being clear about what actually happened there, because it was a good deal more serious in law than a row about crab pots. A commissioned warship enjoys complete sovereign immunity. She is not subject to the jurisdiction of any state except her own, she cannot lawfully be boarded, searched, arrested or detained by anybody else, and in legal terms she is treated as an extension of the country whose flag she wears. Civilians boarding one, confining her ship's company below decks and steaming her into a foreign harbour is not a protest; it is the seizure of another state's sovereign property, and there are centuries in which it would have been treated as an act of war. What made it possible was simply that the alternative was unthinkable: a P2000 has a handful of people aboard and nothing worth calling an armament, and nobody was going to open fire on French fishermen over shellfish quotas.

The burning of the ensign is the part that stung. The White Ensign is a warship's colours, worn only by ships of the Royal Navy and, by an ancient privilege, by the yachts of the Royal Yacht Squadron, and destroying a ship's colours in front of her own crew is about the most pointed insult available in the entire vocabulary of the sea. What is remarkable, looking back, is how fast everybody agreed to forget it. Within weeks there was a compromise about pots on the Schole Bank, the ports reopened, and an incident that would once have filled the newspapers for a month went quietly into the file.

It was a remarkably alarming episode for a training vessel with a young and largely inexperienced crew aboard, and a reminder that even the smallest and least martial ships in the fleet can find themselves caught up in international incidents entirely beyond their control.

And the argument itself has never actually been settled. In May 2021, after the post-Brexit licensing rules changed who could fish in Jersey's waters, around sixty French fishing boats blockaded St Helier, some of them letting off flares in the harbour mouth, and the French maritime minister publicly raised the possibility of cutting off the island's electricity, ninety-five per cent of which arrives by cable from France. Britain sent two offshore patrol vessels, HMS Severn and HMS Tamar. Twenty-eight years after Blazer was taken into Cherbourg, the same waters, the same fish and very largely the same argument, with rather larger ships watching from a distance.

Still on Duty

In recent years HMS Blazer has taken on a more operational role, joining the reconstituted Coastal Forces Squadron and conducting maritime security patrols in European coastal waters from her base at HMNB Devonport in Plymouth, alongside her long-standing training duties, VVIP visits, and officer cadet training work with Britannia Royal Naval College.

The squadron name was chosen deliberately, and it is a considerable one to take on. Coastal Forces, in the Second World War, meant the motor torpedo boats, motor gunboats and motor launches that fought the Germans at very close range in the dark in the Channel and the North Sea, ambushing convoys off the Dutch coast and taking on E-boats at fifty yards with what amounted to petrol-engined plywood. It was among the most dangerous work in the Navy and produced a wildly disproportionate number of decorations. The organisation was wound up in the 1950s and the name revived for the patrol boat squadron in 2020. The modern version escorts the deterrent submarines in and out, patrols the coast, and on exercise plays the enemy, swarming a carrier group from inshore in packs, which is exactly what the originals were for.

In September 2022 she crossed the Channel to northern France in support of Royal British Legion commemorations marking the 78th anniversary of Operation Overlord, a rather more sombre kind of overseas deployment than her usual training runs.

In early 2024, HMS Blazer deployed to northern Norway as part of NATO's Exercise Steadfast Defender alongside three of her sister ships, a striking demonstration that a vessel built primarily to teach students the basics of seamanship can still, decades into her career, take her place in one of NATO's largest and most significant collective exercises, proof that the smallest ships in the fleet often do some of its most enduring work.

That Norwegian deployment is described in more detail in the account of HMS Biter, who made the same passage in company with her. Between them the four boats covered some two thousand two hundred miles of coastline and got further north than any of the class had been in thirty-five years of service.

Leading the River Parade at Dartmouth

On 29 August 2026, HMS Blazer led the Port of Dartmouth Royal Regatta's River Parade, sailing alongside HMS Express and two Britannia Royal Naval College whalers from Noss on Dart before the traditional salute was taken off Dartmouth Yacht Club, a ceremonial turn for a boat whose day job is teaching cadets the basics of seamanship on the very same stretch of water.

Dartmouth is about as close to home water as the Royal Navy has. Officer training moved to the Dart in 1863, when the old wooden ship Britannia was moored in the river as a floating college, and it has never left: the buildings on the hill above the town have been turning out Royal Navy officers since 1905, and every one of them has learned to handle a boat on that stretch of water. A P2000 leading the regatta parade past the yacht club is not a guest at somebody else's occasion. She is doing a lap of the classroom.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.