HMS Brecon (M29): The Minehunter That Made History With Its First Woman Captain

The Build: the Home of the Hunt Class

HMS Brecon was built by Vosper Thornycroft, the lead yard for the Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels, laid down in September 1975 and launched by the Duchess of Kent on 21 June 1978, before commissioning on 18 December 1979, among the earliest of the thirteen-strong Hunt class to enter Royal Navy service.

Built with a glass-reinforced plastic hull to reduce her magnetic signature, HMS Brecon carried a 30mm DS30M Mark 2 gun alongside miniguns and general-purpose machine guns for self-defence, and was equipped over her career with the PAP 104 remote-controlled mine disposal submersible and diver-placed explosive charges (the SeaFox system now associated with the class did not enter Royal Navy service until 2006, a year after Brecon herself paid off), the specialist tools of a job built entirely around finding and safely destroying sea mines rather than fighting conventional naval engagements.

The class was an expensive answer to a specific problem. Thirteen were built, and when they entered service in the early 1980s they were the largest warships in the world made of glass-reinforced plastic, at around 750 tons and sixty metres. All came from Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston apart from Cottesmore and Middleton, which were built by Yarrow on the Clyde. They were also designed to do two jobs that had previously needed two kinds of ship, sweeping mines and hunting them, which is a large part of why the unit cost of the later orders was put to Parliament at about 35 million pounds at 1982 to 1983 prices. That is a startling figure for a vessel the size of a large trawler, and it makes rather more sense once you remember that the alternative to owning minehunters is losing ships.

The name came with the class. Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels are named after British fox hunts, which means they inherited the names of the Second World War Hunt-class escort destroyers, named the same way. The Brecon before this one was one of those, a Hunt Type IV and one of only two built to that particular design, and she had a considerably busier war than her size suggests. She was at Salerno, she was off the Anzio beachhead from 23 January 1944, and on 19 September 1944 she was one of the ships that sank U-407 south of Melos. She was sold for breaking up in August 1961, seventeen years before the Duchess of Kent sent her successor down the slipway at Woolston.

From the Falklands Aftermath to the Gulf

HMS Brecon saw service in the aftermath of the Falklands War in 1982, part of the wider Royal Navy effort to ensure the waters around the islands remained clear and safe for shipping once the fighting itself had ended.

The detail behind that is more interesting than the summary. The actual sweeping in Falklands waters had been done by the requisitioned Hull trawlers of the 11th Mine Countermeasures Squadron, and Brecon and Ledbury, the two newest Hunts in the fleet, arrived in theatre as that work was finishing. What the two of them brought was minehunting sonar and remotely operated vehicles, and what they were really there to establish was whether anything had been left behind. They found empty sinkers, one or two mines still attached to theirs but flooded and sitting on the seabed, and a number of what the trade calls married failures, mines that had never released from their moorings at all. The conclusion was uncomfortable and reassuring in roughly equal measure. The Argentine Navy had laid a good many more mines than anybody had swept, and almost all of them had simply failed to work.

Squadron life was not all mine countermeasures: in June 1985 she paid a goodwill visit to Washington DC as part of the Royal Navy's 1st Mine Countermeasures Squadron, sailing up the Potomac past the Capitol alongside sister ship HMS Cottesmore and passing beneath the raised span of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge on her way out of the Washington Navy Yard.

Her own turn at real mine warfare in the Gulf came two years later, in 1987, not during the more famous 1991 Gulf War but during the Iran-Iraq War's "Tanker War", when she and three sister ships, HMS Bicester, Brocklesby and Hurworth, were rushed out under the exercise minelayer HMS Abdiel after Iranian mines began menacing merchant shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Fresh memories of the Falklands, and an Iraqi jet's accidental Exocet strike on the American frigate USS Stark that May, meant a hurried fit of radar-absorbent panels, chaff launchers and inflatable missile decoys before the four minehunters, capable of barely 14 knots downhill with the wind behind them, took the best part of a month just to reach the Gulf. Their first live sweep, off the mined anchorage at Fujairah, was watched by an ITN news helicopter that spotted a mine ahead of the sweep and had to radio a warning to the very ship it was there to film.

She was later assigned to the Northern Ireland Squadron in 1998, converted for the coastal patrol role over the following two years with her minesweeping gear stripped out in favour of cranes, rigid inflatable boats and a ten-strong embarked Royal Marines boarding team, and in 1999 served as guardship for the tall ships race held at Greenock, a rather more ceremonial duty than her usual mine-hunting work.

The Northern Ireland job was a good deal less genteel than the tall ships were. The squadron existed to stop arms reaching paramilitaries by sea, and what that meant in practice, week after week for decades, was boarding and searching fishing boats and coasters in the North Channel and the Irish Sea; that side of it is described in the article on HMS Cottesmore (M32). Brecon arrived as part of a wholesale changeover: the Ton class had done the work until 1993, the River-class minesweepers took it on from there, and in 1998 the Rivers in turn handed over to the Hunts.

A Historic Command

HMS Brecon earned a significant place in Royal Navy history in January 2004, when Lieutenant Charlotte "Charlie" Atkinson became her commanding officer, the first woman to command an operational Royal Navy warship.

Atkinson was thirty-three, and the first operation she took the ship on in command was a patrol off the Northern Irish coast, which is worth noting because it makes the milestone rather less ceremonial than these things usually are. She did not take over a ship alongside for a photograph; she took over a ship that was going straight back out to stop and search other people's boats in the North Channel in winter.

That qualifier is worth setting out rather than glossing over, because the claim is often made too broadly. Seven women had already held command of the small P2000 patrol craft attached to the University Royal Naval Units, boats like HMS Archer and HMS Blazer. Those are commissioned warships and genuine commands, but they are training craft rather than front-line units. Brecon was a front-line unit, and at around 750 tons she was also, at that point, the largest vessel any woman had ever commanded in the Royal Navy.

Atkinson was the only woman among HMS Brecon's 44-strong ship's company at the time (34 officers and ratings, plus the ten-strong Royal Marines detachment carried for the patrol role), and her appointment came fourteen years after the Royal Navy first began admitting female officers on equal terms with their male counterparts. Growing up in Dorset, she had been drawn to the navy by childhood trips to air shows at RNAS Yeovilton with her father, a former navy air traffic controller, and joined up in 1994 straight after a geography degree at the University of Wales, Swansea, funded by a Royal Navy bursary. By the time she took command she had already served on South Atlantic Patrol duty around the Falkland Islands, conducted oceanographic survey work in the Mediterranean, and spent two years in New Zealand as the Royal Navy's hydrographic exchange officer.

"I believe I am the first of many women who will do this," she told reporters at the time, adding, "I'd like to say to other women that if they want a career in the navy they should go for it. The opportunities are there for you." It is a milestone HMS Brecon carries into her own history as prominently as any battle honour, and one worth distinguishing from a later, more widely reported "first": when Commander Sarah West took command of the frigate HMS Portland in 2012, the headlines called her the first woman to command a major Royal Navy warship, a distinct claim from Atkinson's, since Brecon, however historic, was a minehunter rather than a frontline frigate.

A New Job Training Recruits

HMS Brecon was decommissioned on 19 July 2005, but rather than being scrapped she was converted into a static training ship, nicknamed the "Seamanship Classroom" and moored in the River Lynher at Jupiter Point as part of HMS Raleigh in February 2008, where she continues to give new Royal Navy recruits their very first taste of life aboard a warship, a fitting final role for a vessel that had already made history by putting a woman in command of a Royal Navy ship for the first time, and that now spends her retirement introducing the newest generation of sailors to the service she spent a quarter of a century defending.

That date was not chosen for her. On 23 March 2005 the Ministry of Defence announced that the Northern Ireland Squadron was to be disbanded altogether, part of the normalisation that followed the Good Friday Agreement, and on 19 July her whole squadron went at once: Brecon, Cottesmore and Dulverton, the last three ships of a formation that had been patrolling those waters since the Troubles began.

Nine days later, on 28 July 2005, the Provisional IRA issued the statement formally ending its armed campaign. The timing was not coincidence in any conspiratorial sense; both things were consequences of the same long political process. But it does mean that Brecon's last day as a commissioned warship and the last day of the thing she had been built into service to guard against fell inside a fortnight of each other, and that a job the Royal Navy had been doing continuously for thirty-six years simply stopped.

There is a piece of arithmetic in that ending that will creep up on her. She was a commissioned warship for twenty-five and a half years, from December 1979 to July 2005. She has been a moored classroom in the Lynher since February 2008, and she is still there. Some time in the early 2030s, if nothing changes, she will have spent longer teaching people how to be sailors than she ever spent being a warship, which for a ship that was expensive, specialised and built to do one thing is not a bad second career at all.