HMS Bulldog (A317): The Last Royal Navy Ship With a Wooden Deck

Built for Beauty and Precision

HMS Bulldog was built by Brooke Marine at Lowestoft, launched on 12 July 1967 and commissioned on 21 March 1968, the lead ship of a class of four 189-foot steel-hulled armed survey vessels, her sisters being HMS Beagle, HMS Fawn and HMS Fox. The class had originally been designed with overseas service in mind, though in practice all four ships, intended to work in pairs, spent most of their careers surveying rather closer to home, around British and near-European coastal waters.

There is a specific reason they stayed at home, and it is not that anybody changed their mind about the design. The Bulldogs were ordered for foreign service, and then the North Sea filled up with oil. Commercial exploration began in earnest in the mid-1960s and by the 1970s there were production platforms, pipelines, tanker terminals and supply routes going in across a shallow, busy, badly charted sea on Britain's own doorstep. Every one of those installations needed the sea bed surveyed before it could be built and the surrounding water re-surveyed afterwards, because a pipeline route has to be proved clear, a rig site has to be proved level and safe, and a tanker drawing sixty feet needs to know what is under her to the metre rather than the fathom. The Royal Navy had four brand-new coastal survey ships and a national requirement on its own coast, and that is where they went.

The yard explains a great deal about how she looks. Brooke Marine of Lowestoft built yachts, and the eye that shaped the bulbous bow and the high flared forecastle was a yacht builder's eye rather than a dockyard's. That is not a criticism. A survey vessel spends her life going slowly in bad weather, holding a straight line while her instruments do the work, and a hull that is comfortable and dry at eight knots in a swell is doing exactly what it was designed for. It also meant that when the Royal Navy finished with these ships, people looked at them and saw a yacht, which is precisely what happened to Bulldog in the end, and to her sister HMS Beagle, who actually made it.

Displacing 1,050 tons, and up to 1,160 tons at maximum load, HMS Bulldog was fitted with a bulbous bow and a high flared forecastle that gave her, unusually for a working naval vessel, notably elegant, almost yacht-like lines, complemented by a suite of echo sounders and a Marconi Hydrosearch sector-scanning sonar built for the precise, painstaking business of charting the seabed.

The sector-scanning sonar is worth a note, because it is the difference between measuring the sea bed and seeing it. An echo sounder tells you the depth directly beneath the ship and nothing else, so charting by echo sounder means steaming a grid of parallel lines and interpolating between them, and a wreck or a pinnacle sitting between two lines is simply missed. A sector-scanning sonar sweeps its beam through an arc instead, building a picture of a slice of sea bed to either side of and ahead of the ship, so that anything unusual can be seen and then run over properly with the sounder to get a depth on it. Bulldog carried one from the start, in 1968. It is the ancestor of the multibeam systems that now paint a continuous swathe of sea floor as a ship goes along, and it is the reason a survey vessel of her generation could find things rather than merely record what she happened to pass over.

She was, by most accounts, both an attractive ship and an excellent sea keeper, a combination not always found in vessels built primarily for scientific rather than combat purposes.

The name she carried had earned itself a place in history twenty-seven years before she was launched. On 9 May 1941 the destroyer HMS Bulldog, working with the corvette HMS Aubrietia, put a boarding party into the crippled U-110 and took out her Enigma machine, her cipher material and the bigram tables that made naval Enigma readable at Bletchley. The whole affair is set out properly in Aubrietia's own story. It is a heavy name to hand to a survey ship, and it is a fair sign of how seriously the Royal Navy takes charting that it did.

Three Decades of Survey Work

HMS Bulldog spent over three decades in service, charting waters around the world in support of the Royal Navy's hydrographic mission, work that, while rarely making headlines, underpinned safe navigation for naval and civilian shipping alike.

It is worth being blunt about what that work is, because "survey" sounds like something done by men with clipboards. A hydrographic ship's output is the chart, and the chart is the thing every other ship in the world is relying on when it decides there is water under the keel. Britain has charted a great deal more of the world's ocean than it has ever owned, the Admiralty chart is still a global standard, and every one of those sheets exists because somebody spent weeks running parallel lines at survey speed with an echo sounder going. Nobody notices a chart until it is wrong. Bulldog spent thirty-three years making sure hers were not.

In 1998, her pennant number designation was changed from an A-prefix to an H-prefix, a change made specifically to emphasise her hydrographic survey role over her original auxiliary vessel classification, a small but telling reflection of how the Royal Navy had come to view survey ships as a distinct and valued specialism in their own right.

The choice of letter is worth explaining too, since it is the sort of detail that only makes sense from inside. Royal Navy pennant numbers carry a flag superior, a letter that says what kind of ship this is: D for destroyers, F for frigates, M for mine warfare, L for amphibious, A for auxiliaries and so on. Survey ships had sat under A, alongside tankers, tugs and store carriers, which was administratively tidy and said nothing useful about them. The obvious replacement, S for survey, was long since taken by submarines. So the survey squadron got H, for hydrographic, and Bulldog became H317. It changed nothing about the ship and everything about how she was described, which is the sort of thing services do when they want to make a point about what a branch is worth.

The Last of Her Kind

HMS Bulldog was formally decommissioned on 26 July 2001, having outlasted two of her three sister ships in service: HMS Fox had been sold on in 1989 and HMS Fawn paid off in 1991. By the time she herself left the fleet, she was one of the very last Royal Navy ships still carrying a genuine wooden deck laid over her steel hull, a truly striking piece of naval trivia for a vessel that had spent her entire career working with some of the most modern sonar and survey equipment available. Only her sister HMS Beagle outlasted her, paying off some seven months later in February 2002.

The wooden deck is worth a line of explanation as well. Warships were laid with teak over their steel decks for a very long time, because it is quieter underfoot, kinder in heat and cold, better to stand on when it is wet and, frankly, because it looked right. It is also expensive to buy, expensive to lay and endless to maintain, which is why the Royal Navy stopped doing it. That a ship commissioned in 1968, and working with sector-scanning sonar to the end, went to the breakers still wearing a deck that Nelson would have recognised is one of the more pleasing details in the modern fleet list.

It brought to a close a career built almost entirely on quiet, essential scientific work rather than combat.

An Unfinished Second Life

HMS Bulldog was sold in August 2001 with plans to convert her into a luxury yacht, a fate not unlike that of several other Royal Navy survey and patrol vessels whose graceful lines made them attractive candidates for civilian conversion.

Those plans came to an abrupt halt in May 2004, when fire broke out aboard the ship while she was being converted at Nelson in New Zealand, believed to have been started by a gas welder at work aboard her. Around 40 people were working on the conversion at the time and all got clear safely, but the ship, reportedly about a year from completion according to project director Richard Fogarty, was extensively damaged, and the conversion was never finished.

HMS Bulldog was subsequently taken under tow to Brisbane in Australia to be scrapped, a disappointingly unglamorous end for a ship whose elegant design had once seemed destined for a rather more comfortable retirement.