HMS Charger (P292): Training Liverpool's Future Officers, One River at a Time

Built for a University Unit

HMS Charger was built by Watercraft Limited at Shoreham-by-Sea, with fitting out completed by Vosper Thornycroft, launched in 1986 and commissioned in 1988, an Archer-class patrol vessel built specifically as a sea training platform for the Liverpool University Royal Naval Unit.

Two builders in one sentence is usually a sign that something went wrong, and it did. The design is not British in origin at all: it comes from a police cutter Watercraft built for the Omani coast guard, the Dheeb Al Bahari of 1985, which the Royal Navy liked enough to order ten of from the same firm at Shoreham-by-Sea. Watercraft then went into liquidation partway through the contract and the balance of the order had to be finished by Vosper Thornycroft, which is why Charger effectively has one company's name on her hull and another's on her fitting out. Sixteen were built in the end, moulded in glass-reinforced plastic, fifty-four tonnes apiece and twenty metres and a bit long, and they have now outlasted a great deal of larger, more expensive and more celebrated shipping.

The name has a longer pedigree than her own 20-metre hull might suggest. An earlier HMS Charger was a gun-brig of the Napoleonic Wars, armed with an 8-inch mortar and eighteen-pounder carronades, and a later namesake was a 290-ton torpedo boat destroyer built by Yarrow of Poplar and launched on 15 May 1894, right at the dawn of the destroyer as a class of warship in its own right.

Based at HMS Eaglet in Liverpool, she carries a permanent complement of five full-time Royal Navy crew alongside up to twelve student trainees, giving university officer cadets their first genuine taste of life and responsibility aboard a working naval vessel.

HMS Eaglet is not a ship, and the reason she is called that is one of the better small stories in the reserve. The Royal Naval Reserve was formed in 1859 and its Liverpool headquarters ship arrived on the Mersey under tow in 1862. For the next half century the unit was called HMS Eagle. In 1918 it gave the name up to a new aircraft carrier then being completed, and settled for the diminutive instead, which is how a shore establishment came to be named after a young bird. The carrier that took the name was the former Chilean battleship Almirante Cochrane, and her story is in the article on HMS Eagle (1918).

Eaglet has been several things since. In 1926 the old wooden hulk was replaced by a First World War sloop, HMS Sir Bevis, renamed for the job. During the Second World War she was flagship to the Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches, which is to say the headquarters from which the Battle of the Atlantic was actually fought, and Liverpool is where that command sat from 1941 onwards. The sloop was scrapped in 1971 and the establishment went ashore, and the present building on Brunswick Dock was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1998. It houses the Liverpool University Royal Naval Unit, along with Charger and her sister Biter. So the cadets learning to keep a watch aboard a twenty-metre patrol boat report to a building whose name is a hand-me-down from an aircraft carrier that started life as a South American battleship.

A Baltic Voyage Through Two Canals

In 2011, HMS Charger undertook a substantial Baltic deployment, visiting Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and in the course of the voyage transited both the Caledonian Canal in Scotland and the Kiel Canal in Germany, an ambitious itinerary for a small training vessel and an excellent piece of practical seamanship experience for the cadets aboard, exposing them to international waters, foreign ports and complex canal navigation all in a single deployment.

She has ranged rather further west too: in March 2018, Charger crossed the Irish Sea as part of a University Boat Squadron tour alongside her sister ships HMS Biter and HMS Pursuer, calling at Dublin, Waterford and Kinsale before paying a courtesy visit to the Irish Naval Service base on Haulbowline Island in Cork Harbour, where the visiting crews were received by Commodore Michael Malone, Flag Officer Commanding the Irish Naval Service.

Adopted by Preston, and a First for Northwich

HMS Charger was formally adopted by the city of Preston in 2012, following a series of regular visits that had built up a genuine relationship between the ship and the local community, a tradition the Royal Navy has long maintained with smaller vessels able to visit inland and regional waterways that larger warships simply cannot reach.

In 2013, HMS Charger made history by becoming the first Royal Navy vessel of the 21st century to travel up the River Weaver to Northwich in Cheshire, a striking demonstration of exactly the kind of access her small size and shallow draught made possible, bringing the Royal Navy directly to communities that would otherwise never see one of its ships. Commanded for the trip by Lieutenant Ian Critchley, she came up the River Mersey and through the Manchester Ship Canal before entering the Weaver itself at Marsh Lock, and her return journey needed three road bridges, at Sutton Weaver, Acton Bridge and Winnington, specially opened for her, an unusual weekend operation arranged at the urging of John Tackley, chairman of the River Weaver Navigation Society.

The same year brought another navigational first much further afield. That summer, HMS Charger became the first Royal Navy vessel to berth at the quays of Wexford since Irish independence, calling in as part of the town's John Barry Maritime Festival, named for the Wexford-born officer regarded as the father of the American Navy, and going on to Howth Harbour, a stretch of Irish coast with its own naval footnote in the Asgard gun-running of 1914.

Both of those Irish footnotes are worth unpacking, because they are considerably better stories than a passing mention suggests. John Barry was born at Ballysampson in County Wexford, went to sea as a boy, ended up in Philadelphia, and in 1776 took command of the first ship commissioned into the Continental Navy. He fought the Royal Navy for the whole of the American War of Independence, was given the first commission signed by George Washington as President, and is buried in Philadelphia under the title the father of the United States Navy. A Royal Navy patrol boat tying up at a festival named after him is a fairly relaxed piece of history.

Howth is the sharper one. On 26 July 1914, in broad daylight, a white yacht called the Asgard sailed into the harbour there and unloaded around nine hundred Mauser rifles and twenty-nine thousand rounds of ammunition into the hands of the Irish Volunteers waiting on the pier. She had collected them from a German tug in the North Sea, having bought them in Hamburg, and she had sailed from Conwy with a crew of seven that included two Donegal fishermen, Patrick McGinley and Charles Duggan, and two women, Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers, who spent the passage sleeping on top of the rifles because there was nowhere else to put them. Those guns armed the rising of 1916.

The man at the helm was Erskine Childers, and his life is one of the strangest in these islands. He had written The Riddle of the Sands in 1903, a yachting thriller about two Englishmen stumbling on German invasion preparations in the Frisian Islands, which is still probably the finest sailing novel in the language and did more to alarm the Admiralty about the North Sea than any staff paper. He then served as a Royal Navy officer through the First World War and was decorated for it. Eight years after that he was executed by firing squad by the Irish Free State, at Beggars Bush Barracks on 24 November 1922, for possessing a pistol that Michael Collins had given him as a present. Charger's cadets, calling at Howth on a summer cruise, were tying up in the middle of all that.

Still Training Cadets Today

HMS Charger underwent an engine refit with upgraded components in 2016, keeping her mechanically fit for continued service, and remains affiliated with both Maryport in Cumbria and Preston, honours earned by those earlier years of regular visits.

Her working life has moved on since, in step with the rest of the Archer class. Over the past decade or so the Royal Navy has gradually shifted these small boats away from a purely university-training role and towards more front-line tasking, a change reflected in the renaming of their parent unit to the Coastal Forces Squadron. Charger now sails primarily with the Squadron's northern element out of Faslane on the Clyde, helping to safeguard the waters used by the Navy's submarines and taking her turn on the Squadron's deployments to Norway and the Baltic, a role she was still carrying out in June 2022, when she was photographed arriving at Kiel during that year's round of NATO exercises. She still embarks officer cadets and trainees when her operational tasking allows, keeping faith with the Liverpool University Royal Naval Unit she was originally built to serve.

The rest of the class has gone the same way, and some of them a good deal further. Fourteen of the sixteen now belong to the Coastal Forces Squadron, which until fairly recently was called the 1st Patrol Boat Squadron; the change of name was the whole point of it, because Coastal Forces is what the Royal Navy called its motor gunboats and motor torpedo boats in the Second World War, and reviving the title says plainly enough that these are not simply training boats any more. Two of them, Pursuer and Dasher, spent 2003 to 2010 as the Cyprus Squadron and then went to Gibraltar between 2020 and 2022, armed, on maritime force protection. Charger herself now works out of Faslane with the squadron's northern half, with a crew of five under a lieutenant, training in the Clyde, showing the flag round the north-east of England and Scotland, and going to the Baltic or Norway once a year. It is a considerable amount of navy for fifty-four tonnes.

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