HMS Chiddingfold (M37): Four Decades of Minehunting, Book-Ended by Bahrain Collisions

A Minehunter Launched in the Early 1980s

HMS Chiddingfold was built by Vosper Thornycroft, launched in October 1983, sponsored by Lady Anne Kennon, and commissioned in October 1984, a Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel built with the class's characteristic glass-reinforced plastic hull designed to minimise her magnetic signature.

That last phrase is doing a great deal of work. A modern sea mine does not need to be hit. It sits on the bottom and listens, and waits for the magnetic, acoustic or pressure signature it has been told to look for, which means the ship sent to find it has to have almost no signature at all. The Hunts were built of solid glass-reinforced plastic, laid up by hand in a covered hall at Vosper Thornycroft's Woolston yard on the Itchen, and when the first of them, HMS Brecon, was handed over at the end of 1979 they were the largest plastic vessels ever built anywhere in the world. Everything that turns inside them sits on rafts and shock mountings. Nothing is made of anything magnetic that can be avoided. All of which came to something in the region of £30 million a ship in the early eighties, for a vessel of 750 tons, and caused a certain amount of comment at the time.

Hunting mines and sweeping them are different trades, and she was named for the harder one. A sweeper tows gear astern that either cuts a moored mine adrift or imitates the signature of a ship until an influence mine loses patience and goes off; it is a blunt instrument that works on mines nobody has actually found. A hunter finds each one individually, identifies it, and destroys it where it lies. Chiddingfold's instrument for the finding was Sonar Type 2193, in service since 2004 and, on the Ministry of Defence's own account, able to pick out and classify an object the size of a football at a thousand metres. Sitting in a darkened compartment sorting footballs from oil drums from things that will kill you is not a job that lends itself to a recruiting poster.

For the destroying there were two options, and everybody preferred the first. SEAFOX is an expendable submersible about four feet long and forty kilogrammes in weight, with four reversible motors and a hover thruster, flown down the wire to the contact, parked alongside it and detonated; the shaped charge deals with the mine and nobody gets SEAFOX back. The second option is a clearance diver, who swims down and puts the charge on by hand. That the Royal Navy still trains people to do the second thing, in an age of remote vehicles and autonomy, tells you most of what you need to know about the trade Chiddingfold worked in.

Crewed by five officers and 39 ratings, she was known throughout the Fleet, with the kind of relentless positivity the Navy reserves for its own in-jokes, as "Cheery Chid". She was also the second warship to carry the name: the first HMS Chiddingfold, a Hunt-class destroyer built at Greenock and commissioned in October 1941, took part in the commando raid on Vågsøy in Norway that December and went on to escort the Arctic convoys JW 51A and JW 51B on the first leg of their passage to Russia, before ending her career on loan, and later sold outright, to the Indian Navy as INS Ganga.

The name is not quite the Surrey village, although the village has more than earned its claim on it. Hunt-class ships are named after fox hunts, and the destroyer launched at Scotts of Greenock on 10 March 1941 took the name of the hunt kennelled at Petworth in West Sussex. Her badge said so without embarrassment: on a blue field, a white stirrup and a gold spur crossed in saltire. In February 1942, after a successful Warship Week savings campaign, she was adopted by the civil community of Farnham in Surrey, which is how these things were done at the time, and the modern ship inherited both the name and the habit of being looked after by people ashore.

Her part in the Vågsøy raid was rather more than attendance. On 27 December 1941 she led the two landing ships, Prince Charles and Prince Leopold, into Vaagsfjord ahead of the cruiser HMS Kenya and the fleet destroyers, and then laid the smoke screen that covered them while they bombarded the shore batteries. Two days earlier, weatherbound at Sullom Voe, she had spent her time helping pump a hundred and fifty tons of sea water out of Prince Charles, which is the kind of detail that never makes a citation. Two Heinkels attacked her on the way back to Scapa and got nothing. It earned her the battle honour Norway 1941, one of only two she ever received.

It is worth being exact about those two convoys, because the record gets stretched. Chiddingfold was part of the Western Escort for JW 51A and JW 51B, the pair that sailed for the Kola Inlet in December 1942, and a Western Escort is exactly what it sounds like: the ships that see a convoy out of home waters and then hand it over. She joined JW 51B on 22 December and had left her by the 30th, when Home Fleet destroyers took over for the ocean passage. The Battle of the Barents Sea was fought on 31 December, the day after she turned for home. It is a near miss that has hardened into a claim in more than one published account, and her real record needs no help.

What she did instead was the ordinary, wearing work. Convoy defence out of Orkney and Shetland Command through 1942, then the Mediterranean from September 1943, running convoys between the North African ports and the east coast of Italy and patrolling off the Dalmatian coast for E-boats. She bombarded shore targets at Genoa on 1 March 1945, came home to the 16th Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich, and spent the last months of the war in the Channel and the Thames estuary hunting schnorkel-fitted U-boats and the E-boats still laying mines in the convoy routes, which is where her second battle honour came from. She was with the East Indies Fleet by VJ Day and at Singapore for the reoccupation, and paid off at Portsmouth on 16 November 1945. As INS Ganga she then served India from 1953 until 1975, twenty-two years, appreciably longer than she had served Britain.

Her Gulf connections went back further than her later, longer deployments suggest: by November 2009 she was already working out of Bahraini and Kuwaiti waters as part of the Royal Navy's standing mine countermeasures force in the region, laying the groundwork for the far longer rotational deployments that followed.

In January 2012, she became the first vessel of her class to undergo a substantial mid-life upgrade, a year-long refurbishment that included a full engine replacement, new gearboxes, propellers and an upgraded thruster system, extending her useful service life by many years and setting the template for similar upgrades across the rest of the Hunt class.

Long Years in the Gulf

HMS Chiddingfold sailed alongside HMS Penzance in June 2014 for a three-year deployment to the Persian Gulf, part of the Royal Navy's sustained mine countermeasures presence protecting shipping lanes in one of the world's most strategically sensitive waterways, returning to the United Kingdom in 2017.

She returned to the Gulf region in mid-2020, again alongside HMS Penzance, joining the 9th Mine Countermeasures Squadron based at HMS Jufair in Bahrain, operating under a rotating crew system that saw fresh personnel flown out every four months to keep the ship continuously on station without the wear of a permanently deployed crew.

The formal name for all of this is Operation Kipion, the Royal Navy's standing commitment in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and the minehunting half of it ran out of Bahrain for the best part of twenty years. What the ships actually did there was less dramatic than the headlines and considerably more useful: clearing underwater explosives, freedom of navigation patrols, counter-piracy work, and the steady business of demonstrating that a strait everybody worries about is in fact still open. The crewing is worth a note as well, because it is the opposite of how a warship normally works. The minehunters have no permanent ship's company at all. Ten crews rotate across the flotilla as tasking demands, which keeps hulls at sea and people sane, and it means the thousand-odd officers and ratings who have served in Chiddingfold did so in shifts.

Collisions With Two Fellow Minehunters

HMS Chiddingfold's long Gulf service was not without incident.

In April 2021, she struck the Sandown-class minehunter HMS Penzance while berthing at Mina Salman in Bahrain, causing around £100,000 of damage; both ships stayed afloat and returned safely alongside.

On 19 January 2024, a second and far costlier collision followed: footage showed Chiddingfold appearing to reverse straight into the moored HMS Bangor, holing her side and damaging her galley and cabins to the tune of an estimated £25 million, though the Royal Navy has never officially confirmed the suspected cause, a wiring fault thought to have interfered with her steering or propulsion at the critical moment. It was an unfortunate pattern of mishaps for a ship otherwise renowned for the precision and care her minehunting role demanded, though hardly unique among vessels operating in the busy, congested waters around a shared naval base.

The mechanics of the second one are worth getting right, because Chiddingfold came out of it a great deal better than the ship she hit. She was going astern. Her starboard quarter drove into Bangor's port side and tore a large breach in the fibreglass above the waterline, wrecking the galley and the cabins behind it. Nobody was hurt and neither ship was holed below the water. Chiddingfold was largely unmarked and back on patrol by May. Bangor lost the best part of three years, had to be repaired in Bahrain and then carried home on a heavy-lift ship, and the bill is set out in her own article. The twist came afterwards. Bangor, the last of the Sandown class and comfortably expected to go to the breakers, was given a five-year reprieve because the Navy still needed a deep-water minehunter. She is in commission today. Chiddingfold is not.

Ten months later, and a great deal more in keeping with what this ship deserves to be remembered for, her crew found a box. On the eve of her fortieth birthday, alongside in Bahrain, somebody turned up an envelope of paper that had been handed to the new ship in the 1980s and then quietly forgotten about: an unfinished letter home to a woman called Joan, written on notepaper from HMS Collingwood, a postcard, some yellowed newspaper cuttings, and a set of photographs. One member of the wartime destroyer's crew, and nobody knows which, had kept a scrapbook of everything she did, and had gone on following her afterwards, all the way through her transfer to the Indian Navy in the fifties.

The modern crew could identify some of it and not all. Men on an open bridge in the Mediterranean in 1943, one of them her captain, Lieutenant Thomas Dorrien Smith. What may be the surrender of an Italian submarine. What may be the escort carrier HMS Avenger in the North Atlantic in 1942. There are no notes and only a few spidery captions, and the ship sent the lot to the Naval Historical Branch in Portsmouth rather than risk losing it twice. The birthday itself got a chaplain's blessing, a service of remembrance for the men of both Chiddingfolds, and commemorative coins paid for by her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander David Sandiford, forty years after he handed her over. Most of the forty-five people aboard had not been born when she commissioned.

Into Reserve After Four Decades

HMS Chiddingfold was carried home to the United Kingdom in early 2025 aboard the heavy-lift ship MV Rolldock Storm, rejoining the Portsmouth-based 2nd Mine Countermeasures Squadron on extended readiness, her crew stood down and the ship herself serving chiefly as a source of spare parts for the five Hunt-class sisters still on active duty. The Royal Navy has since confirmed she is being formally decommissioned rather than held in reserve for an eventual return to service.

That confirmation came on 13 July 2026, when the Royal Navy announced her retirement alongside the frigates HMS Richmond and HMS Iron Duke. The Ministry of Defence accounts for 2025-26 put a figure on it: £10.896 million written off as impairment pending her removal from service, part of more than £55 million lost across the three ships. She was the first of the Hunt class to go, and she leaves five behind her.

What replaces her is not another ship, which is the genuinely interesting part. The Royal Navy is putting £1.1 billion into its Mine Hunting Capability programme and £1.3 billion into what it calls the hybrid fleet, and the work has already started: her sister HMS Ledbury now carries a shipping container on her quarterdeck, in the space where the divers' decompression chamber used to live, and flies REMUS autonomous underwater vehicles out of it. On one recent task those vehicles covered some 375 nautical miles of survey lines in a fortnight while the ship followed up with more than a hundred SEAFOX runs. The Hunts were built to put forty-five people and a plastic hull between the country and a minefield. What comes next is designed to put nobody there at all, which is unarguable progress, and is also the end of something.

Back home, the Surrey village that shares her name has kept faith with her throughout: Chiddingfold Parish Council has maintained a formal affiliation with the ship since presenting her with a ceremonial flag in 2001, hosting her crew for a Remembrance Sunday lunch and visiting her at Portsmouth to mark 35 years of service in 2018. Her career, spanning more than four decades from her 1984 commissioning to her decommissioning, stands as a genuine testament to the durability of the Hunt-class design and the sustained importance the Royal Navy has placed on maintaining a dedicated mine countermeasures presence in the Gulf.