HMS Cottesmore (M32): The Minehunter Once Commanded by Prince Andrew

Built on the Clyde

HMS Cottesmore was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the River Clyde, launched on 9 February 1982 and commissioned on 24 June 1983, a Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel built with a glass-reinforced plastic hull, a construction technique chosen specifically to minimise the ship's magnetic signature and reduce her vulnerability to the very magnetic mines she was designed to hunt down and destroy.

Third of Her Name

She was the third Royal Navy ship to carry the name. The first was a 750-ton Hunt-class minesweeper, launched in February 1917 and commissioned that May, which swept for mines off Ireland and in the North Sea before being scrapped in 1923. The second was a proper wartime destroyer, a Hunt-class escort that spent the Second World War shepherding convoys down Britain's east coast, running offensive Coastal Forces patrols, engaging German vessels and supporting the D-Day landings, before being sold to the Egyptian Navy in 1950.

A Royal Commanding Officer

HMS Cottesmore's most distinctive claim to fame came between April 1993 and November 1994, when she was commanded by Lieutenant Commander His Royal Highness The Duke of York, Prince Andrew, a properly unusual entry on any ship's service record and one that briefly made HMS Cottesmore rather better known to the general public than most of her sister minehunters ever managed to become.

HMS Cottesmore was later converted in 1997 into a patrol vessel configuration, adapting her role somewhat from pure mine countermeasures work. The following year she had her minesweeping gear stripped out and two large boat davits fitted to her sweep deck, taking up duty as a Northern Ireland patrol vessel alongside HMS Dulverton and HMS Brecon, part of a squadron that had itself relocated to HM Naval Base Clyde in 1993, watching Ulster's waters for arms smuggling right through to the tail end of the Troubles.

Decommissioning and a Village's Memorial

HMS Cottesmore was declared surplus to requirements and placed on the Ministry of Defence's disposal list in 2004, and was formally decommissioned on 19 July 2005 alongside Dulverton and Brecon, the Northern Ireland Squadron's last three ships, closing out just over two decades of Royal Navy service. The timing carried its own quiet symbolism: the squadron's disbandment came only days before the Provisional IRA itself completed the decommissioning of its own weapons and formally called off its armed campaign, one word doing service for two rather different kinds of ending.

Before her sale, the ship's bell and other memorabilia were presented to the village of Cottesmore in Rutland, the small Leicestershire and Rutland community after which the ship, in keeping with Hunt-class tradition of naming vessels after British fox hunts, had originally been named, a fitting way to preserve a lasting connection between ship and namesake even after the vessel herself had moved on.

A Second Career in the Baltic

HMS Cottesmore was acquired by Lithuania in 2008 and entered service with the Lithuanian Navy as M53 Skalvis, commissioned in 2011 following an upgrade programme in which Thales served as prime contractor, fitting the vessel with a technologically advanced mine-hunting system including the hull-mounted Sonar 2193, keeping her particularly current with modern mine countermeasures technology decades after her original construction. She was bought as part of a pair alongside her old Northern Ireland Squadron companion HMS Dulverton, and although both ships had entered Lithuanian service by 2011, the formal commissioning ceremony for Skalvis was not held until 18 May 2013, at Klaipeda.

As of the most recent available information, the former HMS Cottesmore remains in active service with the Lithuanian Navy, still doing the job she was originally built for, just under a different flag and a different name, patrolling Baltic waters that carry their own long and often difficult history of naval mining.