HMS Dovey (M2005): A Reservist's Minesweeper, Now Patrolling the Bay of Bengal

Built for the Reserve

HMS Dovey was one of twelve River-class minesweepers built by Richards Shipbuilders at Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth, each costing around £4.6 million, part of a class named collectively after British rivers and built specifically with a dual minesweeping and patrol role in mind.

The price is the first clue to what she really was. Four and a half million pounds does not buy a warship, and the Rivers were not designed as one. The hull was a commercial offshore support vessel, the sort of thing built by the dozen to run pipe and crew and mud out to North Sea oil rigs: plain steel, deep and beamy, with a working deck aft, good sea-keeping and no pretensions at all. The Admiralty took that design, put a Bofors on the bow and sweep gear on the quarterdeck, and had a minesweeper for a fraction of what a purpose-built warship would have cost. It is also why every one of the twelve found a buyer afterwards and why several are still afloat. A ship built to a merchant design does not become obsolete when the threat it was drawn for goes away. It just becomes a boat with a deck on it.

The yard that built them fits the ship exactly. Richards was founded at Lowestoft in 1876 as S. Richards and Co., became Richards Ironworks in 1930, was bought by the United Molasses Company in 1954 and took over Fellows of Great Yarmouth in 1969. Its ordinary trade was motor trawlers and drifters for the Lowestoft fishing fleet; in the 1960s it built ten wooden Ton-class minesweepers and a run of seaward defence boats, and through the 1980s it was turning out fishery patrol ships, pollution control vessels, oil rig supply boats, tugs, landing craft and small cargo ships alongside the twelve Rivers. Which is precisely the sort of firm that ought to be building a warship derived from an offshore support vessel: one that had been building offshore support vessels the whole time.

It did not save them. The Great Yarmouth yard closed in the late 1980s for want of orders, and Lowestoft followed in 1994, the year before Dovey was sold to Bangladesh. So the last yard on the East Anglian coast capable of building a small naval ship went out of business within about a decade of finishing the class, and for the same underlying reason the class itself was disposed of: there was no longer enough work to keep any of it going. That is the other half of the story of British shipbuilding in the 1980s, and it is the half that gets told least often.

The class had a very specific Cold War job in mind: countering a Soviet deep-water moored mine NATO had codenamed Cluster Bay, designed to threaten submarines rather than surface ships. River-class sweepers worked the problem in pairs, towing a Wire Sweep Mark 9 between them to cut a mine's mooring wire wherever it sat on the seabed, before the freed mine bobbed to the surface to be destroyed by gunfire, a slow, methodical and distinctly unglamorous job that nonetheless kept the sea lanes safe for Britain's own submarines.

The tactic had a name, and the name explains the ship. Extra Deep Armed Team Sweep: two vessels steaming in company towing a single wire between them, deep enough to reach the mooring wires of mines sitting hundreds of feet down, with cutters on the sweep to part them. Nothing else in the fleet could do it, and the reason the Royal Navy wanted it done is one of the least discussed facts of the Cold War at sea. The deterrent lived at Faslane, and every Polaris boat leaving on patrol had to go out through the North Channel and the deep water beyond it. A field of Cluster Bay mines laid quietly across that exit would not have sunk a single surface ship; it would have threatened the one thing Britain could not afford to have threatened. Dovey and her sisters existed to keep the front door open.

HMS Dovey herself commissioned on 30 March 1985 and was assigned to the Clyde Division of the Royal Naval Reserve, giving part-time sailors genuine hands-on experience aboard an active, purpose-built naval vessel rather than a purely static training platform.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Until 1984 the Royal Naval Reserve had gone to sea in Ton-class coastal minesweepers, which were perfectly good ships and were also hand-me-downs, thirty years old and handed on when the regulars had finished with them. The Rivers were the first vessels the Royal Navy ever built new, from the keel up, specifically for its reservists. A part-time officer from Glasgow could take command of an eight-hundred-ton ship, brand new, with a job that only he and a handful of counterparts around the country could do. There is no better way of telling volunteers that you take them seriously, and there has been nothing quite like it since.

Eight Years With the Reserve

On entering service, Dovey joined the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron at Rosyth, one of eleven ships of the class parcelled out one apiece to Royal Naval Reserve divisions around the country, alongside Waveney, Carron, Helford, Humber, Itchen, Helmsdale, Orwell, Ribble, Spey and Arun; the twelfth, Blackwater, was kept back for the regular Royal Navy. HMS Dovey served with the Royal Naval Reserve for the better part of a decade, spending her time on exactly the kind of reservist training and coastal patrol work her class had originally been designed around, unglamorous but truly valuable duty that kept a pool of trained part-time naval personnel ready to be called upon if needed.

Two of her sisters, Helmsdale and Ribble, were paid off early in 1991 as defence cuts began to bite, and when a wider review of the Royal Naval Reserve followed in 1993, the entire River class was withdrawn from RNR service in one go, Dovey among them, a fleet-wide decision rather than any reflection on her own service.

Not all of them stayed on sweeping. Blackwater, Spey, Arun and Itchen went to the Northern Ireland Squadron, taking over from the Ton-class boats on patrol and search work in the province's waters alongside the Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a job set out in the article on HMS Cottesmore. The commercial hull that made them cheap also made them ideal for it: roomy, seaworthy, unglamorous and entirely uninteresting to look at.

The reason behind the review is worth saying plainly, because it is not a story about the Royal Naval Reserve at all. These ships had been built to sweep Soviet mines out of the deep water off the Clyde. In December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and with it the navy that was going to lay them. Dovey was eight years old. She had been designed for a single, very specific opponent, had spent her entire commissioned life training for a job that never came, and was declared surplus before she was out of her first decade, which is a fate that has befallen a great many good ships and almost never for anything they did wrong.

A New Life as BNS Surovi

HMS Dovey was sold to Bangladesh in 1995 and commissioned into the Bangladesh Navy on 27 April that year as BNS Surovi, displacing 850 long tons standard, armed with a Bofors 40mm gun and two 7.62mm machine guns, and crewed by five officers and twenty-three ratings.

As of the most recent available information, the former HMS Dovey continues to serve the Bangladesh Navy as a patrol ship, a remarkably long second career that has now kept her in active naval service for considerably longer under the Bangladeshi flag than she ever spent under the White Ensign, still doing useful work in the waters of the Bay of Bengal decades after her original construction on England's east coast.

Nor was she alone in finding somewhere else to go. Every one of the twelve was sold abroad, and the class scattered across three continents: Brazil, Bangladesh and Guyana. Humber went to the Brazilian Navy in 1998 as Amorim do Valle; Orwell served on until 2001 and then went to Guyana as GDFS Essequibo; Waveney went with Dovey to Bangladesh and became BNS Shapla. Not one was scrapped by the navy that ordered them. A class of ships written off in a single line of a 1993 defence review has spent the thirty years since doing fishery patrol, coastguard work and survey in warmer water than it was ever built for, which is a rather better outcome than the review intended and a good deal better than most.

Her second navy is worth a word as well, because it is not a quiet posting. Bangladesh sits on the Bay of Bengal, which is one of the most cyclone-prone stretches of water anywhere on earth; it has an enormous fishing fleet, a very long and low coastline, and an exclusive economic zone that was disputed with both its neighbours for decades. What a navy in that position needs from a ship is almost exactly what the Rivers turned out to be accidentally good at: sea-keeping, endurance, a large open working deck aft with a crane over it, room for stores and for people, and a hull cheap enough to run hard and keep running.

Surovi carries a single 40mm Bofors and a pair of machine guns and goes to sea with a crew of twenty-eight, and she has now been doing that work for more than thirty years, which is getting on for four times as long as she spent taking Clyde reservists to sea. A ship designed in Whitehall to cut the mooring wires of Soviet mines in the deep water off Scotland has spent the larger part of her life on fishery patrol in the tropics for a country that had existed for barely fourteen years when she was launched. The Admiralty bought a commercial hull to save money. What it actually bought was a ship that could be useful to almost anybody, almost anywhere, for forty years, which is not at all what was on the requirement.