HMS Enterprise (A71): The Tiny Survey Ship Nicknamed 'The Starship'

A Small Ship With a Big Name

HMS Enterprise was the ninth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, though she bore little resemblance to the fleet carriers, cruisers and famous American vessels that have shared it over the years. She was built by M. W. Blackmore and Sons of Bideford as an Echo-class inshore survey ship, a modest vessel just 100 feet long and 22 feet in the beam, displacing 120 tons standard and rising to 160 tons at full load, closer in scale to a large fishing boat than a warship, and carrying a crew of just 18, purpose-built for the patient, unglamorous work of hydrographic survey rather than combat.

The builder is about as far from a naval dockyard as it is possible to get, and that is the point of her. Blackmore and Sons was one of the smaller boatyards on the Torridge at Bideford in north Devon, a firm that had spent the lean years between the wars building wooden yachts, passenger ferries, pilot cutters and fishing boats, and which was launching the largest vessels it had ever built in the 1950s when the Admiralty came looking for inshore survey ships. That is exactly the right sort of firm to ask. A hundred-foot wooden-hulled survey vessel with a shallow draught and eighteen bunks is a boatbuilder's problem, not a shipyard's. Blackmore joined a consortium of Bideford builders in a new covered yard in 1964, turned to small steel craft, and closed in 1981, which brought shipbuilding in the parish of Bideford to an end altogether.

The name was a considerable thing to hang on a boat that size, and it had been carried by some serious ships. The Enterprise immediately before her was a fast light cruiser that had carried gold across the Atlantic in 1940 and fought a running action against German destroyers in the Bay of Biscay, described in the article on HMS Enterprise (D52). The Royal Navy has always been relaxed about putting a famous name on a very small vessel, on the reasonable grounds that the name belongs to the service rather than to any particular hull. It does, however, guarantee a certain amount of comment on the jetty.

The reason a navy pays for a hundred-foot ship with eighteen people in it is worth stating, because it is not obvious. The east coast of England is not a coast in the ordinary sense; it is a shifting arrangement of sandbanks in shallow water, and the banks move. Storms rearrange them, tides walk them along, and a channel surveyed in one decade can be a shoal in the next. The approaches to the Thames, Harwich and Felixstowe carry some of the densest merchant traffic in the world across exactly that seabed. Somebody has to go out, year after year, and check that the chart still describes what is actually down there, and that somebody cannot be a large ship, because a large ship cannot go where the problem is. Hence Enterprise: shallow draught, small crew, based at Chatham with the Inshore Survey Squadron, working the same stretch of water for a quarter of a century.

She was commissioned in 1959, joining a small class of similarly diminutive survey vessels tasked with charting Britain's own coastal waters in painstaking detail.

Charting the East Coast

HMS Enterprise spent her career working alongside her sister ships HMS Echo and HMS Egeria, conducting hydrographic survey work throughout the coastal waters of Eastern England and the English Channel, becoming a familiar and well-liked presence in the harbours of Britain's east coast over more than two decades of steady service.

Her duties also took her further afield on official visits to Belgian, Dutch and German ports along the North Sea, and on occasion considerably further still, with voyages recorded as far up the Rhine as Cologne, a properly striking itinerary for such a small ship, more accustomed to charting shallow coastal waters than navigating a major inland European waterway.

How she did it is the part that has vanished completely. There was no satellite navigation. Depth came from a single-beam echo sounder, one number at a time, directly under the keel, so covering an area meant steaming a lawnmower pattern of lines and sounding every foot of the way. Position came from the Decca Navigator, a chain of shore transmitters whose overlapping signals a receiver turned into a fix, accurate on a good day to something like ten feet but requiring the ship to go and set up its own shore stations first, by boat and helicopter, wherever there were none. And to cover more ground she put survey motor boats out on either beam to sound in formation alongside her, each boat fixing its own position by compass bearing and vertical sextant angle onto marks ashore. Every one of those numbers was then reduced by hand, corrected for tide, and drawn on a fair sheet. A modern survey ship does more in an hour with one pass of a multibeam, as the article on HMS Echo (H87) describes, and the two ships were separated by only forty-three years.

The Starship

HMS Enterprise picked up an affectionate and rather inevitable nickname among Royal Navy personnel during her service: 'the Starship', a cheerful nod to the fictional USS Enterprise made famous by the American television series Star Trek, which had become a global phenomenon during the very years HMS Enterprise was quietly charting the waters off Harwich and Felixstowe.

It is a nickname that says more about the cultural moment than the ship herself, a small, workmanlike survey vessel briefly sharing her name, however jokingly, with one of the most famous fictional spacecraft ever created.

The timing of the joke is worth noting. Star Trek first went out in America in September 1966 and reached British screens shortly afterwards, by which point Enterprise had been quietly sounding the Thames Estuary for seven years. She kept the nickname for the rest of her career, which means that for the better part of two decades the Royal Navy had a starship attached to the Inshore Survey Squadron at Chatham, engaged in boldly going as far as the Sunk Sand.

Disposal and a Quiet End

HMS Enterprise was put up for disposal by sale in 1985, closing out roughly a quarter century of steady, unglamorous survey work along Britain's eastern coastline and beyond.

Her working life did not actually end there. Renamed Earl of Romney, she was taken on by the Marine Society and became a sail training ship, based at the Gravesend Sea School on the Thames at Denton, giving several more decades of service introducing young trainees to life afloat rather than charting sandbanks for the Admiralty.

The organisation that took her on is older than any ship in this series, and a good deal older than most of the navy. The Marine Society was founded on 25 June 1756, in a tavern in Cornhill, by a group of London merchants at the urging of a traveller and philanthropist named Jonas Hanway. Britain had just gone to war with France and needed sailors; Hanway's idea was to take destitute boys and unemployed men off the streets of London, clothe and equip them at the Society's expense and send them to sea. It worked on a startling scale. By 1763 it had put more than ten thousand men and boys into the fleet, in 1772 Parliament incorporated it by statute, and by Trafalgar something like fifteen per cent of all British naval manpower had come through it. Nelson was one of its trustees.

It is still going, which makes it the oldest public maritime charity in the world, and by the 1980s what it did was train young people for a career at sea rather than find hands for a war. So a survey vessel built at Bideford in the 1950s, who had spent a quarter of a century sounding the sandbanks off Harwich for the Admiralty, was handed to an organisation founded two hundred and twenty-nine years earlier to get London's poor to sea, and spent her third career at Gravesend teaching teenagers to handle a boat. There are worse things to do with a hundred feet of wooden hull, and the last chapter, rotting quietly at her moorings in County Down until 2023, is the only part of it that reads badly.

Her final fate came many years later still, and rather more anticlimactically than her wartime-built contemporaries: left to deteriorate at her moorings in Kilkeel harbour, County Down, she was gradually submerged where she lay, the harbour authority eventually posting signage warning the public away from the wreck before she was finally scrapped in 2023, a quiet and somewhat undignified end for a small ship that had spent her working life doing exactly the kind of patient, careful charting that keeps larger and more famous vessels safely off the rocks.