HMS Example (P165): From Coastal Defence Reserve to Training Tomorrow's Officers

Built for a Reserve That No Longer Exists

HMS Example was built by Watercraft Ltd of Shoreham-by-Sea and launched in 1985, though she did not begin her career in the Royal Navy at all.

She was originally constructed for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, a volunteer coastal defence organisation, and carried the pennant number A153 as the lead vessel of a small batch of four ships known as the Example class, alongside HMS Express, HMS Explorer and HMS Exploit, built to a design essentially identical to the Archer-class patrol boats being built for the Royal Navy at the same time.

When the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was disbanded in 1994, HMS Example transferred directly into the Royal Navy proper, was reclassified as a patrol boat, and received the new pennant number P165, retaining her original name in the process, becoming the first Royal Navy vessel ever to carry it.

The organisation she was built for deserves explaining, because almost nobody remembers it and its job was extraordinary. The Royal Naval Auxiliary Service began in 1952 as the Royal Naval Minewatching Service, a body of civilian volunteers manning observation posts overlooking harbours and estuaries whose task was to watch for mines being dropped from aircraft and plot exactly where they fell, so that the channel could be swept in the right place. In 1962 it was merged with the Admiralty Ferry Crews Association and renamed, and its remit grew into something considerably grimmer. The RNXS existed to keep British ports working in a nuclear war: to get merchant shipping out of the docks and dispersed to safe anchorages before an attack, and to control what moved in and out of what was left afterwards. It was staffed by volunteers with day jobs, several thousand of them, and it trained for that eventuality for thirty years.

It was abolished with the threat it had been created for. The Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, and on 31 March 1994 the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was disbanded as a defence economy, its volunteers thanked and stood down after four decades. What was left was a handful of small ships with nothing to do. Example and her three sisters were handed to the Royal Navy, given pennant numbers, and put to a use nobody had had in mind when they were ordered. She is a Cold War artefact still going to sea, and the only surviving piece of an organisation that was set up to run Britain's ports after the bomb.

Training the Northumbrian URNU

HMS Example has, since her transfer, served the Northumbrian University Royal Naval Unit, providing hands-on naval training for students attending Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Teesside and Sunderland universities, a particularly important pipeline through which the Royal Navy identifies and develops future officers long before they ever formally join the service.

She operates with a small permanent crew of around five regular sailors, currently led by Lieutenant Oliver Lloyd Thomas RN, and can accommodate up to twenty people in total when carrying trainees and instructors on deployment, giving undergraduates real experience of navigation, seamanship and leadership at sea rather than purely classroom instruction.

She is based at HMS Calliope in Gateshead, part of Coastal Forces Squadron (East), and her role extends to supporting UK and NATO exercises across territorial waters, in Norway, Western Europe and the Baltic, most recently spotted transiting the Kiel Canal in Germany in May 2024. Like most Royal Navy vessels she keeps a wide circle of friends: her own affiliations run to the frigate HMS Dauntless, HMS Northumberland, 703 Naval Air Squadron, the town of Whitby, three school Combined Cadet Forces at Durham School, Newcastle Royal Grammar School and Sedbergh, and the Northumberland District Sea Cadet Corps, a small patrol boat with a surprisingly large extended family for her size.

The base she works from is worth a detour, because HMS Calliope is not a building with an arbitrary name on it. The original Calliope was a corvette completed in 1884, and on 15 and 16 March 1889 she was lying in the harbour at Apia in Samoa along with six other warships, three American and three German, all of them there because the three countries were in the middle of an unedifying quarrel over who should run the islands. A hurricane came in. The harbour is small, the reef is close, and there was no room to ride it out.

Calliope's captain, Henry Kane, made the decision nobody else made. He raised steam, slipped his cables and drove her straight out of the harbour into the teeth of the hurricane, past the reef and into open water, making perhaps a knot over the ground against the sea for hour after hour. She got out. Nobody else did. The German gunboat Eber was lost with most of her crew, Adler was thrown onto the reef on her side, the American Vandalia and the flagship Trenton were wrecked and largely submerged, and Olga and Nipsic were driven ashore. Calliope came back the next day, hull sound, having lost three anchors and three boats and sprung her foreyard. The account that has come down from it is that as she clawed past the sinking Trenton, the American crew came to the rail and cheered her.

The name came to the Tyne in 1907, when that same Calliope, by then long obsolete, was towed north and moored as the drill ship of the Tyne Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. She stayed at it until she was sold for scrap in 1951 and was replaced by a Falmouth-class sloop, renamed Calliope in her turn, which served at Elswick until 1968. When the division finally went ashore, the new headquarters kept the name, and it is the building HMS Example ties up beside today.

So a twenty-metre patrol boat built for a Cold War civil defence organisation, crewed by five sailors and a rotation of students from Durham and Newcastle, operates from a shore establishment named after a Victorian corvette that outran a hurricane in the South Pacific in 1889 and is remembered for it in the United States Navy as well as this one. The Royal Navy is not always good at explaining itself, but it is extremely good at keeping hold of things.

It is worth being clear about what the University Royal Naval Units are actually for, because the obvious assumption is wrong. There are fourteen of them, each with a handful of Royal Naval Reserve training officers and one P2000 of its own, and each takes about fifty-one undergraduates for the duration of their degrees, something like 880 students nationally at any time. They are not a recruiting organisation. Nobody signs anything committing them to serve, and a typical unit sends around two people a year on to Dartmouth; the overwhelming majority of URNU members graduate and go into ordinary civilian careers. That is the point rather than a failure of it. The Royal Navy's calculation is that a few hundred people a year who will spend the next forty years as lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists and civil servants, and who have actually stood a watch at three in the morning in the North Sea, are worth a great deal to a service that most of the country now never encounters at all.

Ceremonial Duties and European Deployments

HMS Example has taken part in a range of notable public and ceremonial occasions over her career, including the Entente Cordiale celebrations in 2004, marking a century of the Anglo-French agreement, and escorting HMS Endurance during the International Fleet Review of 2005.

She celebrated her own 21st birthday with a ceremonial divisions parade in 2006, and featured prominently in the Territorial Army's centenary celebrations in 2008, reflecting the close links between the Royal Navy's reserve and volunteer training structures that her own origins in the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service embodied from the very start.

HMS Example undertook a substantial twelve-week deployment in 2012, visiting Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany before continuing on to Stockholm, St Petersburg and Tallinn, a properly ambitious itinerary for a small patrol and training vessel, and one that gave her URNU students a considerably broader taste of European waters than their usual coastal training patrols around the north-east of England.

A Modern Refit

HMS Example rejoined the fleet in November 2016 after a prolonged refit that fitted new engines, raising her top speed to 22 knots. It was a welcome improvement, though still some way short of her full potential: the Example class's hull was actually designed for a 45-knot dash, a figure her original underpowered diesels never got close to, managing barely 14 knots in practice. Even her new engines leave a fair bit of that speed on the table, ensuring she remained fit for the demanding training schedule expected of a University Royal Naval Unit tender well into her fourth decade of service, if not quite living up to her hull's original billing.

The speed story is worth one more line, because it is such a perfectly British piece of procurement. The hull under her is a fast patrol boat form, drawn for something in the region of forty-five knots, and she has spent forty years never once going that fast because the engines put in her were chosen for a coastal defence auxiliary that needed endurance and economy rather than a dash. Fourteen knots became twenty-two knots after the 2016 re-engining, which is a genuine improvement and still around half of what the shape of her hull was designed to deliver. She is a sports car that has spent its entire life doing the school run, and doing it extremely well.

She continues in that role today, still working the same North Sea and Baltic exercise circuit her students have always known, a quietly essential part of the pipeline that introduces each new generation of undergraduates to naval life, seamanship and leadership long before any of them might go on to serve aboard the Royal Navy's larger and more famous ships.

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