HMS Explorer (P164): Training Yorkshire's Sailors From Hull to the Baltic

Built for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service

HMS Explorer was built in 1986 by the now-defunct Watercraft Marine, originally constructed for the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service as an Example-class tender under the designation XSV Explorer.

The service she was built for is worth explaining, because almost nobody remembers it and its purpose was genuinely frightening. It began in 1952 as the Royal Naval Minewatching Service, a body of civilian volunteers whose job in a war would have been to sit at observation posts overlooking every British port and estuary and watch for mines being dropped from aircraft, noting where each one fell so that the sweepers would know where to look. In 1962 that organisation was merged with the Admiralty Ferry Crews Association and given a new name, the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, and a new task that reflected what the Cold War had become. The RNXS existed to empty Britain's ports.

That is not a figure of speech. The planning assumption was that in a nuclear exchange the major ports would be among the first targets, and that any merchant ship still alongside when it happened would be destroyed along with the harbour. So a force was needed that could be called out at very short notice to get shipping out of the docks and away to dispersal anchorages up remote sea lochs and estuaries, and to keep control of the traffic afterwards. Doing that would require boats and people who knew the local water, and the people were civilian volunteers in uniform, doing it at evenings and weekends alongside ordinary jobs. Explorer and her sisters were the boats. She was built in 1986, a black-hulled tender for a volunteer service whose war plan was the evacuation of Hull, Immingham and the Humber under nuclear attack.

Like her sister ships, she was a twin-screw vessel built from moulded glass-reinforced plastic, distinguishable in her early years by the black hull that marked out RNXS vessels from their Royal Navy Archer-class equivalents, a livery she carried until 2005.

She was not the first ship to bear the name, and the first was rather more eventful than the patient training work her modern namesake would go on to do: the original HMS Explorer, commissioned in 1956, was an unarmed experimental submarine powered by a Walter hydrogen peroxide turbine, so plagued with technical problems that her own first captain flatly refused to take her to sea. She eventually got to work properly in 1958, reaching a genuinely startling 25 knots submerged, before being laid up in 1965 and scrapped a few years later, a suitably dramatic false start for a name that has since become a byword for quiet reliability.

HMS Explorer served eight years as an RNXS tender under the pennant number A154, before transferring to the Royal Navy proper when the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was disbanded in 1994. She was reclassified with the new pennant number P164 and assigned to the Yorkshire Universities Royal Naval Unit, a role she has continued in ever since.

It never happened, and then it stopped being necessary. The Cold War ended, the defence cuts of the early 1990s went looking for organisations that could be dispensed with, and the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was disbanded on 31 March 1994 after thirty-two years, its members thanked and stood down. What was left was a small fleet of nearly new, well-built glass-reinforced plastic boats with nothing to do, and the Royal Navy, which had a growing number of university units and not enough hulls to put them in, took them over. Explorer changed her pennant number, lost the black hull in 2005, and went from being part of a plan for the end of the world to teaching undergraduates from Hull, Leeds and Sheffield how to keep a bridge watch. It is difficult to think of a better use for a redundant Cold War asset.

What that unit is actually for, and why the Royal Navy runs fourteen of them, is set out in the article on HMS Example (P165). The short version is that it is not a recruiting scheme: most URNU members graduate and go into civilian life, and the Navy considers that money well spent.

Training Hull, Sheffield and Leeds

HMS Explorer is based in Kingston-upon-Hull and primarily serves the Yorkshire Universities Royal Naval Unit, providing seagoing training for students from the universities of Hull, Sheffield and Leeds, part of the same nationwide network of small patrol and training vessels that gives undergraduates genuine hands-on experience of naval life well before any of them formally join the service.

Her training deployments have typically run for up to five weeks at a stretch during the Easter and summer periods, giving students an intensive introduction to navigation, seamanship and shipboard leadership. With a permanent complement of only five, everyone doubles up: engineers take a turn handling lines when the ship is working alongside, and warfare ratings do the cooking, a small crew's answer to a small boat's lack of room for anyone to specialise too narrowly.

The students aboard are not passengers, and the arrangement is more formal than most people assume. They join as Officer Cadets, working through a task book towards being rated Honorary Midshipmen; they are expected to put in at least twenty-four training days a year, including one continuous twelve-day period which is normally spent at sea in the unit's own boat; and they are paid for it, at the same daily rate as a regular sailor, with a tax-free bounty at the end of the year if they have done the days. A twenty-year-old reading history at Hull can therefore find themselves keeping a bridge watch in the North Sea at four in the morning, responsible for the navigation of a commissioned warship, and being paid to do it.

And there is one thing about the boat herself that every one of them remembers. She is 20.8 metres long, weighs 54 tonnes and is built of glass-reinforced plastic, which is to say she is very small and very light, and she moves accordingly. A P2000 will roll and pitch in weather a frigate would not notice; people have been made comfortably seasick aboard one in Southampton Water. That is not a defect for the purpose. A student who has learned to take a fix, work a passage plan and hand over a watch properly while being thrown about in a boat that will not keep still has learned something that cannot be taught in a classroom, and will find every larger ship they ever serve in a considerable improvement.

Reaching the Baltic

HMS Explorer's operational range expanded substantially following a significant engine upgrade in 2014, and in the summers of 2015 and 2016 she deployed to the Baltic Sea for training and local engagement work, calling at Tallinn in Estonia in July 2015, a considerably more ambitious itinerary than the coastal patrols around Yorkshire's own waters that had defined much of her earlier career.

HMS Explorer also took on a number of notable ceremonial duties during 2016, providing transport for dignitaries, including members of the Royal Family, during the Battle of Jutland Centenary commemorations that June, marking a hundred years since the largest naval battle of the First World War, and serving as guard ship for the Sunderland Air Show, a role that put her firmly in the public eye alongside her ongoing, less visible work training the next generation of naval officers.

Continuing Service

HMS Explorer remains actively assigned to the Coastal Forces Squadron's Inshore Division, continuing to combine undergraduate sea training with ceremonial duties and public engagement work, a notably important if quietly unglamorous role that has kept her busy for more than three decades since her transfer from the old Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, training the officers of tomorrow one training cruise at a time.

Her home port carries a certain amount of history for a Royal Navy ship, too. Hull was for a century the largest distant-water fishing port in the country, and it was Hull trawlers the Royal Navy spent the Cod Wars trying to protect; the city gave the frigate HMS Duncan the Freedom of the City for doing it, as described in the article on HMS Duncan (F80). Britain lost those disputes, and Hull's distant-water fleet ceased to exist. The Royal Navy ship based there now is twenty metres long, carries no weapon at all, and spends its time teaching students from Hull, Leeds and Sheffield how to take a ship to sea. It is a smaller presence than the city once knew, and it is a good deal more use to it than another gunboat would be.

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