HMS Express (P163): The Ninth Ship Since 1695 to Carry the Name

Built by Vosper Thornycroft

HMS Express was built by Vosper Thornycroft and commissioned in 1988, an Archer-class patrol vessel displacing just 54 tonnes, measuring 20.8 metres in length with a beam of 5.8 metres, and powered by two Rolls-Royce diesel engines producing a combined 1,590 brake horsepower.

Like several of her sister ships, she began her career operated by the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service, distinguished by a black hull rather than the standard naval grey, a livery she retained until 2005, some years after transferring fully into Royal Navy service.

The Royal Naval Auxiliary Service is one of the vanished institutions of the Cold War, and what it existed to do is worth setting out. It was formed in the early 1960s by amalgamating the Royal Naval Minewatching Service with the Admiralty Ferry Crews Association, and it was created in response to a very specific fear: that in a war with the Soviet Union, British ports would be mined and attacked with nuclear weapons, and that the Royal Navy would not have a single spare person to deal with the consequences. So it recruited civilian volunteers, put them in uniform, gave them boats and told them what the job would be. It was entirely unarmed. Its ships were designated XSV, for Auxiliary Service Vessel, and they were painted black, which is the whole explanation for the colour Express wore for the first seventeen years of her life.

The job is the part that stops you. RNXS members were divided into Afloat and Ashore. Ashore, they manned port headquarters in every significant harbour in the country. Afloat, they were to patrol the ports and anchorages, board and inspect anything suspicious, help the Naval Control of Shipping organise merchantmen into convoys and, if Britain were attacked, get the faster merchant ships out of the ports and away to safer anchorages overseas before the weapons arrived. That is what several thousand volunteers were quietly training for at weekends for thirty years: evacuating the merchant fleet from Britain's harbours ahead of a nuclear strike, unarmed, in small boats, having gone to work on Monday as usual.

They did it in ships that will be familiar from elsewhere in this series. Before the P2000s came along, the service spent the 1960s and 1970s operating ten mothballed Ham-class inshore minesweepers, Birdham, Odiham, Pagham, Portisham, Puttenham, Saxlingham, Shipham, Shrivenham, Thakeham and Tongham, the same small wooden boats described in the article on HMS Flintham (M2628). The RNXS was disbanded on 31 March 1994 in a round of defence cuts, four years after the wall came down and the emergency it had been built for had gone away. Its people are recognised as veterans, and the Maritime Volunteer Service was set up afterwards and took on a good deal of the work. Express simply changed hands, kept her black paint for another eleven years, and went on doing something useful.

She carries a name with genuine historical depth behind it. The current HMS Express is the ninth Royal Navy vessel to bear the name since 1695, a lineage stretching back well over three centuries, connecting this small modern patrol boat to a long line of predecessors that served across the entire span of British naval history, from the age of sail through to the missile age. The very first was a modest 6-gun advice boat of 77 tons, built at Portsmouth in 1695 to carry despatches rather than fight, about as far from a warship as the name has ever strayed.

Her immediate predecessor made up for that quiet start many times over. The eighth HMS Express, an E-class destroyer launched in 1934, was one of the last two ships out of Dunkirk on 4 June 1940, evacuating 3,419 troops alongside HMS Shikari after towing the crippled French destroyer Jaguar clear of the harbour under fire and serving as Rear Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker's own flagship for the operation. Barely three months later, on 31 August 1940, she was the first ship mined in what became known as the Texel Disaster, losing her entire bow forward of the bridge; she survived, was towed home for rebuilding, and ended her days serving the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Gatineau, a suitably eventful career for a name that had previously done nothing more strenuous than carry the post.

That night off Texel deserves a footnote here, because of what it cost other people. Express did not blow her bow off alone in an empty sea; she did it in the middle of a destroyer flotilla, and two of her consorts turned back to help her. Both were mined in turn. HMS Ivanhoe was so badly damaged she had to be sunk by gunfire the next day, and HMS Esk broke in two and went down with 127 of her people. The full account is in the article on HMS Esk (H15). The eighth Express survived because she was hit first and because two other ships came to her; roughly three hundred men died in the course of that night, and she is the reason a good many of them were where they were.

The admiral whose flag she was flying is worth following as well, because his next year was remarkable. Frederic Wake-Walker was appointed Rear-Admiral, Dover on 29 May 1940 and given charge of all the seagoing ships off the beaches; he arrived off Dunkirk the following day in a minesweeper, had his destroyer HMS Keith sunk under him by air attack on 1 June, and carried on running the evacuation from a motor torpedo boat in the harbour. Less than a year later he was commanding the 1st Cruiser Squadron, and it was his two ships, Norfolk and Suffolk, that found Bismarck in the Denmark Strait and held on to her in appalling visibility for thirty-one hours until the fleet could be brought up. He was then criticised in some quarters for not re-engaging after Hood blew up. Admiral Tovey defended him so vigorously, and offered his own resignation so plainly, that the matter was dropped. Both of those things, the beaches and the shadowing, are decisions about when not to fight, and both of them were right.

Training Wales's Naval Officers

HMS Express is attached to the Wales Universities Royal Naval Unit, providing seagoing training for officer cadets from Cardiff, Swansea and the wider South Wales university network.

She can accommodate up to ten cadets alongside her permanent crew of five naval personnel, giving undergraduates genuine hands-on experience of navigation, seamanship and leadership at sea, the same essential purpose shared by every Archer-class vessel attached to a University Royal Naval Unit around the British coast.

Trials, NATO Exercises and the Baltic

Beyond her core training role, HMS Express also serves as a trials platform for advanced maritime technology, and supports the Fleet Operational Standards and Training organisation, work that puts her small hull to considerably more technically demanding use than routine coastal patrol duties alone would require.

She has taken part in NATO exercises including Joint Warrior and Typhoon Warrior, and has deployed as far afield as the Baltic region and Norway, a notably broad operational footprint for a vessel originally conceived primarily as a coastal training tender.

That trials work is a more interesting use of a small boat than it sounds. A twenty-metre hull with a crew of five is an extremely cheap way of getting a piece of equipment to sea and finding out whether it survives, and it can be tied up, opened up, modified and sent out again in a week rather than the months a frigate would take. The Royal Navy has used the P2000s for exactly that: as a platform for new sensors and communications kit, and as the manned end of experiments involving uncrewed craft, where somebody has to be out there watching what the machines actually do. It is the same logic that put a set of gas turbines into an obsolete Type 14 frigate in 1966. If you want to try something at sea, try it in the ship you can most afford to be without.

HMS Express operates from HMNB Devonport as part of the Coastal Forces Squadron, and maintains affiliations with the destroyer HMS Dragon, the submarine HMS Trenchant, and a range of local cadet groups, connections that help tie her training role into the wider fabric of the Royal Navy's presence in Wales and the South West.

Continuing a Long Tradition

HMS Express remains in active service today, continuing a role that combines undergraduate training with genuine operational and trials work, a modest but truly useful vessel carrying forward a name that has represented the Royal Navy at sea, in one form or another, for well over three hundred years.

Nine ships across three hundred and thirty years is a good deal of continuity for a name that means nothing more grand than fast, and the shape of the list says something about the Royal Navy. The first Express carried despatches. The eighth pulled men off the beaches at Dunkirk, lost her bow to a mine and finished her war under the Canadian flag. The ninth teaches undergraduates from Cardiff and Swansea how to keep a bridge watch. None of those is a battleship, and all three are jobs the Navy could not have done without: carrying the message, getting the army home, and making the next generation of officers.

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