HMS Itchen (M2009): Patrolling Northern Ireland's Waterways During the Troubles

Built by Richards

HMS Itchen was built by Richards Shipbuilders at their Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth yards, one of twelve River-class minesweepers constructed for the Royal Navy, a class designed with a deliberate dual purpose in mind: notably capable minehunting and minesweeping vessels that also served as effective training platforms for the part-time sailors of the Royal Naval Reserve. She commissioned on 12 October 1985 and was attached to the Wessex Division of the RNR in Southampton, spending her first several years doing exactly the training-and-minesweeping job she had been designed for before Northern Ireland gave her rather more serious work.

The class she belonged to was built for a much larger and much colder war than the one she ended up in. The twelve Rivers were designed as deep sea team sweepers, working in pairs and towing a wire between them along the seabed, specifically to counter a Soviet deep-water mine that threatened the submarines carrying Britain's nuclear deterrent out of the Clyde; almost all of them went to Royal Naval Reserve divisions around the country so that part-time crews had a real ship to go to sea in. What they were for, and what happened to the reserve organisation that manned them, is set out in the article on HMS Humber (M2007). Itchen went to the Wessex Division at Southampton, which had also had a much older and smaller minehunter thirty years earlier, described in the article on HMS Isis (M2010). A ship built to sweep the deep Atlantic and manned by weekend sailors from Hampshire then spent five years patrolling a lough in County Antrim, which is not a career anybody drew up.

The yard is worth a paragraph, because Lowestoft had two shipbuilders and this is the one nobody writes about. S. Richards and Co was founded in 1876 on the south side of the inner harbour, became Richards Ironworks in 1930, and spent its first forty years building wooden drifters for the herring fishery, better than two hundred of them before 1919. Then deep-sea trawlers, then paddle steamers. In the Second World War it completed eighty-five small ships and repaired several hundred more, and, unusually for an East Coast yard, was never seriously bombed.

It was bought by the United Molasses Company in 1954, of all the improbable owners, renamed Richards (Shipbuilders), and took over Fellows and Co at Great Yarmouth in 1969, which is why Itchen's build is credited to two yards at once. By the 1980s it was turning out fishery patrol vessels, pollution control ships, oil rig supply boats, landing craft, tugs and minesweepers, which is the profile of a yard that will build anything anyone asks for. The other Lowestoft firm, Brooke Marine, was doing much the same thing half a mile away and is described in the article on HMS Beagle (A319).

Neither survived. Brooke Marine stopped trading in September 1992; Richards closed the Yarmouth yard in the late 1980s and Lowestoft in 1994, both times simply for want of orders. Itchen came out of that yard in 1985 and was gone from the Royal Navy inside thirteen years, and by the time she was handed over to Brazil at Portsmouth in April 1998 the firm that built her had been shut for four years. It is a very East Anglian sort of ending: a herring port that built drifters for eighty years, ended up building minesweepers, and then stopped building anything.

A Different Kind of Patrol

HMS Itchen was assigned to the Northern Ireland Squadron in 1993 alongside three of her sisters, HMS Blackwater, HMS Spey and HMS Arun, a posting that took her a long way from conventional minesweeping duty: together they replaced older Ton-class vessels in patrolling the province's inland waterways and lough systems during a period of sustained political violence, working out of a jetty in Belfast's Musgrave Channel, right next to Moscow Camp, and taking part in counter-terrorist operations in direct support of the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, unglamorous but dangerous work that saw small naval vessels playing a direct role in supporting the wider security effort in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a role considerably removed from the more conventional minehunting and reservist training duties most of her sister ships were built for.

The Northern Ireland Squadron is one of the least discussed British military commitments of the late twentieth century, and it lasted almost as long as the Army's. The Royal Navy went in with everybody else in 1969, under the codename Operation Grenada, and the job had three parts. The first was interdiction: stopping the movement of weapons and explosives by sea to paramilitaries on both sides, which meant boarding and searching fishing boats, coasters and pleasure craft around a coastline full of small harbours and inlets. The second was presence, being conspicuously and continuously there, on the sea approaches and on Lough Neagh, which is the largest lake in the British Isles and sits in the middle of the province. The third was straightforward support to the Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary: moving people and stores to places where the roads were dangerous, watching stretches of water nobody could watch from land, and providing boats for operations along the border loughs, where the frontier runs down the middle of the water and a man in a boat can be in a different jurisdiction in thirty seconds. It was done from a jetty in the Musgrave Channel in Belfast for nearly thirty years.

It is worth being honest about how well the interdiction worked, because the famous seizures were not made by the Royal Navy. The Claudia, carrying five tons of Libyan weapons, was taken by the Irish Naval Service in 1973. The Marita Ann, with seven tons aboard, was stopped off County Kerry in 1984 by three Irish Naval Service ships firing warning shots. The Eksund, the largest of the lot with 150 tonnes of arms and ammunition including twenty surface-to-air missiles, was boarded by French customs officers at Brest in October 1987, and the discovery that four earlier shipments had already got through unnoticed was one of the worst intelligence shocks of the entire conflict. All of those came in from the south and the west, into the Republic, which is exactly what a permanent naval presence in the north was designed to make necessary. Deterrence is invisible when it works, and the Royal Navy's contribution was to make the short crossing from Scotland and the direct approaches to Belfast, Larne and Warrenpoint too dangerous to use. That is not a headline. It is, on any reasonable view, the point.

Sold to Brazil

HMS Itchen was decommissioned as part of a wave of Royal Navy ship disposals between 1997 and 2003, formally transferring to the Marinha do Brasil, the Brazilian Navy, on 8 April 1998 at a handover ceremony held, rather fittingly, back at the Naval Base in Portsmouth. Renamed Bracuí after a river in Rio de Janeiro state, she joined several of her River-class sister ships in finding a second working life with an overseas navy once her British service came to an end, a fairly typical fate for a class of sturdy, well built minesweepers whose usefulness clearly outlasted their time with the Royal Navy itself.

Reclassified as a patrol vessel and armed with a 40mm gun and a pair of 12.7mm machine guns, Bracuí remains in active Brazilian service today, assigned to the Northern Naval Patrol Group out of Belém and covering the coastline and Amazon river approaches of Pará, Maranhão, Piauí and Amapá states, a properly remarkable second career for a small minesweeper that spent her first working life watching over the lakes and rivers of Northern Ireland and now does much the same job at the mouth of the Amazon instead.

The job she does now is a good deal bigger than it sounds. The Northern Naval Patrol Group works the coast and river systems of Para, Maranhao, Piaui and Amapa, which is something like two thousand miles of coastline plus the mouth of the Amazon, where the river discharges more water than the next seven rivers on earth combined and the estuary is over two hundred miles wide. The main channel is deep enough for ocean shipping several hundred miles inland. There is very little road infrastructure, a great deal of smuggling, illegal fishing, illegal logging and illegal gold mining, and the practical way to police any of it is by boat. A shallow-draught steel-hulled vessel of 890 tons with a good radius of action and a 40mm gun is, once again, exactly the right tool, and once again it is not remotely what she was designed for. She has now been Bracui for longer than she was Itchen.

As for the unit she left behind, the Northern Ireland Squadron, by then operating Hunt-class vessels that had replaced the ageing River-class boats in 1998, was itself formally disbanded on 19 July 2005, one of the quieter, more welcome consequences of the peace that followed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

It is worth putting the size of the commitment she was a small part of on the record. Operation Banner ran from August 1969 to July 2007, thirty-eight years, which makes it the longest continuous deployment in British military history; something over 300,000 service personnel served in it, and 763 of them were killed by paramilitary action, with several hundred more dead from other causes. The Navy's share of that was small in numbers and unglamorous in character: a handful of minesweepers with their sweep gear removed, patrolling a lake and a coastline, boarding fishing boats, and being visible. When the squadron was finally stood down, it was because there was no longer anything for it to do, which is the only ending anybody wanted. Itchen had gone to Brazil seven years earlier and was by then patrolling the Amazon, which is about as far from the Musgrave Channel in January as a ship can reasonably get.