HMS Jersey (P295): Guarding the Channel Islands' Own Waters

The First of Her Class

HMS Jersey was built in Aberdeen and launched in 1976 by Princess Anne, the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name and, fittingly for a vessel named after one of the Channel Islands, the very first of the new Island-class offshore patrol vessels to be commissioned, with six sister ships following her into service.

The class exists because Britain lost the Cod Wars, and the design is a borrowed one. Iceland had extended her fishing limit to two hundred miles and made it stick, and on 1 January 1977 the United Kingdom and the rest of the European Community did the same thing, which at a stroke gave the Royal Navy an exclusive fishery zone of some 200,000 square miles to police with almost nothing suitable to police it in. Frigates were far too expensive to use for the job and too fast to be economical at patrol speeds. What the Navy did instead was borrow: Hall Russell of Aberdeen had built two ocean-going fishery protection vessels, Jura and Westra, for the Scottish fisheries service, and Jura had been chartered by the Navy during the Cod Wars and had performed extremely well. So the Admiralty ordered seven ships to essentially the same design, which is to say to the design of a deep-sea trawler. They were slow, at about sixteen knots, lightly armed with a single 40mm gun, and quite extraordinarily seaworthy, because they had the hull form of the very boats they were sent out to inspect. It is one of the more sensible procurement decisions the Ministry of Defence has ever made.

It was a nice piece of naming symmetry: a ship named for Jersey leading a class that would go on to spend much of its working life patrolling the waters around the Channel Islands and the rest of the United Kingdom's fishing grounds.

The squadron she joined is the oldest front-line formation in the Royal Navy, which is a claim worth pausing over given some of the competition. The first recorded English warships sent out specifically to protect fishermen date from the late fourteenth century, and the job has been done more or less continuously ever since, formalised as the Fishery Protection Flotilla in 1920. What it actually involves is police work at sea. A patrol vessel closes a fishing boat, puts a boarding party across in a small boat in whatever the weather is doing, and a team of officers goes through the log, the licences, the net mesh sizes and the catch in the hold, measuring fish, checking species and quotas, and doing it politely enough that the skipper will still cooperate next time. Most inspections find nothing. The point is that the fisherman knows they happen. It is unglamorous, legally intricate, physically nasty in a North Sea winter, and it is the only part of the Royal Navy's work that touches an actual British industry every single week.

Fishery Protection Duty

HMS Jersey served with the Fishery Protection Squadron for the better part of two decades, patrolling British waters, and at times those around Gibraltar, to protect the country's fishing industry, as well as providing security for North Sea oil and gas platforms, the kind of steady, unglamorous constabulary work that rarely makes headlines but keeps an important part of the economy functioning undisturbed.

The oil and gas platform task was more serious than it sounds and it was new. By the late 1970s the North Sea fields were producing a very large share of Britain's energy and an even larger share of the Treasury's revenue, and they sat unprotected in international waters: fixed structures with a few hundred people aboard, no defences of any kind, and no way of moving. The threats considered ranged from terrorism, at a period when the IRA was active and international hijacking was commonplace, to sabotage and to Soviet special forces in a crisis. The answer was a standing naval presence, an offshore patrol vessel able to reach a platform quickly and stay near it, backed by a specialist Royal Marines unit trained specifically to retake rigs. Nobody ever seized a North Sea platform, and it is impossible to know how much of that is because the capability existed. That is the permanent difficulty with deterrence and the permanent difficulty with justifying the budget for it.

The Cherbourg Incident

HMS Jersey earned herself a moment of genuine local fame in the spring of 1993, when weeks of rising tension between British fishery protection vessels and French trawlermen over new Channel Islands fishing limits, introduced the previous September to protect crab and lobster stocks, boiled over into what became known as the Cherbourg incident.

The legal background to that quarrel is genuinely tangled and it explains why tempers ran so high. The Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom and never have been; they are Crown Dependencies, the last remnants of the Duchy of Normandy, with their own parliaments, their own laws and their own fishing regulations, sitting a dozen miles off the coast of France and eighty from England. French fishermen had worked those waters for centuries, and a nineteenth-century convention between Britain and France had given them defined rights there which had been renegotiated, argued over and imperfectly observed ever since. When the Islands extended their limits in September 1992 to protect crab and lobster stocks, they were exercising powers they undoubtedly had, over grounds that French boats had fished for generations, in a legal framework nobody entirely understood. That is a recipe for exactly what followed: inspectors carried off to France against their will, a fishery vessel boarded and her crew shut below for three hours, her ensign burned, and thirty-six trawlers steaming on St Peter Port.

Things had already turned properly ugly by the time Jersey got involved. On 26 March, two Channel Islands fishery inspectors were effectively carried off to the French port of Barneville-Carteret aboard the trawler Impatiens after HMS Orkney confiscated her illegal catch; two days later the skipper of another trawler, La Calypso, refused to submit to inspection and set off for Cherbourg with three British fishery officers still aboard, while, separately, eight French trawlers surrounded the fishery vessel Blazer, boarded her, held her sixteen-man crew below decks for three hours and burned her White Ensign. A flotilla of some 36 French trawlers then steamed on Saint Peter Port in Guernsey before a preliminary deal was struck.

It was HMS Jersey who finally brought the affair to a close, catching La Calypso on 2 April 1993 and having her master, Michel Mesnage, arrested in Guernsey; he was released on bail the following day. For a patrol vessel named after Jersey herself, catching a French trawler fishing illegally in the very waters she was named to protect, in the same week her own name had been dragged into an international diplomatic row, had a certain neat justice to it.

It happened again, almost exactly, twenty-eight years later. In May 2021, after Britain left the European Union and the Channel Islands introduced a new licensing regime for French boats, a flotilla of French trawlers blockaded the harbour at St Helier, and the British government sent two offshore patrol vessels, HMS Severn and HMS Tamar, to sit off the island while France sent two of its own patrol boats to sit near them. Nobody fired anything and the whole thing was over in a day, but the shape of it was identical to 1993: an unresolved argument about who may take shellfish out of a stretch of water that has been disputed since the Middle Ages, escalating from paperwork to trawlers to grey ships within about a week. The Royal Navy has been sending vessels into that particular quarrel for six hundred years, and there is no sign whatever of it stopping.

A Long Second Career in Bangladesh

HMS Jersey was decommissioned in 1993 as the Royal Navy began retiring its Island-class vessels, and was sold to Bangladesh the following year alongside all but one of her sister ships, commissioning into the Bangladesh Navy on 29 January 1994 as the training ship BNS Shaheed Ruhul Amin, named in honour of the Bangladeshi naval hero Mohammad Ruhul Amin.

The man she was renamed for has a story that deserves telling. Mohammad Ruhul Amin was an engine room artificer, a Bengali serving in the Pakistan Navy who joined the newly formed Bangladesh Navy when the liberation war began in 1971. In November of that year he helped lay mines near Chalna which damaged Pakistani shipping. On 10 December he was aboard the gunboat Palash on the Rupsha river when Indian Air Force aircraft, mistaking her for an enemy vessel, attacked and set her on fire; he refused an order to abandon ship and stayed to fight the fire, was blown into the water when the engine room went up, and swam to the bank. He was found there by razakars, local collaborators of the Pakistan Army, and killed with bayonets. He was in his twenties. Bangladesh awarded him the Bir Sreshtho, its highest decoration for gallantry, given to only seven people for the entire war. That a small British trawler-hulled patrol boat spent twenty-six years carrying his name, training Bangladeshi sailors out of Chittagong, is a rather better second life than most warships are given.

Based at Chittagong, she went on to serve as a training vessel for a further quarter of a century, finally decommissioning on 16 June 2020, closing out a working life that had begun protecting the waters around a small Channel Island and ended training a new generation of sailors on the other side of the world.

Forty-four years of continuous service out of a hull designed for catching fish is a good return on whatever the Ministry of Defence paid for her in 1976. She spent seventeen years boarding trawlers in the Channel and the North Sea, minding oil rigs, and being the visible expression of the fact that a British government intended to regulate its own waters; she arrested a French skipper in the middle of an international incident about crabs; and she then spent a quarter of a century teaching seamanship to the navy of a country that had not existed when she was ordered. The Island class were the cheapest ships the Royal Navy bought in that decade and among the most continuously employed. There is a lesson in that which the Navy has periodically had to relearn, most recently when it started building the River class to do the same job all over again.