HMS Peterel (P262): The Patrol Boat That Never Actually Patrolled

A Sensible Idea, Built the Wrong Way

Not every warship's story is one of battle honours and narrow escapes. Some are quieter tales of good intentions meeting an unforgiving sea, and HMS Peterel's is very much one of those. She was one of five Bird-class patrol vessels ordered from Richard Dunston's yard for the Fishery Protection Squadron's Inshore Division, at a cost of around £1.1 million apiece, small and relatively cheap ships intended to enforce Britain's fishing limits in coastal and inshore waters where a full-sized frigate would have been absurd overkill. Peterel herself was one of the first four vessels ordered, back in late 1972, at 37.7 metres long, displacing under 200 tonnes, and armed with a single 40mm Bofors gun and a couple of machine guns, entirely adequate for chasing off the odd errant trawler.

A Design That Simply Would Not Behave

The trouble was seakeeping, the unglamorous but absolutely fundamental ability of a small ship to cope with rough water without throwing her crew and equipment around like dice in a cup. The Bird class, it turned out, was not very good at it. The design's poor sea-keeping qualities were serious enough that the whole class came to be regarded as something of a failure, and Peterel's own case was the most extreme: she never completed a single operational fishery patrol in the role she had been built for. It is a fairly remarkable thing for a purpose-built patrol vessel to manage, rather like commissioning a ship expressly to sink very slowly at the dock.

A Second Calling at Dartmouth

Rather than write the ship off entirely, the Royal Navy found her a job better suited to her limitations. Peterel, together with her sister ship Sandpiper, was repurposed as a training tender for the Royal Naval Reserve during the late 1970s, work that kept her closer to sheltered coastal waters and away from the open-sea conditions that had exposed her flaws so thoroughly. She was later fitted with an enclosed bridge, a small but telling concession to comfort and safety, and assigned to the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where generations of officer cadets learned the basics of seamanship and small-boat handling aboard a vessel that, whatever her operational shortcomings, was at least an honest, real warship rather than a simulator.

Sisters Scattered to the Winds

Peterel's sister ships fared rather better in their original role. Kingfisher, Redpole and Cygnet were sent to reinforce the Northern Ireland Squadron, replacing older minesweepers on the sensitive and demanding patrol work around Ulster's coast and loughs during the Troubles, a job that asked considerably more of a small patrol vessel than chasing trawlers ever had. Of the class's later fates, Cygnet remains in the UK, Redpole crossed the Atlantic into private ownership in the United States, and Sandpiper ended up in the Netherlands, each finding an afterlife rather more settled than their brief, troubled Royal Navy careers as fishery protection vessels ever were.

An Honest Kind of Ship

There is something almost endearing about a warship whose most notable achievement was admitting, in effect, that she could not do the job she was built for and finding something useful to do instead. HMS Peterel never fired her Bofors gun in anger, never chased down an errant trawler, and never really lived up to her own design brief, but for the best part of two decades she quietly and reliably taught the Royal Navy's future officers how to handle a ship at sea, which is, in its own understated way, just as valuable a contribution as any patrol she might have run.