HMS Pursuer (P273): The Training Boat That Guarded Britain's Nuclear Deterrent

An Unusual Guest at the Launch

HMS Pursuer is one of the Royal Navy's small Archer-class patrol vessels, built by Vosper Thornycroft and commissioned in 1988.

Her launch ceremony had one particularly memorable quirk: among the guests in attendance was Ballyregan Bob, the celebrated racing greyhound who went on to set the Guinness World Record for consecutive wins, 32 of them between April 1985 and December 1986, an odd but rather charming footnote for a warship whose working life would otherwise be defined by considerably less glamorous duties.

It is worth knowing why a greyhound was at a warship launch, because in 1987 Ballyregan Bob was about as famous as an animal could get in Britain. He had been bought in Ireland as a yearling for fifteen hundred pounds and trained at Hove by George Curtis, and between 15 April 1985 and 9 December 1986 he won thirty-two races in a row. The thirty-second, at Brighton and Hove in front of seven thousand people, took the world record off an American dog called Joe Dump. He won forty-two of his forty-eight races in total.

He died in 1994, aged ten. There is a bronze of him at the trackside at Hove, and his mounted body is in the Natural History Museum's collection at Tring, which is a sentence that reads oddly and is nonetheless true. George Curtis, who trained him, died in 2020 at ninety-six. Between them they are the reason a fifty-four-tonne patrol boat has a racing greyhound in her launch photographs.

She was not the first ship to carry the name, either. An earlier HMS Pursuer was an Attacker-class escort carrier that provided fighter cover for the famous April 1944 strike on the German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord, an attack that put the pride of the German fleet out of action for three months, before going on to support the Allied landings in southern France that summer. A rather higher bar than her small modern namesake will ever be asked to clear.

That escort carrier has an article of her own here, and there is rather more to her than the Tirpitz: HMS Pursuer (D73) began as an American freighter, spent her first British voyage carrying sixty-two dismantled Thunderbolt fighters to Belfast as deck cargo, covered the D-Day fleets against U-boats out of the French ports and finished her war working the Aegean against a German army trying to get out of Greece.

Training Cadets on Two Coasts

For much of her early career, Pursuer served as the training vessel for the Sussex University Royal Naval Unit, teaching officer cadets the basics of seamanship and ship handling around the south coast, before being reassigned to the Glasgow University Royal Naval Unit in September 2012, shifting her training ground north to the Clyde and the waters of western Scotland.

Armoured Up for Iraq

Pursuer's usually gentle training role gave way to something considerably sharper in 2003, when she was deployed to Cyprus ahead of the invasion of Iraq as part of Operation Telic.

Alongside her sister ship HMS Dasher, she formed the newly established Royal Navy Cyprus Squadron, based at Akrotiri Mole near RAF Akrotiri, and was fitted with Kevlar armour plating and machine guns for force protection duties, guarding visiting ships and high-value British Forces Cyprus installations at a moment of high tension in the eastern Mediterranean, a striking transformation for a small vessel more usually found teaching undergraduates how to steer a straight course. The squadron remained in place until it was disbanded in 2010, at which point Pursuer moved on to her next posting.

A Rescue, and a Watch Over Britain's Deterrent

In 2007 Pursuer took part in a rescue operation, assisting the fishing vessel Seafighter3 after it ran aground, the kind of unglamorous but valuable emergency response that small, fast patrol boats are often best placed to provide.

Between 2010 and 2012 she took on a far more sensitive role still, joining the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron to help protect the Royal Navy's ballistic missile submarines at HM Naval Base Clyde, standing guard, in her own small way, over the physical security of Britain's nuclear deterrent until HMS Tracker took over the duty.

Standing Watch Off Gibraltar

Between 2020 and 2022, Pursuer served with the Gibraltar Squadron, where she was involved in escorting the Spanish patrol boat Serviola out of British territorial waters following a disputed incursion, one of the periodic flashpoints in the long-running and largely good-natured but serious dispute over Gibraltar's waters that has rumbled on for decades between two NATO allies who otherwise cooperate closely.

Into the Age of Robotic Minehunting

Most significantly, in June 2024 Pursuer deployed to the Baltic Sea alongside her sister ship HMS Puncher as part of NATO's Baltops 24 exercise, a gathering of some 50 ships, dozens of aircraft and 9,000 personnel from 20 nations. The two boats carried specialists from the Navy's Mine and Threat Exploitation Group into the Gulf of Riga, launching autonomous underwater vehicles and remotely operated cameras to survey 620,000 square metres of a historic minefield still thought to hold around 80,000 mines and other unexploded ordnance, putting one of the Navy's oldest and smallest patrol classes to work exploring exactly the kind of uncrewed technology that is reshaping how mine warfare is conducted. She remains assigned to the Coastal Forces Squadron today.

The rest of that small and rather clubbable squadron is here too. HMS Dasher (P280) was the other half of the Cyprus Squadron, HMS Tracker (P274) took the Faslane job over from her, and HMS Puncher (P291) was alongside her in the Gulf of Riga in 2024. Four boats, none of them much longer than a cricket pitch, between them covering a war, a nuclear deterrent, a sovereignty dispute and eighty thousand mines.

A Small Boat, Surprisingly Well-Travelled

For a vessel built primarily to teach university students how to sail, HMS Pursuer has accumulated a remarkably eclectic service record: armed and armoured for the Iraq War, trusted with guarding Britain's nuclear submarines, deployed to a live sovereignty dispute off Gibraltar, and now helping pioneer autonomous minehunting in the Baltic.

It is a reminder that even the Royal Navy's smallest, least celebrated vessels can end up doing some of its most varied work.

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