HMS Quorn (M41): Once the World's Largest Plastic Warship, Now Sailing for Lithuania

The Last of the Hunts

HMS Quorn was the last ship built to the Hunt-class design, built by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston, launched on 23 January 1988, commissioned the following year, and the third Royal Navy vessel to carry the name.

The Quorn Before Her

The name comes from a Leicestershire village and, through it, from the Quorn Hunt, one of the oldest and most famous foxhunts in England, which is why a mine countermeasures vessel shares a naming convention with a pack of hounds. It is also, for anybody who has ever bought a packet of it, where the meat substitute gets its name: the Quorn trademark had already been used on instant food long before Marlow Foods put mycoprotein under it in 1985.

The second ship of the name is the one that matters, and she should not be passed over. HMS Quorn of 1940 was a Type I Hunt-class escort destroyer built by J Samuel White at Cowes, and by the summer of 1944 she was working the Normandy beachhead, escorting the endless stream of shipping feeding the invasion.

On the night of 3 August 1944 the Germans threw everything unconventional they had at the anchorage at once: E-boats, Linsen explosive motorboats, Neger one-man torpedoes and low-flying aircraft, all together. Quorn was hit by one of them, and to this day nobody is certain whether it was a Linsen or a Neger. She sank quickly. Four officers and a hundred and twenty-six ratings were killed.

The number that stays with you is a different one. Men who got clear of the ship were in the water for up to eight hours before anybody reached them, and a great many of those did not survive the wait. Of the hundred and thirty dead, eleven bodies were eventually recovered, washed ashore over the following weeks, and they lie in three Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries: Tilly-sur-Seulles and Douvres-la-Delivrande in Normandy, and Le Crotoy at the mouth of the Somme, a hundred miles from where the ship went down. The other hundred and nineteen have no grave.

In May 2016, four sailors from this Quorn crossed the Channel and went to stand at those graves. It is a small thing and it is the reason ships keep names.

The Hunt class was, in its day, a properly unusual piece of naval engineering: built from glass-reinforced plastic rather than steel to avoid triggering magnetic mines, the class briefly held the distinction of being the largest warships ever constructed from composite material anywhere in the world. Quorn herself displaced 750 tonnes, ran to 60 metres in length, and could make 17 knots on a pair of Napier Deltic diesels, with a crew of around 45 operating a single 30mm gun alongside miniguns and machine guns for close-in defence.

Thirteen were built in total, combining the traditionally separate roles of minesweeping and active minehunting into a single hull, along with a useful secondary role as an offshore patrol vessel when mine warfare duties allowed.

The class has several other accounts here worth a look: HMS Cattistock (M31) and HMS Ledbury (M30) are both still working, forty years on from being launched, which says something about what a plastic hull does for a warship's lifespan. The earlier Hunts, the destroyers, are represented here by HMS Quantock (L58), another Type I who spent the war with four guns instead of six because of an error in the class's stability calculations.

Years on Station in the Gulf

Quorn spent a substantial stretch of her career, from May 2011 to September 2014, deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of the Royal Navy's long-standing permanent regional mine countermeasures presence, based out of Bahrain with crews rotating through while the ship herself remained on station.

During that deployment she was twinned with the American minehunter USS Devastator, part of the close, ongoing cooperation between the Royal Navy and US Navy in keeping Gulf shipping lanes clear of mines in one of the world's most strategically sensitive waterways.

NATO Exercises Closer to Home

Back in northern European waters during the spring and summer of 2015, Quorn joined the Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group One, taking part in Exercise Joint Warrior off Scotland, the major multinational BALTOPS exercise alongside HMS Iron Duke and HMS Ocean, and a visit to Kiel Week in Germany, keeping up the steady rhythm of allied training exercises that define so much of a modern minehunter's working life even without a live mine in sight.

A Bell Handed to Her Namesake Village

Quorn decommissioned on 14 December 2017 after 27 years of Royal Navy service, and in a nice piece of continuity, her ship's bell and naval ensign were presented to Quorn Parish Council in Leicestershire the following year, giving the small village that lent its name to three successive Royal Navy ships a physical memento of the connection.

A Refit Interrupted by a Shipyard's Collapse

Quorn's retirement turned out to be anything but straightforward. She was sold to the Lithuanian Navy on 30 April 2020 for £1 million and renamed M55 Suduvis, and in July 2022 Harland and Wolff's Appledore yard was awarded a £55 million contract to carry out her conversion for Lithuanian service.

That plan fell apart when Harland and Wolff itself collapsed into administration in 2024, leaving the half-converted minehunter in limbo. Only the work needed to make her safe for the voyage was ever finished, and local suppliers on the contract were reportedly left unpaid, before she was finally towed out of Appledore on 22 August 2025 and on to Klaipeda so the conversion could be completed in Lithuania instead, Navantia UK confirming, once it had taken over some of Harland and Wolff's other assets, that the minehunter contract itself was not part of the deal.

A Second Chance to Hunt Mines

For a ship that spent nearly three decades quietly and effectively clearing mines for the Royal Navy, it has been a strangely eventful road into retirement, caught up in the very public difficulties of British shipbuilding even after her own working life had ended. A hull built to survive magnetic mines unscathed, it turns out, is no defence at all against a shipyard's own collapsing balance sheet.

Once her conversion is finally complete, HMS Quorn will begin an entirely new chapter as a Lithuanian warship, continuing exactly the kind of mine countermeasures work she was originally built for, just now defending the Baltic rather than the Gulf or the North Sea.