HMS Raider (P275): Standing Guard Over Britain's Submarines on the Clyde

A Later Addition to the Archer Class

HMS Raider is one of the Royal Navy's Archer-class patrol vessels, small glass-reinforced plastic craft built as fast training boats and coastal patrol craft. She was one of two additional, Batch 2 Archers, alongside her sister HMS Tracker, ordered from the Ailsa Shipbuilding Company and commissioned in January 1998 to replace the elderly HMS Loyal Watcher and HMS Loyal Chancellor as training boats for the Cambridge and Oxford university naval units, later in the class's production run than most of her sisters, which had entered service a decade earlier. That extra decade of design refinement bought her a genuine practical edge: as a Batch 2 boat she can sustain 24 knots, some four knots quicker than her Batch 1 sisters.

At just under 21 metres long and 54 tonnes, with a ship's company of just seven led by an experienced lieutenant, she is a small vessel, but one built to do an important job.

Training Cadets at Cambridge, Then Bristol

Raider spent her early career attached to the Cambridge University Royal Naval Unit, teaching undergraduate officer cadets the fundamentals of seamanship and navigation on live water rather than in a classroom.

In the summer of 2010 she was reassigned to become Bristol URNU's training ship, taking over the role from HMS Trumpeter, who headed off in the opposite direction to take up Raider's old berth at Cambridge, a tidy little swap that shifted both boats' cruising grounds while leaving the essential work of giving university students their first genuine taste of naval life exactly the same.

Guarding the Clyde, Around the Clock

Raider's role changed considerably in October 2012, when she joined the Faslane Patrol Boat Squadron at HM Naval Base Clyde in place of the outgoing HMS Dasher, taking on force protection duties for the submarines, including the Royal Navy's ballistic missile boats, that transit to and from the base. The squadron itself was renamed the Coastal Forces Squadron on 21 May 2020, with Raider and Tracker forming its Faslane-based element, Coastal Forces Squadron (North).

Working alongside her sister HMS Tracker, and fitted for the role with three general-purpose machine guns and armour plating, she maintains patrol cover in the Firth of Clyde around the clock, every day of the year, providing maritime security for some of the most strategically sensitive vessels in the entire Royal Navy.

Her sisters in the squadron have accounts of their own here. HMS Tracker (P274) is the other half of Coastal Forces Squadron (North) and shares the Clyde watch with her; HMS Dasher (P280) is the boat she replaced at Faslane, and had already been armoured up and sent to Cyprus for the Iraq war before that; and HMS Trumpeter (P294) is the one who swapped berths with her in 2010 and went to Cambridge.

It is unglamorous, watchful work, but among the most consistently important duties any small patrol boat in the fleet performs, given what she is ultimately there to protect.

The Third Ship to Carry the Name

Raider carries a name with real history behind it. An earlier HMS Raider was an R-class destroyer that served from 1916 to 1927, while a Second World War-era Raider served with distinction through that conflict and was then transferred to India in 1949 rather than paid off.

The present, much smaller Raider inherits that name rather than any of the earlier ships' battle honours, but continues a naval tradition of reusing proven, well-regarded names across very different generations and very different types of ship.

That second Raider deserves the detail, because she had one of the longer and more useful careers of any destroyer of her generation. She was built by Cammell Laird, laid down in April 1941 and commissioned in November 1942, and Romford adopted her after a Warship Week. She worked the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and came out of the war with six battle honours, four Distinguished Service Medals and five mentions in despatches among her ship's company, which for an escort destroyer is a great deal of paper.

She went into reserve at Devonport in January 1946, came out again that May for the Mediterranean, spent a while as plane guard to the carriers and went back into reserve in 1947. And then, instead of the breakers, she went to India. On 9 September 1949 she recommissioned at Devonport as HMIS Rana, under Commander S N Kohli, who would later be an admiral and Chief of the Naval Staff.

As Rana she served in the Indian 11th Destroyer Squadron alongside Rajput and Ranjit, was in action in the war of 1965 and again in 1971, and was not decommissioned until 1976, thirty-four years after she was launched. She went to the breakers in 1979. So the name this small patrol boat carries belonged, within living memory, to a ship that fought in three wars under two flags and outlasted the empire that built her.

Small, Watchful, and Essential

HMS Raider will never fight a fleet action or earn a battle honour of her own, but her current role, standing continuous watch over the submarines that carry Britain's nuclear deterrent, is about as consequential as small-boat duty gets in the modern Royal Navy.

From training the officers of tomorrow at two different universities to standing guard today over some of the nation's most sensitive military assets, she has quietly done exactly the kind of work the Navy cannot function without.

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