HMS Ribble (M2012): A Fourth Ship, Built to Sweep Soviet Mines

The Fourth Ribble

HMS Ribble launched at Great Yarmouth on 7 May 1985, the fourth Royal Navy vessel to carry the name, following a River-class destroyer that fought in the Dardanelles in 1915 and two River-class frigates from the Second World War, one of which was transferred before completion to the Royal Netherlands Navy and the other lent for a spell to the Royal Canadian Navy.

The First Ribble Was at Anzac Cove

The Dardanelles ship deserves considerably more than a passing mention, because she was there on the worst morning of the whole campaign. HMS Ribble was a River-class destroyer sitting on the China station when war broke out, sent to the Mediterranean late in 1914, and on 25 April 1915 she was one of eight destroyers at the Anzac landing. Six of the eight carried troops and put them ashore using their own boats. Ribble, under Lieutenant-Commander Ralph Wilkinson, had aboard her a company of the 12th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force and a hundred and seventeen men of the 3rd Field Ambulance, and she towed the transport Devanah's lifeboats in towards the beach off Gaba Tepe in the dark.

The last part of that approach was made in something like thirty-six rowing boats, hauled inshore behind steam picket boats, with men sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark waiting to find out where they were. Most of the ships involved came under heavy machine gun fire as the light came up. Wilkinson wrote afterwards about the soldiers he had aboard on the way there. A great many of them did not come off that beach. It is a strange thing to think about when looking at a small grey minesweeper launched at Great Yarmouth seventy years later, but the name is the same and the Navy keeps its names on purpose.

This latest Ribble had nothing in common with her predecessors beyond the name, built instead as a Fleet Minesweeper for an entirely different kind of Cold War threat.

Built on a Commercial Hull to Beat Soviet Mines

Ribble belonged to the River-class of Fleet Minesweepers, a dozen vessels built in the 1980s by Richards Shipbuilders at Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth at a cost of around £4.6 million each, specifically designed to counter Cluster Bay, NATO's rather quaint-sounding reporting name for a new generation of deep-water buoyant mines the Soviet Union was believed to be developing, a name that suggests a seaside caravan park rather than a weapon built to snap a submarine's hull in two.

Rather than a purpose-built warship hull, the class was based on a commercial offshore support vessel design, a pragmatic and cost-effective choice that still gave the ships the sea-keeping needed for deep-sea team sweeping. At around 47 metres long and capable of 14 knots, Ribble and her sisters towed the Wire Sweep Mark 9 system in pairs, following the seabed's contours to perform what the Navy called Extra Deep Armed Team Sweeping, or EDATS, cutting the mooring wires of mines lurking far deeper than older sweep gear could ever reach.

How that job actually worked, and what Cluster Bay was, is set out at length in the article on HMS Orwell (M2011). The short version is that two ships towed a single wire between them, following the shape of the seabed, and cut the mooring cables of mines sitting far too deep for anything the Navy had used before, so that the mines came up to the surface and could be shot. It is a job that needs two ships or it needs none, which is why the class was built in a dozen and why they trained as pairs.

A Modest but Purposeful Armament

Displacing around 890 tons at full load and crewed by five officers and twenty-three ratings, Ribble carried a single 40mm Bofors gun and a pair of general-purpose machine guns, a light armament reflecting her specialist role rather than any expectation of surface combat.

She joined the 10th Mine Countermeasures Squadron on completion, one of eleven sister ships, among them Waveney, Humber, Orwell and Spey, that went on to serve with Royal Naval Reserve divisions around the country, giving reservists genuine hands-on experience of minesweeping and general seamanship duties, while a smaller number of the class took on counter-terrorism patrol duties with the Northern Ireland Squadron during a particularly tense period of the Troubles.

The reserve arrangement was more deliberate than the article suggests. Eleven of the twelve were allocated to individual Royal Naval Reserve divisions, one ship to a division, so that a drill hall in a city a hundred miles from the sea had an actual seagoing warship attached to it; only Blackwater stayed with the regular fleet. That arrangement is described properly in the article on HMS Humber (M2007), and the Northern Ireland patrol work that several of the class took on is told in HMS Itchen (M2009).

A Career Cut Short by the End of the Cold War

Ribble's Royal Navy service proved comparatively brief, spanning barely six years before she was declared surplus as defence priorities shifted following the end of the Cold War, the very threat the entire class had been built to counter having largely evaporated.

What the article calls being declared surplus took a while to finish. Ribble and her sister Helmsdale were paid off in 1991 in a round of defence cuts, and then simply sat at Portsmouth for four years, in commission on paper and going nowhere, while somebody looked for a buyer. She was six years old when she stopped working and ten before she left. It is a very Cold War ending: a ship built at considerable expense against a specific Soviet weapon, made redundant not because she failed but because the weapon and the country that was going to lay it both stopped existing.

She was transferred to the Brazilian Navy on 10 January 1995 and recommissioned there under the new name Garnier Sampaio, though her second career was rather less exciting than her first: her sweep gear and armament were stripped out before the handover, and she was converted into a buoy tender, swapping mines for navigation markers in South American waters.

Brazil took two of them. Humber went the same way and is still afloat there, and the class as a whole scattered further than most: Orwell became Guyana's Essequibo, and Carron, Dovey and Helford ended up in Bangladesh. For a design lifted from a commercial offshore support vessel to save money, that is a considerable second life, and it is worth noting that not one of them was bought for the job she was built to do. Every navy that took one wanted the hull.

A Practical Ship for a Practical Job

HMS Ribble was never a ship built for headlines, a workmanlike vessel built on a commercial hull to do an unglamorous but vital job protecting Britain's waters from an evolving mine threat. Her transfer to Brazil rather than the scrapyard is itself a modest tribute to how sound the River-class hull was, sturdy enough that another navy wanted her on, even stripped of the very equipment that had once been her entire purpose, long after the Royal Navy had moved on.