HMS Trumpeter (P294): From Training Undergraduates to Guarding the Diamond Jubilee

Built to Train the Next Generation

HMS Trumpeter was commissioned in early 1989 at HMS Wessex, the Solent Division Royal Naval Reserve unit in Southampton Docks, a small but well-equipped Archer-class patrol vessel designed as a navigation training platform, giving naval personnel and university students their first taste of seamanship and small warship operations.

The Trumpeter Before Her

The name had been to war rather recently. The previous HMS Trumpeter was an escort carrier, laid down at Seattle-Tacoma in August 1942 as the American Bastian, handed to Britain under Lend-Lease and commissioned under the White Ensign on 4 August 1943. She spent 1944 in northern waters, and in August of that year she and her sister Nabob flew the diversionary operations for Goodwood, the long and largely unsuccessful campaign of carrier strikes against the Tirpitz in her Norwegian fjord; the strikes themselves came off HMS Formidable, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Furious.

Her last day of the war is the one worth keeping. On 4 May 1945 she put up eight Avengers and four Wildcats of 846 Naval Air Squadron as part of a forty-four aircraft strike on the German U-boat depot at Kilbotn, near Harstad in northern Norway. They sank the depot ship Black Watch and took U-711 down with her. It was four days before the German surrender, and it is generally reckoned the last Fleet Air Arm strike of the European war. Trumpeter went back to American custody in April 1946 and finished as a Dutch merchant ship called the Alblasserdijk. Her sister HMS Ruler had a similar career at the other end of the world.

Forty-three years later the name came back on a boat weighing rather less than one of that carrier's aircraft lifts. The scheme she was built to serve, and why the Royal Navy pays undergraduates to learn seamanship it will never ask them to use, is set out in HMS Archer (P264).

Training at Gibraltar

From 1991, Trumpeter deployed with her sister ship HMS Ranger to the Gibraltar Squadron, continuing her training mission for University Royal Naval Units, giving successive generations of undergraduates hands-on experience of naval life alongside their studies.

Twelve Years on the Rock

The Gibraltar posting is what separates her from the other thirteen boats of her class, and it lasted a great deal longer than the article suggests. Trumpeter and HMS Ranger went out in 1991 and stayed until 2003: twelve years of a two-boat squadron, in the same waters, doing a job that had almost nothing to do with training undergraduates.

Guarding a harbour on the Rock is a peculiar business, because the water around it is disputed. Britain claims three miles of territorial sea off Gibraltar; Spain does not accept that there is any such thing; and the practical result is a stretch of sea a few miles across in which two NATO allies routinely disagree, at close quarters, in front of cameras, about whose jurisdiction applies to a fishing boat or a bunkering tanker. Handling that requires a hull that can be present without being threatening and a crew who understand that the object is never to make the incident worse. Two twenty-metre training boats turn out to be almost ideal for it, which is why they were left there for over a decade before purpose-built fast patrol boats arrived. HMS Scimitar (P284) and HMS Sabre (P285) took the work over in 2003, and Trumpeter came home to a university.

Guarding the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics

Trumpeter's most publicly visible moments came in 2012, when she was deployed on the Thames to provide security for the Diamond Jubilee Pageant marking Queen Elizabeth II's sixty years on the throne, and later that year assisted with security arrangements for the London Olympics, two of the largest and most closely watched public events Britain staged that decade.

The Thames in June 2012 was not a routine security task either. The Diamond Jubilee Pageant put around a thousand vessels on the river in a single moving column, the largest gathering of boats on the Thames in three and a half centuries, in continuous rain, with the Queen standing for most of seven hours. Trumpeter and Ranger were both on the water for it, and a great deal of the work of a patrol boat on a day like that consists of being politely in the way of anybody who has decided to come closer.

A Shift to Operational Duties

By the early 2020s, Trumpeter had transitioned from primarily training duties towards a more operational role within the reconstituted Coastal Forces Squadron, and in early 2024 deployed to northern Norway alongside three sister ships for the major NATO exercise Steadfast Defender, a particularly significant deployment for a vessel that had spent most of her career in the comparatively gentle waters of training exercises.

The Norwegian deployment is the more surprising line on her record. A P2000 is fifty-four tonnes and twenty metres long, designed for the Solent and the Clyde, and taking four of them above the Arctic Circle in February to work alongside NATO forces on the alliance's northern flank is not what the class was drawn for. What that involved, and why the Royal Navy wanted its smallest warships up there at all, is described in HMS Biter (P270).

Still Training Sailors Today

HMS Trumpeter is currently assigned to the Cambridge University Royal Naval Unit, having previously served the Bristol unit in the same capacity, continuing the training role she was built for more than three decades ago while also standing ready for the kind of operational deployments that have become an increasing part of her class's remit in recent years.

The two university units she has served can be dated. She went to Bristol in 2003 when she came back from Gibraltar, and moved to Cambridge in September 2010, which means she has now spent longer working for Cambridge than she spent on the Rock. A boat commissioned in 1989 is old enough that some of the officers now sending students to sea in her were students in her themselves, which is more or less the point of the whole arrangement.

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