HMS Waveney (M2003): From the Royal Naval Reserve to the Bay of Bengal

Built for the Reserve

HMS Waveney was built by Richards Dry Dock and Engineering and entered Royal Navy service on 12 July 1984, a River-class minesweeper assigned to the South Wales Division of the Royal Naval Reserve, part of a class specifically designed to give reservists hands-on experience of minesweeping and patrol work alongside the regular fleet.

Cardiff's Own Minesweeper

The South Wales Division of the Royal Naval Reserve is a real place with real people in it, and it is worth saying what having a ship of your own meant to it.

A reserve division is a drill hall in a city, in this case at Cardiff, where several hundred people with ordinary jobs turn up on weekday evenings and give up their weekends. Without a ship, that is a great deal of instruction in things nobody gets to do. With a ship, it is a different proposition entirely: the division has a warship, alongside, that its own members take to sea, run, navigate, maintain and sweep with, under their own officers. Waveney belonged to South Wales in the way a lifeboat belongs to a town.

Why the class existed at all, which is a story about Soviet mines and the exits from the Clyde, is set out in HMS Orwell (M2011) and HMS Ribble (M2012), and what the sweep itself involved is in HMS Venturer (M08).

Her builder is worth a note too. Richards of Lowestoft was a fishing-boat and small-craft yard on the Suffolk coast, not a naval shipbuilder, and it built twelve of these ships. That was deliberate: the River class was designed to commercial rather than full naval standards precisely so that yards like Richards could build them quickly and cheaply, on the sound argument that a sweeper which has to be affordable in dozens is worth more than a perfect one you can only have three of. It is the same reasoning that produced the wartime trawler fleets, applied in the 1980s.

A Decade in Reserve Service

Waveney served the Royal Naval Reserve for close to a decade before being withdrawn from service in 1993, part of the broader post-Cold War drawdown that saw a number of River-class vessels declared surplus to requirements as defence priorities shifted.

Sold at Nine Years Old

Withdrawn in 1993 after less than a decade looks like waste and is really the collision of two separate events.

The first is that the threat went away. These ships existed to deal with one specific problem, the deep-laid mine barrier a Soviet submarine could put across the deep-water exits from British waters, and in December 1991 the Soviet Union stopped existing. The second is Front Line First, the 1994 defence costs study, which reorganised the Royal Naval Reserve and took the minewarfare role away from the divisions. Between them, a class of eleven nearly new warships became surplus within about two years.

That is why, in the middle 1990s, a great many small navies suddenly acquired British minesweepers. Four went to Bangladesh, several to Brazil, one to Guyana, others to Portugal. They were modern, cheap, simple, shallow-drafted and easy to maintain, which is exactly the specification a navy with a long coast and a small budget wants, and they were being sold by a country that no longer had a use for them.

Sold to Bangladesh

In 1995, Waveney was sold to Bangladesh and recommissioned into the Bangladesh Navy as BNS Shapla on 27 April that year, taking on a new life patrolling the waters of the Bay of Bengal, armed with a Bofors 40mm gun and general-purpose machine guns for her new role.

Still on Patrol

BNS Shapla continues in active service with the Bangladesh Navy as a patrol ship, a properly satisfying second career for a vessel originally built to give British reservists their sea time, now helping to secure one of the busiest and most strategically important stretches of water in South Asia, decades after her construction on the other side of the world.

What Shapla Means

The name she was given is not a random one. Shapla is the water lily, the national flower of Bangladesh, and it sits at the centre of the national emblem, resting on water, between ears of rice, with four stars above it. It is about as close to the country's idea of itself as a word can get.

It is also, in its way, an apt name for the job. Bangladesh has one of the most crowded and least forgiving stretches of water in the world: the Bay of Bengal takes the outflow of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, floods the coast when the cyclones come, and supports a fishing fleet of tens of thousands of small boats working alongside the shipping lanes into Chittagong. A patrol ship there spends her time on fisheries, on piracy and smuggling in the river approaches, and on getting to places after storms.

She has now been Bangladeshi for more than thirty years, which is over three times as long as she was British. Her sisters Carron, Dovey and Helford went with her, and all four are still there. A set of ships built on the Suffolk coast to sweep Soviet mines out of a Scottish sea loch have spent most of their lives in the Bay of Bengal, and are still working.