The last of a class of ship born out of the Icelandic ‘Cod Wars’ of 30 years ago will be handed over to their new owners today.

HMS Lindisfarne and HMS Guernsey are the sole survivors in the Royal Navy of the seven Island-class ships, and will now join four of their sisters in service with the Bangladeshi Navy.

The confrontations between British and Icelandic ships in the early 1970s, nicknamed the Cod Wars, demonstrated to the Admiralty that the use of frigates in such situations was far from ideal, as RN vessels played cat-and-mouse with Icelandic patrol ships.

The best solution seemed to be a class of ship designed in the style of the vessels which plied their trade in that inhospitable region – ocean-going trawlers.

And so the first of a line of modest, even unglamorous, but hard-working ships, HMS Jersey, was launched by Princess Anne at the shipyard of Hall Russell in Aberdeen in 1976, entering service with the Royal Navy’s Fishery Protection Squadron, protecting Britain’s fishery and offshore energy assets.

Over the next three years Jersey was joined by sisters Guernsey, Orkney, Shetland, Lindisfarne, Alderney and Anglesey – all named after British islands.

The class soon made their presence known – Jersey detained a Russian fishing vessel during her first patrol from Rosyth, the first to have found to be transgressing the 200-mile limit.

Over the years, many others followed, and soon the growing flotilla were responsible for netting hundreds of thousands of pounds in fines paid by fishing vessels, of many nationalities, that had flouted fishing regulations.

In 1985, Jersey claimed what was then a record result – a fine of £30,000 against a Spanish trawler caught fishing without a licence in British waters. Three years later, a similar offender caught by HMS Shetland had to cough up £35,000.

While the majority of offenders went along quietly, the Islands sometimes encountered opposition – and on one notable occasion, severe resistance.

On July 4, 1981, HMS Alderney had to deal with one of the most dramatic fishery incidents since the Cod Wars when she tried to escort an offending French trawler into Grimsby.

The vessel headed for Boulogne, threatening Alderney’s boarding party with knives and acetylene torches. In the ensuing sea chase, the trawler collided with another French fishing boat, tried to ram HMS Alderney, and eventually hit the warship while cutting across her bows.

Doing more damage to itself than the British warship, the trawler at last gave up and agreed to be towed into Grimsby, where she landed a £6,796 fine plus £2,000 for the damage to Alderney.

Sometimes the international confrontations among fishermen at sea threatened wider and more serious consequences, testing the powers of authority and diplomacy of the Islands to the extreme. They were not found wanting.

In the 1990s, when increasingly stringent regulations to protect the fisheries were being imposed, tempers among trawlermen who felt their livelihoods threatened often became frayed, leading to high-profile confrontations.

In 1994, such a row blew up between Spanish and British trawlers in the Bay of Biscay. Dubbed the ‘Tuna War’, running skirmishes and claim and counter-claim captured the headlines and threatened to spiral into increasingly serious incidents.

HMS Anglesey was despatched to the area and, with the help of a Spanish patrol vessel, brought calm and peace within 24 hours, a situation that continued thanks to the follow-up presence of HMS Shetland.

Two years later, HMS Lindisfarne became the first RN fishery protection vessel to police the controversial ‘Irish Box’ which permitted the Spanish greater access to British fisheries, and in the same year, Shetland mediated between Danish sand eel fishermen and Greenpeace environmental activists in the Firth of Forth.

The fishing community’s view of the Islands was demonstrated when on a visit to Vigo for the World Fishing Exhibition in 1985, HMS Guernsey announced it was hosting a reception on board for all those present who had been arrested by ships of the Fishery Protection Squadron.

Despite misgivings in some quarters, the party was well-attended and a great success – a tribute to Island-class diplomacy.

Other roles undertaken by the ships included search and rescue, counter-drugs operations, and on one occasion HMS Shetland acted as a temporary Royal Yacht after Prince Charles’ helicopter was grounded by fog during a royal visit to the Scilly Isles. Allowing him to disembark five hours later at Penzance.

Drug-busting operations are usually associated with Royal Navy frigates patrolling the Caribbean, but in 1992 Shetland, with Customs officers on board, seized cocaine with a street value of £30 million from a British-registered oil rig support vessel.

Shetland boarded the ship 170 miles east of Newcastle during a long and skilful operation for which the Royal Navy won the praise of the Chairman of HM Customs and Excise.

These durable ships, spending up to three weeks at sea on patrol at a single stretch, were often quickly on the scene at major incidents, breaking off from normal duties to help with the rescue operation or to co-ordinate emergency services.

In 1978, Shetland saved the trawler Random Harvest, on fire in the North Sea, and the next year Jersey did the same for the Trevarth off Brixham, her fire-fighting team spending hours in battle against the flames.

That same year, HMS Orkney was on-scene commander for the clean-up operation after the tanker Christos Bitas ran aground in the Irish Sea.

Anglesey was one of the first vessels on the scene, picking up seven survivors, during the disastrous Fastnet Race in August 1979, when the race fleet of 303 was hit by a vicious storm which killed 17 and wrecked dozens of boats.

Not long after, her fire-fighters tackled a blaze on board a Spanish petroleum gas tanker off the Devon coast. That year, too, Lindisfarne was the first fishery protection vessel to replenish another ship at sea when she transferred 560 tons of oil to a Grimsby trawler in a three-hour operation to restore loss of fuel which threatened to cripple her.

In 1980, in winds up to Force 12, HMS Orkney helped to co-ordinate the search for survivors of the lost trawler Ocean Monarch off Fair Isle.

The following year HMS Lindisfarne was the first warship to help search for survivors and retrieve bodies from the water when the Norwegian Aleksander Kielland oil rig capsized.

For her part in the operation Lindisfarne won the thanks of the people of Stavanger, a centre of the oil industry in Norway.

In 1984 HMS Orkney recovered many of the bodies from the freighter Radiant Med after the ship sank off Guernsey with the loss of 17 lives, but later that year there was a happier outcome when HMS jersey went to the aid of French transatlantic yachtswoman Monique Brand after her boat was damaged in bad weather.

The ships were often called on to lend a hand in cases of failed engines – in one case, in 1991, HMS Anglesey took a Peterhead fishing vessel in tow after she lost all power in seas which the Commanding Officer described as the biggest he had ever seen, with waves towering up to 60ft.

Again it was Anglesey, in 1997, that saved a 67-year-old man and his grandson after their boat was almost smashed to pieces in collision with a Chinese freighter 30 miles south of the Scillies.

And on a stormy night in the following year, Alderney saved the two-man crew of a yacht 25 miles west of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel – the men had been trying to return to North Wales after visiting the International Festival of the Sea at Portsmouth.

In 2001, Shetland’s prompt action saved the life of a trawlerman who had severed an artery in a fall on board the Hull fishing vessel Atlantic Prince. A boarding party from the Royal Navy ship gave first aid and stabilised the patient’s condition before he was winched into a rescue helicopter for transfer to hospital.

Anglesey had a particularly hectic time at the end of 2001, when her boat crew rescued two men in a motor cruiser drifting through surf towards rocks off Plymouth in bad weather, then her firefighters helped suppress a fire on board the merchantman Rosebank off Sunderland, and finally she picked up crewmen of a sinking freighter in the Western Approaches.

The only Island-class ship not to join the Bangladeshis was HMS Orkney, which was bought by the Trinidad and Tobago Coastguard and renamed Nelson – a fitting name, as the Navy hero once commanded the Fishery Protection Squadron.

Jersey, which sailed east in 1994, is now the Shaheed Ruhul Amin and a training ship. Shetland and Alderney – decommisioned in 2002 – are serving with the Bangladeshi patrol forces as the Kapatakhaya and Karatoa respectively. They are being joined by Anglesey, which left for Bangladesh last year.