HMS Ajax (F114): The Frigate That Collected the Freedom of Her Namesake Town

A Ship That Changed Class Before She Was Even Launched

This particular HMS Ajax had an unusually indecisive start to life.

Built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, she was originally laid down on 19 October 1959 as a Rothesay-class frigate under the name Fowey, only for the design to be changed on 14 March 1960 partway through construction, converting her into the newer, more capable Leander class and giving her the rather grander name Ajax along the way, at a final build cost of £4.8 million.

The switch was not cosmetic. A Rothesay was a good anti-submarine frigate with a helicopter platform bolted on as an afterthought; the Leander was the Improved Type 12, drawn up around the helicopter from the start, with a proper hangar, a wider range of sensors and enough spare volume to be refitted repeatedly over thirty years. Changing the design in March 1960, five months after her keel went down, turned Ajax from a ship of the 1950s into a ship of the 1960s at a stroke, and gave her the extra two decades of usefulness that followed.

She was launched on 16 August 1962 and commissioned on 11 December 1963, a solidly built general-purpose frigate armed with a twin 4.5-inch gun mount, Bofors anti-aircraft guns, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, and a Westland Wasp helicopter.

There is a small piece of continuity built into the launch itself that is worth knowing about. The ship was christened at Birkenhead by Mrs Dreyer, whose husband had served as a lieutenant-commander in the cruiser Ajax at the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939. The Admiralty could have found any number of dignitaries to swing a bottle at a Cammell Laird slipway in 1962. It went and found somebody with a direct family connection to the action that had made the name worth having, which is the sort of quiet, deliberate gesture the Royal Navy is very good at and almost never bothers to explain. It also set up, fourteen years early, the oddest and warmest afternoon of this ship's career.

East of Suez

Ajax wasted little time getting to work, standing by the Swedish merchant vessel MV Solklint after a collision in Channel fog in early 1964 and escorting her into Cherbourg, before heading east later that year as leader of the 24th Escort Group for a Far East commission that ran from 1964 to 1968.

Over those years she took part in the Beira Patrol, the long-running Royal Navy effort to enforce oil sanctions against Rhodesia by sea, joined the task force covering the British withdrawal from Aden, and served spells as guardship for both Hong Kong and Singapore, the sort of steady, far-flung commitment that defined much of the Cold War frigate force's working life.

A New Set of Teeth

After becoming Gibraltar guardship in 1970, Ajax went in for a substantial modernisation at Devonport Dockyard that ran from 16 August 1970 to 5 December 1973, trading her original 4.5-inch gun for an Ikara anti-submarine missile system and gaining eight Sea Cat surface-to-air missiles, bringing her up to date for a navy increasingly built around guided weapons rather than traditional naval guns.

The modernisation deserves more than a sentence, because it left her almost unrecognisable. The twin 4.5-inch turret came out entirely and in its place went a zareba, the Navy's word for the armoured enclosure that housed an Ikara GWS40 anti-submarine missile system, with its magazine and loading gear buried in the hull beneath. Ikara was an Australian design, and the point of it was reach: a homing torpedo delivered by rocket to a submarine ten or twenty kilometres away, rather than a mortar bomb lobbed a few hundred yards. The air warning radar came off the mainmast, on the reasoning that these ships would always work inside a mixed group where somebody else was doing the air search, and the Sea Cat arrangement aft was rebuilt with its director moved to the centreline and quadruple launchers either side.

Eight Leanders got that treatment, and Ajax was the second of them, following the class leader herself and preceding Galatea, Aurora, Euryalus, Arethusa, Naiad and Dido. It made her a specialist submarine hunter of real capability. It also left her, for the rest of her career, without a gun of any consequence, which is worth bearing in mind against what she did and did not do in 1982.

Freshly modernised, she took over as leader of the 8th Frigate Squadron.

A Visit to Her Own Namesake

Ajax's most charming moment came during a round-the-world deployment in 1975 and 1976, when a call at Canada saw her granted the Freedom of the town of Ajax, Ontario, a town that had itself been named after an earlier, far more famous HMS Ajax in recognition of that ship's role in the 1939 Battle of the River Plate.

The town in question owes its name to the Leander-class cruiser of the same name, which fought Admiral Graf Spee off the River Plate in December 1939 and was famous enough by 1941 for Canadian planners to name a shell-filling plant after her, and then the community that grew up around it. Ajax, Ontario has since named its streets after men who served in the three cruisers of that action. So when the frigate arrived in 1976 she was being welcomed by roads named after the crews of the ship whose name she now carried.

It is a rare thing for a warship to visit a town named after one of her own predecessors and be welcomed as something close to a returning relative, streets and all.

In between refits in 1977 and 1980 to 1981, she also helped evacuate British citizens from Cyprus on 28 August 1974, during the Turkish invasion of the island, before going on to lead the 1st Frigate Squadron following her later refit.

Cyprus in 1974 deserves rather better than a subordinate clause, because it turned into one of the largest evacuations the Royal Navy carried out in the second half of the twentieth century. A Greek-backed coup deposed Archbishop Makarios on 15 July; Turkey landed on the north coast around Kyrenia on 20 July. HMS Hermes, then working as a commando carrier rather than a strike carrier, had arrived off the island on the 17th at the head of a task group that included HMS Andromeda, HMS Devonshire, HMS Rhyl and the tanker RFA Olna, with orders to get civilians out of a war that had started three days after she got there.

By 23 July there were more than fifteen hundred people on the beaches west of Kyrenia with no shelter and no water, and two of them had been shot. The carrier's captain took his task group into the Turkish war zone to lift them off, watching aircraft bomb the hillsides and artillery fire inland while he did it. The plan to send in boats was dropped when word arrived that the approaches to the beaches had been mined, so very nearly the whole evacuation went out by air, flown by the Wessex helicopters of 845 Naval Air Squadron. British forces took 7,526 people off Cyprus altogether, 5,171 of them British nationals. Ajax's own date of 28 August puts her in the second act rather than the first, after the Turkish offensive of mid-August had taken the northern third of the island and produced a fresh wave of people with somewhere they urgently needed not to be.

A Quieter Final Act

Although Ajax did not take part in the 1982 Falklands War, she kept busy in the years that followed, serving as Persian Gulf guardship and completing a four-month deployment with the South Atlantic Protection Force around the Falklands in 1984, before spending part of her final year escorting the Royal Yacht Britannia on a tour of Italy in 1985, a suitably dignified way to close out an active career.

She paid off at Devonport on 31 May 1985 and was formally decommissioned for disposal on 10 June, when she was inspected by the Royal Thai Navy as a possible purchase; the deal fell through once Ajax was judged not to be in good enough condition to be worth buying.

She spent a further period as a static training ship at Devonport, taking over from HMS Salisbury and teaching seamen how to handle replenishment-at-sea gear, before being laid up in February 1988 and finally arriving under tow at Millom in Cumbria on 3 August 1988 to be broken up.

Even the last tow needed a rewrite. Ajax was taken north for the breakers and got as far as the mouth of the Duddon estuary, where she could not get over the bar, so she was hauled back up the coast to Barrow to be lightened and to wait for a tide big enough to carry her in. A ship that had been redesigned on the slipway, rearmed halfway through her life, turned down by the Royal Thai Navy and then set to teaching seamanship to other people needed one final change of plan in order to reach a scrapyard.

Pieces of her live on scattered around the places she meant something to: her anchor sits at the Royal Canadian Legion in Ajax, Ontario, her ship's bell hangs in that town's council chamber, and one of her radio masts still stands at Millom Rugby Union Football Club, a quietly fitting scattering of mementoes for a ship her own crew nicknamed the White Tornado.

Nobody has ever satisfactorily accounted for the White Tornado, but the ship's company committed to it entirely: her magazine was the White Tornado Times, which the lower deck immediately and inevitably shortened to the TWITT. The bell in the council chamber at Ajax, Ontario has a second life as well. Engraved on it are the names of the twenty-two children christened aboard the ship between 1973 and 1983, using the bell as a font in the old naval fashion, so a Canadian town closes its council meetings by ringing a British frigate's bell, and the names on the rim belong to people now in their forties and fifties.