HMS Apollo (F70): The Cod War Collision With the Only Fatality of the Whole Dispute

The Penultimate Leander

HMS Apollo was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun on the Clyde, laid down on 1 May 1969, launched on 15 October 1970, and commissioned on 10 June 1972 as the penultimate Leander-class frigate built for the Royal Navy.

Being the penultimate of anything is an odd distinction, so it is worth saying what she was next to last of. Twenty-six Leanders were built for the Royal Navy between 1959 and 1973, which makes the class comfortably the most numerous British frigate design of the postwar era, and versions of it were built under licence or bought outright by the Netherlands, India, Australia and Chile. They were handsome, roomy, seaworthy ships that the fleet liked, and they were still doing front-line work thirty years after the first of them was laid down. Apollo came near the end of a very long production run, which is why she got the wide hull and, as it turned out, why she missed the upgrades.

A Batch 3B broadbeam Leander, she displaced just under 3,000 tons fully loaded, capable of 28 knots on twin steam turbines, and carried a fairly typical fit for her generation: twin 4.5-inch guns, a Sea Cat missile launcher, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, and a Westland Wasp helicopter.

Batch 3B sounds like a large and important classification and is in fact a club of two. Ten of the twenty-six Leanders got the wider hull, and the last pair off the slipway, Apollo and Ariadne, were separated out from the rest for one reason: they carried a new electronic warfare outfit, the UA-13, in place of the set their sisters had. The aerial for it went on top of the foremast inside a conical housing that the fleet took one look at and christened the witch's hat, and it is the single feature that lets you pick the last two Leanders out of a photograph of the class at a distance. Everything else about them was standard. The whole of Batch 3B, in other words, comes down to a hat.

The distinction that mattered rather more ran through the batch above them. Five of the broadbeam ships, Andromeda, Charybdis, Hermione, Jupiter and Scylla, were taken in hand as Batch 3A and effectively rebuilt: the twin 4.5-inch turret came out and Exocet went in its place, Sea Wolf replaced Sea Cat, and a 1960s gun frigate turned into a genuinely modern escort. Apollo and Ariadne, the two newest hulls in the entire class, were among the ones left exactly as built, which is how the youngest Leanders in the fleet ended up carrying the oldest weapons in it. Her sister and near twin has her own story in HMS Ariadne (F72), including the small matter of being the last steam warship the Royal Navy ever ordered.

A Collision With Consequences

Apollo saw her first significant action during the Second Cod War, the escalating dispute with Iceland over fishing rights, and it proved a remarkably grim milestone. On 29 August 1973, while trying to approach a British trawler, the Icelandic gunboat ICGV Ægir collided with Apollo and came off worse, taking hull damage serious enough that she turned back towards port for repairs.

The dispute she walked into is worth setting out, because the Royal Navy was only in it reluctantly. Iceland extended her fishery limit to fifty miles on 1 September 1972, and the British government, not wanting to escalate, initially declined to send warships at all. What it sent instead were large, fast, chartered ocean-going tugs, Statesman among them, along with the Irishman and the Lloydsman, whose job was to get between the Icelandic gunboats and the trawlers and shoulder them off. That held for eight months. On 17 May 1973 the British trawlers gave up and left Icelandic waters altogether, and came back two days later with frigates in company. Apollo was one of them.

The fatality that followed came not from the collision itself but from the attempt to patch it up.

Engineer Halldór Hallfreðsson, just 33 years old, was welding a repair to Ægir’s damaged hull at sea when the ship had to manoeuvre sharply to avoid a second collision, this time with the British tug Statesman; seawater flooded the compartment he was working in, and he was fatally electrocuted by his own welding equipment.

It remains the only recorded death of the entire Cod Wars dispute, across all three rounds of confrontation between Britain and Iceland, a sobering reminder that even a conflict fought largely through deliberate, almost ritualised ramming could turn suddenly and tragically serious.

That is what makes the sequence of events on 29 August 1973 so bleak. Ægir had already been damaged in a collision with a frigate and was trying to weld a patch on her own hull at sea when she had to swerve to avoid hitting a tug, and the swerve put water into the compartment where the welding was going on. Every element of the accident, the gunboat, the frigate, the tug, the improvised repair, is a piece of the peculiar machinery of the Cod Wars, and none of it was meant to kill anybody. That is precisely why the death of one thirty-three-year-old engineer stands out across all three disputes.

The dispute ended a little over two months later. An agreement signed on 8 November 1973 confined British fishing to defined areas inside the fifty-mile limit and capped the annual British catch at 130,000 tonnes. It lasted two years, at which point Iceland went to two hundred miles and the whole thing started again, rather worse, in the round that produced the rammings suffered by HMS Andromeda and eventually the Island class patrol vessels built in its aftermath.

There is a very British postscript to the fifty-mile argument, which is that Britain shortly afterwards did the same thing on four times the scale. On 1 January 1977, barely three years after the Royal Navy had spent a season shouldering Icelandic gunboats off British trawlers on the principle that a fifty-mile claim was an outrage, the United Kingdom extended its own fishery limits to two hundred miles. The new zone was carved into four areas for policing, and the Royal Navy took the northern and southern North Sea and the South-West Approaches, which is a very great deal of water to be responsible for.

What it did not yet have was anything to patrol it with. The Island class had been ordered but had not arrived, so frigates took turns in the North Sea in the meantime, and Apollo was one of them. That gave her the quiet distinction of having argued both sides of the same case inside four years, first against an extended fishery limit and then on behalf of one. When the Islands did turn up they were the sensible answer: built fast to a commercial offshore support vessel design, cheap to run, and able to sit out weather that would have sent a frigate home early. By November 1979 the RAF was flying about a hundred and eighty hours of Nimrod patrols a month over the same water, enough to sweep the whole of it once every ten days, and the frigates were released to go back to being frigates.

Jubilees and the Falklands

Apollo's career took a considerably more ceremonial turn in 1977, when she served as captain of the Second Frigate Squadron during Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review, coordinating warship anchorages for the occasion and receiving four Silver Jubilee medals for her ship's company.

She was deployed to the South Atlantic in 1982 following the Falklands War, returning that October with hull damage sustained in heavy seas, and returned to the South Atlantic again in 1983, unglamorous but necessary presence duty in the war's aftermath.

A planned modernisation that would have fitted her with Exocet and Sea Wolf missiles was cancelled following the 1981 Defence Review, though she still received a substantial £11 million refit at Devonport between July 1984 and May 1985, which updated her radar and replaced her boat davits with a pole-derrick arrangement for inflatable boats.

The cancellation is worth naming properly, because it was part of something much larger. The 1981 Defence Review, drawn up under John Nott, proposed to cut the surface fleet hard in favour of submarines and the nuclear deterrent: carriers sold, amphibious ships paid off, a long list of frigates and destroyers disposed of early or left unmodernised. Apollo lost her Exocet and Sea Wolf conversion to it. Nine months after the review was published, Argentina invaded the Falklands, and almost every ship type it had proposed to get rid of turned out to be the one the country needed. The review was quietly shelved. Apollo never did get her missiles.

A Long Second Career as PNS Zulfiqar

Apollo was decommissioned from the Royal Navy on 7 July 1988 and sold to Pakistan just over a week later, on 15 July 1988, recommissioned into the Pakistan Navy as PNS Zulfiqar that October.

Pakistan bought two Leanders that year, not one. HMS Diomede (F16), a veteran of rather more Icelandic ramming than Apollo ever managed, paid off at the end of May and was in Pakistani hands by July; Apollo followed her out in October. The name she was given on the way is a considerable step up from Apollo. Zulfiqar is the sword that Muhammad is said to have handed to Ali at the Battle of Uhud in 625, after Ali broke his own in the fighting; the word is usually read as cleaver of the spine, and the sword is almost always drawn with a split blade, which is why it turns up on flags, gateways and coats of arms right across the Islamic world. It is one of the great names in the region, and Pakistan has given it to more than one warship. A frigate laid down on the Clyde for a navy that names its ships after Greek gods went out to the Arabian Sea carrying a legendary sword, which is a fair summary of what tends to happen to second-hand warships.

She underwent a further significant refit between 1991 and 1993, swapping her 20mm guns and Seacat launcher for twin 25mm mounts and replacing her Wasp helicopter with a SA 319B Alouette III, and went on to serve Pakistan for eighteen years before finally being decommissioned on 29 October 2006.

She met her end on 12 March 2010, sunk as a target in the Arabian Sea by a Pakistani F-22P frigate, a P3C maritime patrol aircraft, and an Agosta 90B submarine, a fairly emphatic final exercise for a ship that had already survived a genuine wartime-style collision, two royal jubilees, and a war of her own before she ever reached Pakistani colours.

The name did not die with her, and the timing is almost too neat. In September 2009 Pakistan commissioned the lead ship of a new class of Chinese-built frigates and called her Zulfiquar, and under six months later a ship of that class was among the units that put the old one on the bottom. Being sunk by your own successor is a fate not many warships manage. The Royal Navy, twenty-two years out of the business by then and busy elsewhere, was not there to see it.