HMS Arethusa (F38): From Escorting the Queen to Ramming an Icelandic Gunboat

A Solid Start on the Isle of Wight

HMS Arethusa was built by J.S. White and Company at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, launched on 5 November 1963 and commissioned on 24 November 1965.

A Leander-class frigate of some 2,450 tons standard displacement, she carried the class's familiar twin 4.5-inch guns, Sea Cat missiles and Bofors guns, along with the anti-submarine sonar and torpedo fit typical of the type, a well-rounded general-purpose frigate for the Cold War fleet.

She was, in fact, the last warship ever built at J. Samuel White's yard, laid down on 7 September 1962 and launched by Lady Hamilton, wife of Vice Admiral Sir John Hamilton, as hundreds of the yard's own workmen watched her slide down the slipway into the Medina.

The yard itself closed for good in 1965, the same year Arethusa was commissioned, bringing more than a century of Isle of Wight shipbuilding to a quiet end.

The yard deserves a proper obituary, because it was not a minor concern. The White family had been building ships in Kent since the eighteenth century, and Thomas White moved the business from Broadstairs to East Cowes in 1802, onto a site on the Medina that already had a century of shipbuilding behind it. By the 1850s the works employed around five hundred craftsmen. Between 1905 and 1911 alone the yard turned out twenty-five destroyers, using its own White-Forster water-tube boiler, and it went on to build twenty-seven destroyers, eleven patrol vessels, two submarines and two hundred seaplanes in the First World War, and twenty-six destroyers, a minelayer and 285 small craft in the Second.

And it did something else that outlasted all of it. J. Samuel White built more than 130 lifeboats for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, more than any other builder in the country. So the firm that produced Arethusa also produced a large proportion of the boats that went out from British beaches for the best part of a century to fetch people off wrecks. Not a bad thing to have on the record when the gates finally shut in 1965.

The name she was given had two very different ships in it, and both are worth a paragraph. The immediate predecessor was HMS Arethusa the light cruiser, laid down at Chatham in January 1933 and commissioned in February 1935, and her war was as hard as any cruiser's. On 18 November 1942, running a convoy through to Malta on Operation Stoneage, an Italian aircraft torpedo hit her on the port side abreast of B turret and opened a hole in her measuring something like fifty-three feet by thirty-five. The blast killed everyone in the vicinity where they stood. A hundred and fifty-six men died.

What followed is the part worth knowing. Her hull structure began to buckle, so she could not be driven ahead, and HMS Petard put a wire on her and towed her stern-first for four hundred and fifty miles to Alexandria, arriving on 21 November. She lay under temporary repair there until February 1943. Eighteen months later she was off Sword Beach on the morning of D-Day, shelling the shore and exchanging fire with German destroyers coming out of Le Havre, and on 16 June 1944 she carried King George VI and the Chiefs of Staff across to look at the beachhead. A memorial to her dead stands in the Maritime Quarter at Swansea.

The other Arethusa was not a warship at all. The Shaftesbury Homes charity ran a boys' training ship of that name, moored on the Medway at Upnor within sight of Chatham Dockyard, taking boys off the streets and out of institutions and training them for the sea. By 1933 the old wooden hulk carrying the name had rotted past saving, and the charity replaced her with something considerably more romantic: the Peking, a four-masted steel barque built at Hamburg in 1911 for the Laeisz Flying-P line, one of the last great Cape Horn nitrate carriers, handed to Britain after the First World War as war reparations.

So for forty-one years, between two and three hundred boys at a time learned their trade aboard a genuine square-rigger lying in a Kent river, a ship that had rounded the Horn under sail carrying Chilean nitrates. She was retired in 1974, took her old name back, was bought the following year by the South Street Seaport Museum in New York and restored to her 1911 condition, and has since gone home to Hamburg as a museum ship. She is still afloat and can be walked around, which is a good deal more than can be said for the frigate.

It is a curious inheritance for a Leander to carry: a cruiser towed backwards across the Mediterranean with a hole in her the size of a house, and a German windjammer full of Kentish boys learning to go aloft. Arethusa herself was a Greek sea nymph, which is at least an explanation for the Navy's persistence with the name across two and a half centuries.

A Truly Global Beat

Arethusa's career took her to a remarkable spread of the world. She deployed to the Mediterranean in 1967, and in 1969 sailed with a multi-ship group to the Caribbean via the Panama Canal, later serving as West Indies guard ship with a busy schedule of port visits.

In 1970 she deployed to the Far East by way of South Africa, calling at ports across the region before returning to Singapore, where she had the honour of escorting Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during a royal tour of Southeast Asia, a rather more ceremonial assignment than most of what filled a frigate's working year.

In 1972 she took up the considerably less glamorous but notably important work of the Beira Patrol, helping enforce the oil embargo intended to pressure the white minority government of Rhodesia.

The patrol as a whole ran for nearly a decade, from March 1966 to June 1975, drawing on some 76 Royal Navy ships in total and costing well over £100 million, before her own career took a sharply more confrontational turn the following year.

What that patrol was actually for, and how well it worked, is set out in the account of HMS Andromeda. The short version is that the ships did the job faultlessly for a decade and the policy failed anyway, because oil went into Rhodesia overland from South Africa in quantities the blockade never touched. Steaming up and down the Mozambique Channel in that heat, month after month, knowing that, was one of the less rewarding things the Royal Navy did in the 1970s.

A Collision in the Cod Wars

On 20 July 1973, while protecting the Hull trawler Kingston Jade fishing inside Iceland's disputed 50-mile limit, Arethusa was rammed by the Icelandic gunboat Óðinn, part of the ongoing, deliberately physical dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights that saw Royal Navy frigates repeatedly used as escorts and, just as often, as targets.

The damage to Arethusa was slight and no one was hurt, and the wider dispute ended that September when Britain accepted Iceland's 50-mile zone. Arethusa came through it intact and went on, between 1973 and 1977, to undergo a substantial modernisation that saw her original gun armament partially replaced by the Ikara anti-submarine missile system, transforming her capability considerably for the later Cold War years.

The modernisation that followed was a great deal more drastic than the phrase partially replaced suggests. The twin 4.5-inch turret came out completely and in its place went a zareba, the armoured enclosure that housed the Ikara anti-submarine missile, with its magazine buried in the hull below. 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, instead of a mortar bomb lobbed a few hundred yards. Eight Leanders were converted, and the full story of what the conversion involved is in the account of HMS Ajax, the second of the eight. It left Arethusa a formidable submarine hunter and a ship with no gun worth mentioning.

NATO Service and a Late Refit

Arethusa took part in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review and deployed again to the Far East and Pacific in 1979, before completing a refit in 1980 and 1981 and going on to serve with NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic, the alliance's permanent multinational naval group, from 1981 onward.

Standing Naval Force Atlantic is worth a note, because it was genuinely new. Formed in 1968, it was the first permanent multinational naval squadron in history: a handful of destroyers and frigates from different NATO countries kept together as a single working force, year in and year out, exercising and deploying as one. Nothing like it had ever existed in peacetime. The point was partly military and mostly political, a standing demonstration that the alliance could put ships from six or seven navies under one commander and have them behave like a fleet rather than a convoy of visitors.

She received a towed array sonar in 1985, keeping her relevant into the final years of the Cold War, and was finally decommissioned at Portsmouth on 4 April 1989 after a 24-year career that had taken her from royal escort duty to a collision with an Icelandic gunboat and everywhere in between.

The towed array she received in 1985 was arguably the most important thing ever fitted to her. By the middle of the 1980s Soviet submarines had become quiet enough that a hull-mounted sonar, sitting in the middle of the noisiest object for miles, was struggling to hear them at all. A towed array is a long cable of hydrophones streamed a mile or more astern, well clear of the ship's own machinery, listening passively at very low frequencies for the sounds a submarine cannot help making. Frigates fitted with it stopped being general-purpose escorts and became specialist listeners, patrolling the gap between Greenland, Iceland and Scotland through which every Soviet submarine heading for the Atlantic had to pass. Arethusa spent her last four years doing that.

She was sunk as a target ship in the Western Approaches in June 1991, her useful life continuing, in a fashion, right to the very end.

There is a bleak logic to how she finished. A frigate sunk as a target is not being thrown away: she is being used to find out exactly what a modern weapon does to a real warship, which is information no amount of modelling will give you and which the next generation of ships is designed around. Arethusa went down in the Western Approaches in June 1991, two years after paying off, having spent twenty-four years learning how to find submarines and one afternoon teaching the Navy something about being hit.