HMS Aurora (F10): The Frigate That Turned a Cod War Into a Rescue Mission

A Squadron Leader From the Start

HMS Aurora was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, launched on 28 November 1962 and commissioned on 9 April 1964.

Clydebank is worth a paragraph in its own right, because John Brown and Company built a quite extraordinary proportion of the ships anybody has heard of. Out of that yard came the battlecruisers Hood and Repulse, the battleships Barham, Duke of York and Vanguard, the carrier Indefatigable, and on the other slipway the liners Lusitania, Aquitania, Queen Mary and, in 1967, the QE2. Aurora went down the ways there in 1962, between the last two of those.

What happened to the yard afterwards is a very short and very bleak story. In February 1968 John Brown's Clydebank yard was merged with four other Upper Clyde firms into a single company, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. By 1971 the government had decided to let it go under. Thirteen thousand men refused to accept it, occupied the yards and carried on building ships without being paid to do so, in what became known as the work-in, and after more than six months the government reversed itself and put the money in. Aurora was launched by a firm that no longer existed six years later, into a Navy that would outlive it.

The previous ship of the name had a career that makes this one look sedate. HMS Aurora, an Arethusa-class light cruiser completed in 1937, spent the middle of the war with Force K operating out of Malta, hunting the convoys that supplied Rommel in North Africa, and took a great deal of punishment doing it. What happened to her afterwards is the remarkable part. In 1948 she was sold to the Chinese Nationalist government as compensation for vessels Britain had seized at Hong Kong, renamed Chung King, and made the flagship of the Chinese navy. On 25 February 1949 her entire crew defected to the Communists and took the flagship with them.

The rest of that story is worth having, because it gets stranger. She was sold to the Chinese government on 19 May 1948 in settlement of a genuinely obscure debt: six Chinese customs patrol vessels and a freighter that Britain had seized at Hong Kong and then lost during the war. As Chung King she became the flagship of a navy fighting a civil war it was losing. When her crew took her over on 25 February 1949 they ran up a homemade white flag with a red star sewn in the middle of it, which is the sort of detail that does not appear in official histories. A month later Nationalist aircraft caught her at Huludao and put three heavy bombs into her; her new owners stripped out her instruments and her guns and opened her sea valves rather than let her be salvaged by the other side. She was raised later with Soviet help, and the Soviets took whatever equipment was left as payment for the job. What was pulled out of the mud was an empty steel box, and that is what she remained for the next thirty years: an accommodation ship and a floating warehouse, renamed Huang He in 1959, sent to Shanghai for a salvage-ship conversion that was abandoned after two hundred and seventy-six thousand yuan had gone into it, and finally towed to Tianjin in 1965 to be a barracks. A cruiser that had fought Force K's war out of Malta ended as a dormitory.

A Leander-class frigate fitted with a comprehensive suite of radar and sonar systems, twin 4.5-inch guns, a Seacat missile launcher and a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, she was considered capable enough to become leader of the 2nd Frigate Squadron in her very first year of service, a notable early vote of confidence in a brand-new ship.

Being made squadron leader in her first year is a bigger compliment than it sounds. A frigate squadron leader carries the captain commanding the squadron and his staff, which means extra accommodation, extra communications, extra plotting space and a great deal of extra traffic through the operations room, and it means the ship is expected to be the one that works when the others are in refit. Giving that to a brand new ship, before she had a commission behind her, was the Admiralty saying that both the Leander design and this particular hull were trusted. It is also a reminder of how good the Leanders were. Twenty-six were built for the Royal Navy and the design was sold or copied abroad more widely than any other post-war British warship, going to India, Chile, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. For twenty years the Leander was what most people, including most foreign navies, pictured when they thought of a British frigate.

Her early service was not without incident: in April 1968 her embarked Westland Wasp helicopter, from 829 Naval Air Squadron, crashed off South Africa, with a replacement aircraft subsequently supplied from HMS Gurkha to keep her operational.

A Rescue in the Middle of a Fishing Dispute

Aurora took part in commemorative operations off France in August 1969, marking the 25th anniversary of Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France.

Her most truly dramatic peacetime moment, however, came in September 1972, during the Second Cod War with Iceland, when her embarked helicopter rescued the five-person crew of a fishing vessel in difficulty, a welcome piece of straightforward lifesaving amid a dispute that more often involved deliberate ramming than rescue operations.

The dispute she was in the middle of deserves setting out, because the rescue only makes sense against it. Iceland extended its fishing limit from twelve miles to fifty on 1 September 1972, Britain refused to accept it, and the Royal Navy was sent to protect British trawlers working inside the new line. What followed was three years of a peculiar sort of confrontation in which nobody was allowed to shoot: Icelandic gunboats towed cutting gear designed to sever a trawler's warps, British frigates put themselves in the way, and both sides rammed each other with some regularity. Ships were holed. One man died. What is easy to lose in that is that the same frigates were also the only substantial rescue capability for hundreds of miles of extremely dangerous water, and were expected to be both at once. The details of the confrontation are in the articles on HMS Apollo (F70), HMS Arethusa (F38) and HMS Gurkha (F122).

The helicopter is the part of that rescue that matters, and it is a good illustration of what changed in the 1960s. A Leander carried a Westland Wasp, a small, spindly, four-legged machine that looked like an insect and could lift very little, but which gave the ship something no previous frigate had: the ability to put a man over a casualty in the water within minutes rather than lowering a boat and pulling for it. It was designed to carry a homing torpedo out to a submarine contact, and in practice it spent most of its career doing everything else, which is the usual fate of naval helicopters. Aurora had already lost one over the side off South Africa in April 1968, with a replacement flown out from HMS Gurkha to keep her operational, so she knew exactly what the aircraft was worth. Five fishermen went home in 1972 because a frigate on a fishery dispute had one aboard.

From Gunboat Escort to Submarine Hunter

Aurora underwent a significant modernisation completed in 1976, converting her into a specialist anti-submarine platform fitted with the Ikara missile system, considerably sharpening her ability to counter the growing Soviet submarine threat of the later Cold War.

Her own conversion put her among a small and specialised group. Eight Leanders had the twin 4.5-inch turret removed entirely and replaced with the Ikara anti-submarine missile system, a rocket that carried a homing torpedo out to a submarine ten or twenty kilometres away rather than a mortar bomb lobbed a few hundred yards. The full account of what the work involved is in the piece on HMS Ajax. It made Aurora a serious submarine hunter and it left her, for the rest of her life, without a gun worth the name, which is why the fishery protection work she did afterwards came with a certain irony attached.

From 1978 onward she carried out Fishery Protection Squadron duties, and in 1982 took part in the Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf, before undertaking a substantial deployment to the Far East, Australia and New Zealand in 1983, a notably global itinerary for a frigate originally built for North Atlantic anti-submarine work.

The last few years of her career were busier than the sentence about them suggests. From 1978 she was on the Fishery Protection Squadron, which by then meant policing the newly extended British two-hundred-mile limit as well as the traditional inshore work. In 1982 she went to the Armilla Patrol in the Gulf, the standing Royal Navy commitment established in 1980 to look after British merchant shipping during the Iran-Iraq war, which by the early 1980s meant escorting tankers through a war zone in which both belligerents were attacking neutral ships. That is described further in the article on HMS Beaver (F93). Then in 1983 she went east again, to the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. An Ikara Leander was a specialised North Atlantic submarine hunter with no real gun armament, and the Navy of the early 1980s was sending her to the Gulf and the Pacific because there was nobody else to send.

A Casualty of the Defence Cuts

Aurora was decommissioned on 28 April 1987, a casualty of the defence cuts and manpower shortages that affected the Royal Navy widely during that period.

The early end is worth a word of explanation as well. Aurora had been extensively and expensively rebuilt in the mid-1970s, and she was scrapped a decade later at twenty-three years old, which for a Leander is young. The reasons were structural rather than personal: the Ikara system was ageing, the ships that carried it had given up their guns to get it and could do little else, and the Royal Navy of the mid-1980s was short of people and short of money and had to choose. Ships that could only do one thing went first, however well they did it.

Even the breaking of her has a small story in it. Millom sits on the Duddon estuary in south Cumbria, an iron-mining town that lost its mine and its ironworks in 1968 and spent the following decades looking for something to replace them. Duddon Valley Shipbreakers was one of the answers, and for a while in the 1980s and early 1990s small Cumbrian tidal berths took warships that the big yards no longer wanted the trouble of. It is a long way from Clydebank, where thirteen thousand men had occupied the yards in 1971 to stop exactly this sort of decline, and where the QE2 and the Queen Mary and this ship had all been built within five years of each other. Aurora began at the most famous shipyard in Britain and ended on a mudflat in a town that had lost its industry, which is as neat a summary of what happened to British heavy engineering in her lifetime as any ship could offer.

She lay in reserve for three years before arriving at Millom in Cumbria on 6 September 1990, where Duddon Valley Shipbreakers broke her up, bringing to a close a 23-year career that had taken her from leading a frigate squadron in her first year of service to hunting submarines and rescuing fishermen along the way.