HMS Barrosa (D68): The Destroyer That Fought Actual Pirates

A Long Wait to Complete

HMS Barrosa was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 28 December 1943 and launched on 17 January 1945, but was not completed until 14 February 1947, well after the war she had been designed for had ended.

A Battle-class destroyer displacing up to 3,420 tons and capable of 34 knots, she carried five 4.5-inch guns, Bofors guns, torpedo tubes and a Squid anti-submarine mortar, later supplemented with Sea Cat missiles and updated radar as her career progressed.

The name comes from a very good day for the British Army. At Barrosa, near Cadiz, on 5 March 1811, a force under Thomas Graham turned on a larger French army under Marshal Victor and beat it in about ninety minutes. What made the battle famous was one particular incident: the 87th Foot, an Irish regiment, went for the colour party of the French 8th Ligne. Ensign Edward Keogh got a hand on the eagle's shaft and was shot and bayoneted for it; Sergeant Patrick Masterson took over, killed his way through and wrenched the eagle out of the dying bearer's hands. It was the first French imperial eagle ever captured by a British regiment.

The rewards were handsome. Masterson, a sergeant, was given a battlefield commission on the spot, which in the British Army of 1811 was very nearly unheard of. The regiment did better still: the Prince Regent made them the Prince of Wales's Own Irish Regiment and directed that they should wear an eagle on their colours and on their appointments, so that every man in the 87th carried the thing they had taken for the rest of the regiment's existence. The cry they had gone in shouting, Faugh a Ballagh, clear the way, became the motto and stayed the motto through every amalgamation that followed, down through the Royal Irish Fusiliers to the present day.

Which is a great deal to hang on ninety minutes near Cadiz, and it is worth remembering when a destroyer turns up in the Far East a hundred and fifty years later with the name on her bow. Ships named for battles are usually named for the strategy. This one was named for a fight over a brass bird on a pole.

Her early service was fairly quiet: commissioned into the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, she was initially laid up owing to postwar manpower shortages before returning to active duty in 1948, collided with the oiler Black Ranger in November 1949, and was placed in reserve in April 1950.

Coronation and Suez

Barrosa was recommissioned on 2 May 1952 into the 4th Destroyer Squadron, and took part in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in June 1953, before settling into Mediterranean duties that included anti-smuggling patrols off Cyprus. She deployed during the Suez Crisis in November 1956, part of the substantial Royal Navy force assembled for the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt.

A Genuine Fight With Pirates

After colliding with HMS Corunna in March 1959 and being modified as a radar picket ship later that year, Barrosa joined the 8th Destroyer Squadron in the Far East in 1963, just as Indonesia's Confrontation with the newly forming Malaysia began to simmer.

The radar picket conversion is the thing that shaped the rest of her career. Four of the Later Battles, Agincourt, Aisne, Corunna and Barrosa, were rebuilt as fast air detection escorts: ships to steam well out ahead of a carrier group and see what was coming long before the carriers could. The work is described in the account of HMS Alamein, the sister who did not get it and was scrapped instead. It meant a lattice mast carrying an enormous four-ton double bedstead aerial, a Sea Cat launcher aft, banks of new equipment, and giving up torpedo tubes and light guns to pay for the weight. It also meant a ship that could be sent to sit alone off a coastline for months on end, which is exactly what happened to her.

She had already had one brush with the murkier side of the job the previous winter: on 28 December 1962, an Indonesian gunboat intercepted a local trading kumpit off Tawau in North Borneo, arrested its crew and took it under tow. Barrosa gave chase, and her commanding officer, Commander P. F. R. Corson, boarded the gunboat on the high seas alongside a police officer, only for the case to founder on the diplomatic technicality that the kumpit's ownership could not be proven, forcing Barrosa to withdraw empty-handed.

There was nothing technical about what followed on 11 February 1963. While chasing a suspected pirate craft in Malayan waters, the crew of Barrosa's whaler came under fire, and Able Seaman Charles Sutherland was mortally wounded, a rare and sobering reminder that not every threat facing a Cold War-era destroyer came from a conventional enemy navy.

His full record, such as it is, reads: Sutherland, Charles A, Able Seaman, official number JX 911345, HMS Barrosa, Monday 11 February 1963, killed on anti-pirate operation. Nine words of circumstance. He is the only man from the ship in the Royal Navy casualty rolls for the whole of 1963 to 1965.

That is the difficulty with the deaths of the long tail-end of empire. There was no war on. Confrontation was not declared, the Borneo territories were in the middle of becoming somewhere else, and a rating shot in a ship's boat during a police action against criminals does not fit into any of the categories that get names cut into stone. He was doing exactly what the Royal Navy had put him there to do, and he is a line in a table.

The piracy she ran into was not a colourful anachronism, and it never has been. The waters between Borneo, the Philippines and the Malay peninsula are a maze of islands, shallow channels and mangrove creeks with hundreds of miles of unpoliced coast, and small craft carrying trade goods and cash between islands have been robbed there for as long as there has been trade to rob. A destroyer is an absurd instrument for the job, being far too large to follow anything into a creek, which is precisely why the whaler had to go in and why a seaman in an open boat ended up being shot. Charles Sutherland died in 1963 doing something a sailor of 1863 would have recognised exactly.

The sailor of 1863 is not a figure of speech. The Royal Navy fought a full-scale campaign against piracy on precisely this coast in the 1840s, and it is one of the least comfortable things in the service's nineteenth-century record. James Brooke, an Englishman who had made himself Rajah of Sarawak, met Captain the Honourable Henry Keppel of HMS Dido at Singapore in 1843 and found in him a willing partner. In May that year a party from Dido went up the Sarebas river with Brooke's own schooner and a fleet of local prahus, the first move in a campaign that ran for six years and went a long way beyond protecting the shipping lanes.

It ended at Beting Marau, at the mouth of the Saribas, on the night of 31 July 1849, when Captain Arthur Farquhar's ships fell on a Saribas Dayak fleet. Nobody agrees on how many were killed; the higher counts run past a thousand. What turned it into a scandal at home was the money. An Act of 1825 paid prize money of twenty pounds a head for every pirate captured or killed, which is to say that the Royal Navy was paid by the corpse, with no very rigorous method of establishing whether a given corpse had been a pirate. The same bounty had produced payments of over a hundred and forty-nine thousand pounds for operations off China that year, in the course of which the officers involved could not agree whether the dead numbered six hundred or two thousand.

Richard Cobden and Joseph Hume took it up in the Commons, the Pirates (Head Money) Repeal Bill went through both Houses in 1850, and a commission of inquiry eventually sat at Singapore in 1854 to examine what Brooke had been doing with the Queen's ships. The head money was gone, and so, for a long time, was the Navy's appetite for the work. It never entirely stopped, though: in June 1961, eighteen months before Barrosa got there, the government told the Commons that operations against pirates in North Borneo took the form of frequent but irregular patrols by all suitable classes of ship, planned with the Governor and the local police. Barrosa was one of the suitable classes of ship.

Barrosa returned to the same stretch of coast later that month for a rather more satisfying outcome, joining forces with the Army's Green Jackets in a combined operation off North-East Borneo in which the destroyer sealed off the sea approaches while the soldiers searched ashore.

Six suspected pirates were captured and their boat seized, a rare piece of good publicity, reported as far away as Singapore, for a ship that otherwise went about her Far East duties largely unremarked.

She went on to conduct patrols during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, the low-level conflict fought over the formation of Malaysia in the mid-1960s, transferring in the process from the 8th Destroyer Squadron to the 24th Escort Squadron and settling into a long spell as a Far East radar picket broken by only two returns home, from mid-1966 to mid-1967 and again for a few months in 1968.

Oil Spills and a Final Withdrawal

Barrosa's final commission proved just as varied as her earlier career. In March 1967 she took part in the response to the Torrey Canyon disaster, the supertanker wreck that caused Britain's worst ever oil spill at the time, and that November supported the British withdrawal from Aden, marking the end of over a century of British presence in the territory.

Aden that November was an ending of a different kind. Britain had held Aden since 1839, a hundred and twenty-eight years, and by 1967 the position was untenable: a violent insurgency ashore, no agreement on what would follow, and a decision in London to be out by the end of the year. The final withdrawal on 29 November was covered from the sea, with warships offshore ready to support the last troops out and to take them off if it went wrong. It did not go wrong. Barrosa spent the last months of her operational life watching Britain leave a place it had held longer than most people ashore had been alive.

The Torrey Canyon response is worth setting out, because what the government did about it is almost unbelievable now. The tanker struck Pollard's Rock on the Seven Stones reef between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly on 18 March 1967, carrying around 120,000 tons of crude. She was the largest ship ever wrecked to that date and the spill was the biggest in history. With salvage failing and the oil coming ashore in Cornwall, the Cabinet decided the answer was to burn it, and ordered the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to bomb the wreck.

They did it for three days. Something in the order of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds of explosive went onto the ship, along with sixteen rockets, three thousand two hundred gallons of napalm and nearly ten thousand gallons of kerosene, the object being to open the remaining tanks and then set the oil alight. Aircraft missed. Tides put the fires out and they had to be relit. It is the only occasion on which Britain has bombed a ship in its own coastal waters in peacetime, and Barrosa was one of the vessels standing off it. The disaster produced the first serious international rules on tanker pollution, which is the one useful thing to come out of it.

In October 1968 she towed the stricken Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel Lyness, a fittingly practical final duty before her own service came to an end.

Lyness was worth the trouble, as it turned out. She was a brand-new Ness-class stores support ship, launched by Swan Hunter at Wallsend in April 1966 and in service that December, three months ahead of schedule, which is the sort of thing that almost never happens and is worth recording when it does. She was two years old when Barrosa put a wire on her.

She then outlived the destroyer that towed her by forty-six years. Lyness went on through the Silver Jubilee Review at Spithead in 1977, was chartered by the American Military Sealift Command in November 1980, was renamed USNS Sirius in January 1981 and bought outright for thirty-seven million dollars in 1982, spent two decades in United States service, ended up as a training ship for the Texas Maritime Academy under the name Texas Clipper III, and was finally recycled at Brownsville in Texas on 30 May 2014. Barrosa was decommissioned two months after the tow.

A Long Wait for the Scrapyard

Barrosa was decommissioned in December 1968 and listed for disposal in 1972, though she was not immediately broken up, instead serving as a storage hulk at Portsmouth by 1974.

She finally arrived at Blyth for scrapping on 1 December 1978, a full decade after her active service had ended, closing out a career that had taken her from Suez to genuine piracy to one of the twentieth century's most notorious environmental disasters.