HMS Berwick (F115): Saved From Scrapping by the Falklands, Sunk by Torpedo Anyway

The Tenth Berwick

HMS Berwick was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, laid down on 16 June 1958, launched on 15 December 1959, and completed on 1 June 1961, the tenth Royal Navy ship to carry the name.

A Rothesay-class anti-submarine frigate displacing 2,490 tonnes and capable of 29.5 knots, she carried a forward 4.5-inch gun mount, torpedo tubes and Limbo anti-submarine mortars, later gaining a Seacat missile system and Wasp helicopter facilities during a major refit between 1968 and 1971.

The Rothesays were the second batch of what the Navy called the Type 12, and the Type 12 hull is one of the genuine triumphs of post-war British naval architecture. The problem it was drawn to solve was that the new generation of fast Soviet submarines had to be chased in the open Atlantic, and an escort that has to throttle back to fifteen knots because she is burying her bow in a head sea is no use for chasing anything. The answer was a long, fine, high-freeboard forward hull with a pronounced knuckle to throw the water clear, and it worked so well that the ships could hold speed in weather that stopped everything else. The same hull went on to become the Leander class, of which more than fifty were built for Britain and half a dozen other navies, and it was still being built in one form or another thirty years after Berwick was laid down.

The refit that gave her a Wasp changed her more than the Seacat did. As built, her anti-submarine reach was the Limbo mortar, which threw its charges perhaps a thousand yards ahead of the ship, meaning that to attack a submarine she first had to get on top of it. A small helicopter with a homing torpedo slung underneath extends that reach to twenty miles or more and lets the frigate stay outside the submarine's own torpedo range while doing it. That single change, from a mortar to an aircraft, is the largest improvement in escort capability of the whole century, and it is why every serious frigate built since has a flight deck on the back.

HMS Berwick led the 5th Frigate Squadron from 1961 to 1963 under Captain David Dunbar-Nasmith, son of the celebrated submarine ace Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, who had won the Victoria Cross at Gallipoli in 1915, a fairly hard act to follow into a naval career.

In November 1962 Berwick joined HMS Duchess, HMS Scarborough, HMS Lowestoft and the St David's lifeboat in a prolonged search after a Westland Whirlwind helicopter from HMS Hermes came down near St Davids Head.

Squadron Leader Stott was pulled from the water unconscious and later died, and despite everyone's best efforts the Conservative peer Lord Windlesham, who had been aboard, was never found, a sobering reminder of how quickly a routine flight could turn fatal.

The circumstances, set out in both Houses the following week, are worth having in full. The helicopter was taking three passengers from Hermes across to the Royal Naval Air Station at Brawdy: Squadron Leader Stott of the Royal Air Force, Lord Windlesham, and John Cronin, the Member of Parliament for Loughborough. The two politicians were aboard the carrier under an Admiralty scheme that allowed members of the Commons and the Lords to spend a period at sea with the Fleet, on the sensible principle that people voting on naval estimates ought to have seen a ship working.

A mile west of South Bishop, at a thousand feet, the engine failed completely and the aircraft went into the sea. Cronin and the two aircrew were picked up alive and unhurt by a second helicopter from Hermes after about half an hour in the water. Stott was recovered unconscious and died. Lord Windlesham was never found at all, and Berwick spent the following days searching a patch of the Irish Sea with Duchess, Scarborough, Lowestoft and the St David's lifeboat for a man who was not there.

It is a small episode and an unusually pointed one. A parliamentarian went to sea to see what the Navy did, and the Navy then spent three days looking for him. Whatever else the scheme achieved, the two Members who took it up that November came back with a considerably clearer idea of what the fleet air arm did for a living than any briefing would have given them, and one of them did not come back at all.

A Remarkably Global Working Life

HMS Berwick led the 21st Escort Squadron between 1963 and 1965, and in September 1964 escorted HMS Victorious through the Lombok Strait during the Sunda Straits Crisis, when Indonesia denied access to the more direct route.

At Easter 1966 she enforced the Rhodesian oil blockade as part of the Beira Patrol, stopping and boarding the Greek tanker SS Manuella, a properly tense piece of maritime law enforcement carried out under close international scrutiny.

The Beira Patrol was a genuinely strange piece of history and deserves setting out. Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally in November 1965 rather than move towards majority rule, and since it is a landlocked country its oil came up a pipeline from the Mozambique port of Beira to the refinery at Umtali. In April 1966 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 221, which called on the United Kingdom, by name and alone, to prevent by force if necessary the arrival of oil at Beira. That was the first time in its history that the Security Council authorised the use of force to enforce sanctions, and the instrument chosen to do it was the Royal Navy. Boarding a Greek tanker in the Mozambique Channel therefore had rather more legal weight behind it than the phrase blockade duty implies.

Manuella evidently hadn't learned her lesson: in April 1967 Berwick intercepted her again trying the same run, only for the tanker to double back the moment Berwick broke off to refuel, and she had to be chased down a second time by HMS Puma instead.

It made Berwick's part in one of the patrol's only 47 interceptions across nine largely uneventful years, a statistic that says everything about just how tedious blockade duty in the Mozambique Channel generally was.

It also, in the end, did not work, which is the part usually left out. The pipeline stayed shut and no tanker ever discharged at Beira again, but Rhodesia simply bought its oil overland through South Africa and never went short, and the patrol ground on regardless from 1966 until 1975, tying up seventy-six Royal Navy ships over its life at a cost estimated at a hundred million pounds. It ended not because it succeeded but because Mozambique became independent and closed the door itself. Nine years of steaming up and down a hot, empty stretch of ocean, and the thing everyone was there to stop was being driven across a border several hundred miles inland.

Following her 1968 to 1971 refit, HMS Berwick embarked on a full circumnavigation of the globe between July 1975 and April 1976, sailing via the Suez and Panama canals as part of a flotilla with HMS Ajax, HMS Plymouth and HMS Rothesay, visiting Gibraltar, Malta, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii and Panama, an extraordinary itinerary for a single deployment.

During a reception aboard the ship in Port Nelson that January, New Zealand's Speaker of the House of Representatives, Stan Whitehead, collapsed and died, a particularly sombre note amid an otherwise triumphant world tour.

HMS Berwick took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review in 1977 as part of the 8th Frigate Squadron, and had earlier suffered a collision with the frigate HMS Phoebe while departing Portsmouth Harbour for a West Indies deployment in November 1971, both ships sustaining minor damage.

Reprieved by War

HMS Berwick was paid off into reserve with the standby squadron in December 1980, and by 1982 was initially being considered for disposal as part of the era's defence cuts, her component parts already earmarked as a spares source for HMS Falmouth.

The disposal she was queued up for was not a routine one. The 1981 defence review, John Nott's, proposed cutting the surface fleet hard: a great many frigates and destroyers gone, one of the new carriers sold to Australia, and the Antarctic patrol ship Endurance withdrawn from the South Atlantic. That last decision in particular was read in Buenos Aires as a statement that Britain had lost interest in the Falklands, and the invasion followed within a year. The review was then torn up. Berwick, who in the spring of 1982 was being quietly picked over for parts to keep another frigate going, was back in commission by 5 August. There are few sharper illustrations of how quickly a defence policy can be overtaken by events.

The Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands that April changed everything: rather than being scrapped, HMS Berwick underwent a recommissioning refit at Chatham Dockyard and returned to service on 5 August 1982, joining the 5th Frigate Squadron and completing two post-war South Atlantic task force deployments in 1982 and 1983, a genuine second life granted by the very conflict that might otherwise have simply hastened her retirement.

A Deliberate Final Sinking

HMS Berwick was finally paid off from active service in 1985, and on 18 August 1986 was sunk as a target ship by a Tigerfish torpedo fired from the submarine HMS Tireless, a controlled, deliberate end that put her considerable seakeeping and structural qualities to one last practical use, helping the Royal Navy test and refine its own torpedo capability even in her final moments afloat.

And there is a sting in the choice of weapon. The Mark 24 Tigerfish had been in development since the 1960s and had a dismal reputation in the fleet for its guidance failing after launch. When HMS Conqueror was ordered to attack the General Belgrano in May 1982 her captain declined to use it, and sank a cruiser with three Mark 8 torpedoes of a design dating from the 1920s, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the old ones went where they were pointed. That was a public embarrassment, and the work to put Tigerfish right ran on for years afterwards. Proving a torpedo properly means firing it at a real warship and watching what happens, which is what Berwick was for on 18 August 1986. Her last service to the Navy was to be shot at by the weapon that had let it down.