HMS Brighton (F106): From the Malacca Strait to Leading NATO's Standing Fleet

A Frigate for the Anti-Submarine Age

HMS Brighton was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun on the Clyde, her keel laid on 23 July 1957, launched on 31 October 1959, and commissioned on 28 September 1961, a Rothesay-class Type 12M anti-submarine frigate.

As built, she carried a twin 4.5-inch gun mount forward, a single 40mm Bofors gun aft, two Limbo anti-submarine mortars and twelve 21-inch torpedo tubes, a solid Cold War anti-submarine fit that reflected the class's core mission of hunting Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic.

The Rothesays were the second batch of the Type 12, and the hull under her was one of the real successes of post-war British naval architecture, drawn to chase fast Soviet submarines in an Atlantic that does not flatten itself for anybody. The design is set out at length in the article on her sister HMS Berwick, and there is no sense repeating it here. What matters for Brighton is that it was a hull worth spending money on, which is precisely what the Navy did to her in 1968.

Patrolling Confrontation and Sanctions

HMS Brighton had already had a taste of the region in 1962, sent out to Borneo the same year as the Brunei Revolt that set the whole Confrontation in motion. She joined the 6th Frigate Squadron on commissioning before transferring to the 30th Escort Squadron in 1963, and returned to the Far East between June and December 1965, conducting anti-infiltration patrols during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation itself, the low-level but truly dangerous conflict fought largely in the jungles and coastal waters of Borneo and the Malacca Strait as Indonesia sought to prevent the formation of the new Malaysian federation.

The Brunei Revolt is worth telling properly, because it is the hinge the whole of Confrontation turns on and almost nobody in Britain has heard of it. On 8 December 1962 the North Kalimantan National Army, the TNKU, rose across the oil-rich protectorate of Brunei: police stations and government buildings attacked, the Shell installations at the oil town of Seria seized, and, across the border in Sarawak, the town of Limbang taken with the British Resident, his wife and a dozen others held hostage. The rebels announced that the hostages would be hanged on 12 December.

What happened at Limbang on that date has a naval component that generally gets left out. The job went to L Company of 42 Commando under Captain Jeremy Moore. There were no landing craft, so two Z-craft lighters, the Nakhoda Manis and the Sindaun, were requisitioned and given five-man crews out of the minesweepers, and the marines went up the river in them at dawn. The engine noise carried, the surprise was gone, and they came into the landing under heavy fire from the police station. Two marines were killed before anybody got ashore and three more in the house-to-house fighting that took the rest of the day, with six wounded including one of the sailors. The hostages were freed. Moore got a bar to his Military Cross, and twenty years later he commanded the British land forces in the Falklands.

Between Limbang, the Queen's Own Highlanders retaking Seria and the Green Jackets landing in western Brunei, the revolt was broken inside a week by troops flown in from Singapore. A second phase dragged on until the TNKU's military commander was captured in May 1963, and on 12 April that year a police post at Tebedu in Sarawak was attacked by men who had come across from Indonesian Kalimantan. That is generally taken as the start of Confrontation. Brighton went out to Borneo in 1962, which is to say she was in the right part of the world at the exact moment a three-year undeclared war began.

Anti-infiltration patrol is a polite phrase for a genuinely nasty job. Indonesia was landing small parties of infiltrators by boat along the coasts and up the creeks, and stopping them meant a lot of nights spent watching very dark water in a ship designed to hunt submarines in the North Atlantic. Minesweepers did much of the close inshore work, as the story of HMS Bossington shows, and frigates like Brighton provided the weight behind them. Britain fought the Confrontation for three years, largely won it, and has almost entirely forgotten it.

She went on to serve on the Beira Patrol off East Africa between August and December 1966, part of the Royal Navy's effort to enforce oil sanctions against the white minority government of Rhodesia following its unilateral declaration of independence, blockading the port of Beira in Mozambique through which sanctioned oil supplies might otherwise have reached the landlocked colony, before diverting to Singapore that December. The following year she moved to the Middle East, serving with the Eastern Fleet off Aden through the final, tense months of Britain's withdrawal from the colony in 1967, before taking up the rather calmer role of Gibraltar Guardship.

The Beira Patrol was one of the strangest tasks the Royal Navy has ever been handed, and it is set out properly in the article on HMS Berwick, who was there at Easter 1966 and boarded a tanker for her trouble. The short version is that it worked and it failed at the same time: no tanker ever discharged at Beira again, and Rhodesia bought its oil overland through South Africa instead and never went short. It ran from 1966 to 1975 and tied up seventy-six Royal Navy ships across those nine years. Brighton did her four months of it and moved on.

Leading NATO's Standing Fleet

On 13 January 1968, HMS Brighton joined a fledgling NATO squadron at Portland that would shortly become the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, the alliance's permanently deployed multinational squadron, and took command of it, a role that put a British frigate at the head of an international force drawn from across the NATO alliance and underscored the importance the Royal Navy placed on collective Atlantic defence during the Cold War.

It is worth being clear about what she was joining, because the Standing Naval Force Atlantic was a genuinely new idea. Allied navies had exercised together for years and then gone home again. This was the first permanent peacetime multinational naval squadron anywhere in the world: ships from different countries, kept together continuously, under a single commander, ready to go somewhere as a formed unit rather than as an assembly of guests.

It came out of an exercise. In early 1965 Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States each put one ship into a five-month series of exercises called Matchmaker. It went well enough to be repeated in 1966 and again in 1967, and in late November 1966 an American officer, Rear Admiral Richard Colbert, wrote the paper that proposed making the arrangement permanent. NATO approved it in the middle of December 1967, which left about a month to actually do it.

The ceremony at Portland on 13 January 1968 was accordingly short. Admiral Sir John Bush, Commander-in-Chief Eastern Atlantic, presided on behalf of the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Admiral Ephraim Holmes of the United States Navy, and four ships made up the force: HMS Brighton, the Dutch Holland, the Norwegian Narvik and the American Holder, with the Canadian Gatineau joining them in March. It is a small enough list to fit in a paragraph, and it turned into something that stayed at sea without a break for the next thirty-seven years, until the force was renamed Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 in January 2005. It is still there now. Brighton was one of the four ships it started with.

A Major Overhaul and a Jubilee

HMS Brighton underwent a major modernisation at Chatham Dockyard between 5 August 1968 and 18 February 1972, an overhaul that brought her capabilities much closer to the newer Leander-class frigates, adding the Seacat anti-aircraft missile system, a flight deck and hangar for a Wasp helicopter, and 20mm cannon, while reducing her Limbo mortar fit to a single unit and removing her torpedo tubes entirely, a substantial rebalancing of her armament towards air defence and modern sensors.

The renewed frigate went straight back to sea, taking up the Gibraltar Guardship role again in 1973 before joining the task force gathering off Cyprus the following July, when Turkey's invasion of the island triggered a large-scale British evacuation of civilians and service dependants. In December 1975 she was patrolling the Icelandic fishing grounds during the Third Cod War, where the Icelandic gunboat Thor, after colliding with a British vessel, threatened to open fire, only to be reminded by HMS Brighton that doing so would be, in one memorable account of the exchange, "a terminally unwise thing to do."

The scale of the Cyprus job is worth a line, because a British evacuation sounds like a few coachloads and was not. There were up to thirteen thousand dependants of British service personnel living in the sovereign base areas at Dhekelia and Akrotiri, and several thousand more expatriates and tourists scattered across an island that had just become a war zone. HMS Hermes reached Cyprus on 17 July 1974 at the head of the task group, with Andromeda, Devonshire, Rhyl and RFA Olna, and on 22 and 23 July fifteen hundred and fifty-two civilians were lifted out of the north by the carrier's helicopters and by landing craft working into Kyrenia harbour, at one point face to face with a Turkish tank.

Brighton was one of a long line of frigates sent north to stand between British trawlers and the Icelandic Coast Guard, and by 1975 the Icelanders had graduated from threats to net cutters and deliberate ramming. HMS Andromeda was hit three separate times in the same dispute. That the exchange with Thor stayed verbal counts, in the circumstances, as a good day.

The investment paid off in extended service, and in 1977 HMS Brighton attended the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, marking twenty-five years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.

The Final Years

HMS Brighton was decommissioned in November 1981 and laid up with the Standby Squadron at Rosyth, later cannibalised for spare parts to keep her surviving sister ships running, her substantial modernisation having extended her useful life by a decade beyond what her original 1961 commissioning might otherwise have suggested.

The Standby Squadron and the cannibalising deserve explaining, because the phrase makes it sound tidier than it was. A ship in the Standby Squadron was not in reserve in the old sense and not on the disposal list either: she lay in a basin, out of commission, with a small maintenance party rather than a ship's company, hull and machinery kept up, theoretically available if a crisis ever produced enough sailors to man her. What that meant in practice for a Rothesay in 1982 is set out in the article on HMS Keppel (F85), who was pulled out of exactly that condition to cover for a sister with a broken boiler.

Cannibalising was the next stage down. Once it was accepted that a ship would never sail again, the fittings that were still good, pumps, valves, electronics, gun parts, anything the surviving members of the class still needed and the supply system could no longer buy, were cut out of her and carried away. It kept her sisters at sea for a few more years. It is a bleak way for a warship to finish, gradually emptied out to keep other people's ships running, and in the early 1980s it happened to a great many of them.

She was sold to Dean Marine for scrap, arriving at their yard at Kingsnorth on the Medway on 16 September 1985 to be broken up, closing out a career that had taken her from anti-infiltration patrols in the Malacca Strait to leading NATO's premier standing naval force in the Atlantic.