HMS Charybdis (F75): From the Cod Wars to Guarding Ark Royal in the Gulf

A Leander for the Modern Fleet

HMS Charybdis was built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, launched on 28 February 1968 and commissioned on 2 June 1969, a Leander-class frigate originally armed with twin 4.5-inch guns.

She was among the last proper warships that Harland and Wolff's famous Belfast yard built for the Royal Navy, the yard turning increasingly to merchant work and Royal Fleet Auxiliary contracts in the years that followed. To her own ship's company, with the sort of affection sailors reserve for an awkward name, she was known simply as the "Cherry B".

It is worth being precise about that, because the record is a good deal tidier than it sounds. Harland and Wolff built a hundred and seventy-four warships for the Royal Navy between 1868 and 1969, and Charybdis was the last of them. Not one of the last: the last. After she was delivered in June 1969 the Belfast yard never built another British warship, and its subsequent work for the naval service was auxiliaries, the fleet replenishment ship Fort Victoria of 1990 among them. A century and a year of naval construction, from ironclads to guided-missile frigates, ends with this ship. Nobody at the launch on 28 February 1968 would have thought so; Belfast still had the Troubles ahead of it, and the yard was still one of the largest employers in the city.

She served as guard ship at Gibraltar in 1969, and in 1970 undertook a Far East and Pacific deployment that included Commonwealth exercises, the standard round of duties expected of a modern general-purpose frigate in the early 1970s Royal Navy.

Guarding Trawlers in the Second Cod War

HMS Charybdis was deployed in 1973 during the Second Cod War, the escalating dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights in the North Atlantic, tasked with protecting British trawlers operating in waters Iceland claimed as its own exclusive fishing zone, a tense and occasionally physically confrontational deployment that saw Royal Navy frigates repeatedly shadowing and shielding civilian fishing vessels from Icelandic coastguard interference.

Iceland was pushing its claimed limit out from 12 to 50 miles, and the Navy typically kept three frigates and three ocean-going tugs on task at any one time to screen the trawler fleets. Surviving Imperial War Museum film from the campaign catches Charybdis shadowing and out-manoeuvring the Icelandic gunboat Ægir rather than trading blows with her, a rather more decorous showing than fellow frigate HMS Lincoln managed that same year, rammed by Ægir not once but twice.

Lincoln's year is worth reading alongside this one, because it shows the other end of the same policy. She was an old Type 61 air-direction frigate, slower and considerably less nimble than a Leander, and the Navy sent her north with her hull padded with lengths of railway track and baulks of timber to take the impacts, on the reasoning that a ship which is going to be rammed may as well be prepared for it. She was rammed twice. Charybdis, faster and better handled, could do the job by manoeuvre instead, which is why the film of her out-turning the Aegir looks like seamanship rather than a car crash. Lincoln's side of the Second Cod War is in the article on HMS Lincoln (F99).

A Modernisation Rushed by War

HMS Charybdis took part in the Mediterranean deployment marking Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review in 1976 and 1977, before undergoing a substantial modernisation between 1979 and 1982 that removed her original gun armament in favour of Exocet anti-ship missiles and the Sea Wolf air defence system.

That refit was a great deal more than a refit, and only five ships in the fleet ever got it. Charybdis was one of the broad-beamed Leanders, and she was one of five, with HMS Andromeda, Scylla, Jupiter and Hermione, rebuilt to what was called the Batch 3A standard. Everything came out: the twin 4.5-inch turret, the Seacat, the old radars, the lot. In went a six-barrelled Sea Wolf launcher with its Type 910 tracker, four Exocet launchers where the gun had been, Type 2016 sonar and a hangar and flight deck rebuilt for the Lynx. What came out the other end was a frigate laid down in the 1960s carrying most of the capability of a Type 22.

The other four are all worth knowing, and three of them appear elsewhere in this series. HMS Andromeda (F57) was the first of the five to be rebuilt, and had been rammed three times by Icelandic gunboats before she got anywhere near a dockyard; HMS Jupiter (F60) managed, in 1984, to hit London Bridge; and HMS Hermione (F58) spent part of her career pretending to be a fictional frigate on television. Five ships, five very different careers, and one of the more successful pieces of naval second-hand engineering Britain has done: for seventy million pounds each the Navy got, out of hulls already fifteen years old, ships that could shoot down a sea-skimming missile and sink a warship over the horizon.

It was not cheap, and that is why there were only five. Parliament was told in November 1981 that each of these modernisations was costing at or above seventy million pounds, which at the time was in the same region as building a new frigate outright, and the programme stopped where it did. Charybdis went into the yard in 1979 expecting a long, unhurried rebuild and came out in a hurry in 1982 because a war had broken out in the South Atlantic and the Navy suddenly wanted every hull it could get. She missed the fighting and spent the aftermath patrolling the islands instead, which is the fate of a great many ships in that war.

That refit was notably accelerated by the outbreak of the Falklands War, the Admiralty pushing to get every capable frigate back into front-line service as quickly as possible, and HMS Charybdis subsequently patrolled the Falkland Islands in the conflict's aftermath.

Escorting the Fleet Through the 1980s

HMS Charybdis went on to serve across the West Indies, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf through much of the 1980s, including Armilla Patrol deployments in the Straits of Hormuz in 1985 and 1988, part of the sustained Royal Navy presence protecting shipping in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War and its aftermath.

Sea Wolf Protection During the Gulf War

HMS Charybdis's Sea Wolf missile system saw genuine operational use during the 1991 Gulf War, when she provided close air defence protection for the carrier HMS Ark Royal, a role that made direct use of the very modernisation programme her Falklands-era refit had been rushed to complete nearly a decade earlier. She was decommissioned that September, her long and varied service at an end.

The carrier's war was fought at one remove: rather than steaming into the Gulf itself, Ark Royal, with Charybdis screening her, held station in the Eastern Mediterranean off Cyprus, freeing up a United States Navy carrier to operate in the Gulf and Red Sea proper, useful, unglamorous work a long way from the front pages.

A Final Role as a Target

HMS Charybdis was sunk during a Joint Maritime Course sinking exercise on 11 June 1993, off the Benbecula Rocket Range in Scotland, her hull put to a final useful purpose testing weapons and providing valuable data on ship survivability, closing out the career of a frigate that had defended fishing trawlers off Iceland, patrolled the recaptured Falklands, and shielded one of the Royal Navy's most storied carriers during a shooting war.

A sinking exercise is not simply target practice, and it is worth knowing what it is for. A warship hull that has been built, run and worn out for real is the only honest way to find out what modern weapons actually do to modern ships: how a warhead behaves against a real bulkhead, how flooding spreads through real compartments, how long a real hull stays up. The data goes into the design of the next class, and there is no substitute for it, which is why navies keep doing it. The range off Benbecula that Charybdis was sunk on is still in use for exactly this: in September 2026 British and American forces sank the decommissioned American frigate USS Klakring there. It is a bleak end for a ship and a genuinely useful one, and of all the things a thirty-year-old frigate can be turned into, it is a good deal better than razor blades.

One footnote on the name. Charybdis is the whirlpool of the Odyssey, the other half of the choice a sailor faces between Scylla and Charybdis, and the Royal Navy has cheerfully named ships after both hazards for two centuries; her Sea Wolf conversion put her in the same group of five as HMS Scylla, so for a while the fleet had both of Homer's monsters in the same squadron with the same missile system. Her own company, sensibly, called her the Cherry B and got on with it.

The footnote has a heavier half, though, and it is the reason the name still means something in the Channel Islands. The Charybdis before this one was a Dido-class cruiser, and she was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Brittany on the night of 23 October 1943 during Operation Tunnel, going down in about half an hour with more than four hundred of her people. Twenty-one of the dead washed ashore on German-occupied Guernsey. The occupying authorities allowed a full military funeral at Le Foulon, and around five thousand of the twenty thousand islanders still on Guernsey walked or cycled to it and laid better than a thousand wreaths, which the Germans correctly understood as a demonstration and after which they banned any further such ceremonies. Her story is told in the article on HMS Charybdis (88).

That service never stopped. Survivors, families and islanders still gather every October for the Charybdis and Limbourne Memorial Weekend, with the service at Le Foulon held under the Guernsey Association of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and a chapel at St John's Church in St Peter Port keeps relics of the sinking, including the union flag that was draped over the coffin of an unknown sailor. Which means that for the whole twenty-four years this ship carried the name, there was a wreath-laying every autumn on a small island for the ship that had carried it before, and a fair number of the men aboard the frigate will have known exactly why. Then there is the coincidence of 1993: the year the wreck of the first Charybdis was finally located on the sea bed off Brittany is the same year the second was towed out to the Hebrides range and sunk on purpose.