HMS Chatham (F87): The First British Warship to Fire in Anger Since the Falklands

A Well-Armed Batch 3 Frigate

HMS Chatham was built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne, her keel laid on 12 May 1986, launched on 20 January 1988 and commissioned on 4 May 1990, taking as her motto the pleasingly aggressive "Surge et Vince", a Latin rendering of "Up and at 'em" borrowed from her home town's own football and rugby clubs.

There is something quietly sad about the name. Chatham built warships for the Royal Navy for the best part of four hundred years, and it built some of the most famous of them; HMS Victory was launched there in 1765. On 31 March 1984 the dockyard closed. Four years after that, this Chatham went down the slipway at Wallsend on the Tyne, because there was no longer a yard at Chatham to build a ship named after Chatham. The site is a museum now, and the ship preserved in its No 2 Dry Dock is HMS Cavalier, the last British destroyer of the Second World War, sitting in the dock where Victory was built.

And the yard that built her instead has since gone the same way, which finishes the thought rather than softening it. Swan Hunter was founded at Wallsend in 1880 and became one of the best-known shipbuilders in the world. The Mauretania went down that slipway in September 1906. So did HMS Ark Royal in 1985, the year before Chatham's keel was laid. The firm went into receivership in 1993, three years after Chatham commissioned, when a government contract went to a yard on the Clyde instead; the Wallsend site was bought out of receivership by a Dutch businessman, Jaap Kroese, and kept going.

It lasted another thirteen years. In 2000 the yard won the order for two large landing ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, due in service in 2004. By the summer of 2006 the cost had reached £309 million and only one of them had been delivered; Largs Bay was the last ship Swan Hunter ever built and completed. That November Kroese announced that the business was finished and put the cranes up for sale, and in April 2007 the cranes, the floating dock and the whole of the plant were bought by an Indian shipbuilder and shipped out to India over six months to be re-erected there. So the ship named after a dockyard that no longer builds ships was herself built by a yard that no longer exists, on a river where the cranes were taken down and sent abroad within twenty years of her launch.

She was a Batch 3 Type 22 frigate, among the most heavily armed general-purpose frigates the Royal Navy operated, carrying two Sea Wolf air defence missile systems with 72 missiles between them, two quadruple Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers, torpedo tubes, a 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun and a Goalkeeper close-in weapon system, a truly formidable combination of anti-air, anti-ship and anti-submarine capability built into a single hull.

She also turned out to be something of a lucky ship for her own commanding officers: eight of the captains who served aboard her, James Morse, Ian Forbes, Tony Hogg, Paul Boissier, Christopher Clayton, Martin Connell, Trevor Soar and George Zambellas among them, went on to reach flag rank, with Zambellas eventually rising all the way to First Sea Lord, the professional head of the entire Royal Navy.

Rammed and Boarded in the Adriatic

On 1 May 1994, HMS Chatham assisted the Dutch frigate HNLMS Van Kinsbergen in intercepting the Maltese freighter Lido II, suspected of smuggling fuel to Montenegro in violation of United Nations sanctions during Operation Sharp Guard's enforcement of the Yugoslav arms and trade embargo.

The operation turned remarkably dangerous when three Yugoslav Končar-class missile boats contested the interception, with one attempting to ram HMS Chatham directly, an alarming escalation that was only defused when Italian Tornado aircraft, scrambled from Gioia del Colle airbase, helped drive off the Yugoslav corvettes.

Lido II's own crew had sabotaged her engine room in an apparent attempt to prevent the boarding succeeding, and HMS Chatham's engineering party had to contain the resulting leak, while seven Yugoslav stowaways were discovered aboard before the freighter was escorted to Italy for repairs, a properly dramatic single episode packed into what had begun as a routine sanctions-enforcement boarding.

The First Shots Since the Falklands

HMS Chatham deployed to the Persian Gulf between January and August 2003 for Operation Telic, the British contribution to the invasion of Iraq, spending roughly 90 days continuously at sea under defence watches in the northern Gulf, facing the genuine hazard of mines laid by Iraqi forces.

In March 2003, HMS Chatham became the first British warship to fire her guns in anger since the Falklands War, engaging targets on the Al-Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq, firing approximately 60 rounds from her 4.5-inch gun.

She remained on station alongside HMS Marlborough, HMS Richmond and the Australian frigate HMAS Anzac for the following 72 hours, maintaining immediate readiness to provide fire support for Royal Marines advancing up the peninsula, a properly historic moment that placed HMS Chatham at the very front of Britain's return to sustained naval gunfire in anger after more than two decades.

Hong Kong, Sierra Leone and the Tsunami

HMS Chatham also served as guardship to the Royal Yacht Britannia during the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, under Captain Christopher Clayton, and took part in Operation Palliser in May 2000, evacuating British, European and Commonwealth nationals from Sierra Leone under a young Captain George Zambellas, the very officer who would later become First Sea Lord. In December 2004 she provided humanitarian relief off Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, a particularly varied service record that combined high-intensity combat operations with humanitarian and diplomatic duties across three decades.

Operation Palliser deserves more than a clause, because it is generally reckoned one of the most successful small interventions Britain has made in the last half century. Sierra Leone's civil war had reached the point, in early May 2000, where the Revolutionary United Front was advancing on Freetown and had cut the road between the capital and Lungi, the country's only usable airport. Several hundred British and other foreign nationals were trapped in a city about to fall. On 7 May, 1 Para flew from Brize Norton to Dakar, and a company and a special forces squadron went straight on by Hercules and had the airport in hand before dark.

The evacuation was finished by 12 May. What made it work, and the reason Chatham was there, is that an air-landed battalion cannot stay: it has almost nothing with it and no way of being supplied. So by 14 May the paratroopers had been relieved by the Amphibious Ready Group built around 42 Commando, arriving by sea with its own helicopters, vehicles, stores, medical facilities and, crucially, the ability to sit off the coast indefinitely without asking anybody's permission. That is what an amphibious force is for, and Sierra Leone is the clearest demonstration of it in modern British history: the RUF advance stopped, the government held, and the war was over within two years. Chatham's part was to be one of the grey ships offshore that made the whole thing possible, under a captain who would end up running the Royal Navy.

NATO's Flagship Against Somali Piracy

Her last operational deployment was arguably her most eventful. Departing Devonport in January 2010, Chatham spent seven months as flagship of NATO's counter-piracy Operation Ocean Shield, arriving in the Gulf of Aden that February to patrol some of the most pirate-infested waters on earth.

On 14 May 2010, Chatham's own Lynx helicopter and an EU maritime patrol aircraft caught a suspected pirate mother ship towing two heavily-engined attack skiffs some 150 miles off Tanzania. Boarded by Royal Marines, the vessel turned out to be carrying ten Somalis, fuel drums and little else, its crew having tipped their weapons overboard rather than be caught with them. Chatham's helicopter destroyed both skiffs before the mother ship, her fuel deliberately left short, was sent home to Somalia. "I am extremely pleased that we have again successfully disrupted a suspected pirate attack group," said her commanding officer, Commander Simon Huntington.

A week later, Chatham found herself fighting the weather rather than pirates. On 20 May, her bridge team took a distress call from the master of the merchant ship MV Dubai Moon, caught in a tropical storm south west of Socotra; by the time Chatham reached her the storm had grown into a full cyclone, the merchantman listing heavily as her cargo of vehicles broke loose and slid across the deck while she drifted towards a small island. Her anchors held just long enough, about a thousand yards short of a reef, for Chatham's Lynx to complete a three-hour winching operation and lift all 23 crew to safety. "If we had not been rescued by the Royal Navy and NATO, we would have died with my ship," said Dubai Moon's master, Hassan Madar.

The End of Service

HMS Chatham was decommissioned on 8 February 2011 and sold to the Turkish company Leyal for scrapping in July 2013, towed to Turkey for breaking that autumn, bringing to a close the career of a frigate whose gunfire off the Al-Faw Peninsula had marked a notably significant moment in modern Royal Navy history, the first time in over twenty years that a British warship had fired her weapons in combat.

She did not last long after it. The four Batch 3 Type 22s, Chatham, Cornwall, Cumberland and Campbeltown, were the newest and by common consent the most capable general-purpose frigates in the fleet, and all four were cut in a single stroke in the 2010 defence review, as set out in the article on HMS Boxer. Chatham paid off in February 2011, twenty years and nine months after commissioning, having fired the first British naval gunfire in anger since 1982 and rescued twenty-three men off a sinking ship in a cyclone. Every one of the four went to the same breakers in Turkey. Not one was replaced.