HMS Chichester (F59): Rescuing a Burning Coaster, Then Accused of Spying by Moscow

An Aircraft Direction Frigate

HMS Chichester was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, her keel laid on 26 June 1953, launched on 21 April 1955 by Elizabeth Douglas-Home, wife of the future Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, and commissioned on 16 May 1958.

A Salisbury-class Type 61 aircraft direction frigate, she displaced 2,170 tons standard and up to 2,408 tons at deep load, armed with a twin 4.5-inch gun turret, a STAAG twin 40mm Bofors mount, later replaced by a simpler Mark V twin Bofors, and a Squid anti-submarine mortar, built specifically to provide radar direction and control for aircraft operating with the fleet.

Aircraft direction needs explaining, because it does not sound like fighting. The lesson came out of the Pacific in 1945, where the Americans learned at appalling cost that the way to survive a massed air attack is to put a ship out ahead of the fleet with the best radar you have and let her see the raid coming while there is still time to do something about it. The picket did not shoot the aircraft down. She found them, worked out their course, speed and height, and talked the fighters onto them over the radio. A decade later the threat had changed from kamikazes to Soviet bombers carrying stand-off missiles, and the arithmetic had got worse, because now the raid had to be broken up before it reached its launch point rather than before it reached the fleet.

What that meant for Chichester was a warship built around her radar rather than her guns. The Type 61 shared a hull with the Type 41 Leopard-class air defence frigates, and where a Leopard carried two twin 4.5-inch turrets, Chichester carried one, forward. The after turret was deleted to make room for the direction equipment, the operations room to work it and the Type 982 air warning set, which could reach out something like 120 miles. The sums were brutal and deliberate: about 115 tons of gun and mounting given up to buy back 23 tons of radar. Handing over half your main armament in exchange for a better view of the sky only makes sense if you genuinely believe the next war at sea will be decided by who sees whom first.

Her machinery was the other oddity and the more consequential one. Eight Admiralty Standard Range diesels of 1,800 brake horsepower apiece, coupled in pairs through fluid clutches and gearboxes to two shafts for 14,400 horsepower, and not a boiler anywhere in the ship. The Admiralty settled on diesels in 1947 for reasons that had nothing to do with tactics. Steam plant was temperamental and needed highly trained engine room ratings, and the postwar Navy had neither the men nor the time to train them; diesels were simpler and more economical and could be run by people brought on quickly. The by-product was endurance. Chichester carried a hundred tons more fuel than a Leopard and could steam 7,600 miles at sixteen knots, further than any other frigate of her generation. A Whitehall decision taken in 1947 about a shortage of engineers is the reason she ended her career on the other side of the world.

Four were built and the fleet called them the Cathedral class: Salisbury, Chichester, Llandaff and Lincoln. Seven were planned. Two were cancelled outright under the 1957 Defence White Paper, and the last of them, which was to have been named Coventry, hung on suspended until 1961, by which point the Admiralty had decided that the converted Battle-class destroyers were fast enough to keep up with a carrier and the Type 61s were not. Coventry's place in the programme went to the new Leander design instead, and the hull was built as HMS Penelope. Chichester herself had been ordered from Fairfield on 28 June 1951 and cost £3,291,000.

A Rescue Off Milford Haven

HMS Chichester joined the 4th Frigate Squadron on commissioning, alternating between home waters and the Far East, and on 10 September 1958, rescued the crew of the coaster Concha, which had caught fire off Milford Haven, a remarkably dangerous rescue carried out in home waters barely months into her career.

One detailed account of the incident survives, and only one, and it makes the whole thing a good deal less tidy than a clean rescue. The fire in Concha began with an explosion in her engine room. Chichester took her crew off and then sent a firefighting party across, which is a considerable thing to ask of anybody: boarding a burning ship to fight a fire her own people have already given up on. They lost. Concha was taken in tow by the tug Sheila and went down on the way in. Chichester had been in commission for under four months.

On 2 November 1958, HMS Chichester, together with the cruiser HMS Ceylon and the frigate HMS Loch Fyne, embarked the British paratroopers who had been flown into Jordan that July at King Hussein's own request, after the Iraqi monarchy next door was overthrown in a coup and the young king feared his own regime might be next. With the crisis defused, Chichester went on to deploy through the Mediterranean to the Far East and returned home via South Africa and South America, a global circuit for a frigate still relatively new to service.

A Forgotten Spell in Borneo

Somewhere in these years, HMS Chichester spent time far from home waters that never made it into her usual potted history: surviving Imperial War Museum film shows her alongside the Government Wharf at Sandakan in North Borneo during the Indonesian Confrontation of the mid-1960s, her off-duty ratings making the most of what the town had to offer, which by the cameraman's account amounted to some fruit and a bottle or two of Carlsberg.

Accused of Espionage

HMS Chichester was refitted with upgraded radar systems between 1963 and 1964, and by 1968 was engaged in fishery protection duties, during which the Soviet Union accused her of espionage, a striking episode reflecting the constant undercurrent of Cold War suspicion that coloured even routine Royal Navy fishery patrols whenever they operated anywhere near Soviet interests or vessels, a reminder that almost any naval activity during this period could be read, rightly or wrongly, through the lens of superpower rivalry.

That refit was rather more than a change of aerials. She went into Chatham and came out with her masts rebuilt as macks, the mast and the diesel exhaust uptakes combined into one structure, the after one thickened and raised to carry the four-ton aerial of the Type 965 long-range radar. Anybody who served in the sixties and seventies knows it on sight: the enormous lattice double bedstead that sat on the mainmast of half the fleet. It was a real improvement, and by the middle of the following decade it was thoroughly obsolete.

Fishery protection sounds like a demotion and is not. The Royal Navy calls it the oldest front-line squadron in the service, tracing its descent through the wafting ships that escorted the herring fleets in Elizabeth's reign back to guardships found by Yarmouth in 1379. What it meant in 1968 was working the northern grounds among a distant-water fishing fleet that had become genuinely international, and a good deal of what flew the Soviet flag out there was not fishing. Moscow ran a substantial fleet of intelligence-gathering trawlers and every navy in NATO knew it. An accusation of spying, levelled at a frigate whose entire reason for existing was seeing a long way, was rich. It was not baseless in principle. Everybody out there was watching everybody else, and the fish were largely incidental.

Blockading Rhodesia, Guarding Hong Kong

HMS Chichester joined the Beira Patrol in December 1969, part of the Royal Navy's long-running blockade enforcing oil sanctions against the white minority government of Rhodesia following its unilateral declaration of independence.

It is worth being honest about what the Beira Patrol was. Over ten years, seventy-six Royal Navy ships took their turn on it, at an estimated total cost of a hundred million pounds, and it did not work. In September 1966, three years before Chichester arrived, the Commonwealth Secretary reported that 220,000 gallons of oil a day were reaching Rhodesia. Under rationing, the country needed 200,000. The Navy closed the port of Beira and the oil came overland from South Africa and by rail from Lourenço Marques instead. Nobody in Whitehall was under any illusion: an internal Ministry of Defence paper in March 1968 recorded flatly that Rhodesia was getting all the oil it needed or more.

The rules of engagement were not a bluff, which matters, because they explain why a ship with a 4.5-inch turret was sent to do it. A tanker that ignored a challenge was to be fired across the bow, first with small-arms tracer, then with 40mm, then with a 4.5-inch round. If she kept going, the frigate was to close to point-blank range and warn her. Then practice ammunition at her funnel. Then anti-submarine mortar bombs set shallow a couple of hundred yards astern. And if she still would not stop, service ammunition at the bridge or the engine room or both, and keep firing until she did. Those instructions were written after a French tanker called Artois embarrassed the patrol in 1967 by simply carrying on, and the Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, complained that leaving a commanding officer in any doubt about how far he was expected to go was unfair on the officer and a standing invitation to international ridicule.

The Navy did not want the job and said so. Keeping two ships on station consumed six frigates in the cycle, and in June 1969, six months before Chichester joined, the Defence Secretary's own staff put it in writing: there was no training value in the patrol, and since the oil was patently reaching Rhodesia by other routes, the men employed on it could not be expected to derive any satisfaction from it. They urged him to find a way of getting shot of the commitment. He could not. The patrol was the visible proof of a legal position Britain had drafted for itself at the United Nations, and symbols are harder to give up than frigates. It ran until 25 June 1975, the day Mozambique became independent, and the last ship to come off station was HMS Salisbury, the lead ship of Chichester's own class.

In 1971 she was refitted for a quieter, five-year posting as Hong Kong guardship, a role her crew soon nicknamed "the Hong Kong Gin Ship". The refit stripped out much of her original war-fighting kit as no longer relevant to the job: her Squid mortar was removed, her twin Bofors mount replaced by a single, simpler Mark VII gun, and her radar fit pared back to just what local patrol work required.

The guardship was not a ceremonial post, whatever the nickname suggests. She took over from the Type 12 frigate HMS Whitby, and she was there because Hong Kong, after the withdrawal from Singapore, was the last real Royal Navy outpost east of Suez: four million people on a land border with China and a sea frontier that no fence could close. The work was sovereignty, support to customs and police, disaster relief when the typhoons came through, and the endless business of intercepting small craft. The Touch Base policy introduced in 1974 meant that an illegal immigrant from China who reached the urban area could register and stay, while one stopped before he got there went straight back, which placed an unlovely amount of moral weight on precisely where a patrol happened to be at the time.

She was being supplanted even as she did it. Five Ton-class minesweepers, converted for patrol work, formed the 6th Patrol Squadron, and in shallow, crowded, close inshore water they did the job far better than a 2,400-ton frigate ever could. After the 1974 defence review the Navy could see no reason to keep a gun frigate on station as well. No frigate replaced her. From then until the Peacock-class patrol vessels arrived in the middle eighties, the largest British warships in Hong Kong were minesweepers a fraction of her size.

When defence cuts finally did away with the need for a dedicated Hong Kong guardship, Chichester sailed for home in the spring of 1976, her route home taking her through Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands only weeks after the Argentine destroyer Almirante Storni had fired warning shots across the bows of the British research ship RRS Shackleton nearby, forcing her towards Port Stanley rather than the Argentine port her captors had originally demanded. It was a small, largely forgotten coincidence at the time, a Royal Navy frigate calling in at the very port that would make world headlines for weeks on end barely six years later.

The End of Service

HMS Chichester was eventually decommissioned and arrived for scrapping at Queenborough on 17 March 1981, bringing to a close a career that had ranged from a dramatic rescue in Welsh waters to Cold War espionage accusations from Moscow, and finally to years spent safeguarding one of Britain's most significant remaining overseas territories.

There is a neatness to her career that is really a form of obsolescence. Chichester was built to stand out ahead of a carrier task force and vector fighters onto an incoming raid. In February 1966 the government cancelled CVA-01, the carrier that was to have replaced the wartime-built ships she screened, and British fixed-wing naval aviation went onto a timetable that finished it off. The Type 61s were not fast enough to screen the carriers that remained. So a ship designed for one highly specialised job spent her last decade doing none of it: counting trawlers in the North Sea, stopping tankers off Mozambique and watching for sampans in the approaches to Hong Kong. She did all of it perfectly well. None of it was what she was for.

Her sisters outlasted her by a distance. Llandaff was sold to Bangladesh in December 1978 and served as BNS Umar Farooq for another thirty-eight years, taking part in the 2014 search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 before she was finally sold for breaking up in November 2016, a Cold War radar picket still at sea in the age of the mobile telephone. Lincoln, having been rammed by an Icelandic gunboat, went home and had lengths of railway line welded to her stern in preparation for the next round. Chichester went to Queenborough. She was the fourth ship to carry the name, after two ships of the line and a Victorian training ship lent to Lord Shaftesbury for destitute boys out of London, and there has not been a fifth.