HMS Cleopatra (F28): The First Leander Converted Twice Over

A Leander Built at Devonport

HMS Cleopatra was built at Devonport Dockyard, her keel laid on 19 June 1963, launched on 21 March 1964, and commissioned on 1 March 1966, a Leander-class frigate initially displacing 2,380 tons standard, armed with a twin 4.5-inch gun mount forward, a quadruple Sea Cat missile launcher, Oerlikon guns, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar and a Westland Wasp helicopter. She deployed to the Far East Fleet on commissioning, joining the 2nd Destroyer Squadron, before returning to Britain in 1967 to serve as a training ship at Portland.

Present at a Tragic Collision

HMS Cleopatra served on the Beira Patrol, enforcing the oil embargo against Rhodesia, and was present in 1969 at the collision between the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne and the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans, which cut the smaller ship in two and killed 74 of her crew, one of the most notorious peacetime naval disasters of the Cold War era, a devastating event that HMS Cleopatra, like several other Commonwealth and allied vessels in the vicinity, found herself drawn into the aftermath of.

Escorting the Queen, and Defending Trawlers

HMS Cleopatra visited the West Indies and the United States alongside HMS Ark Royal in 1971, before deploying to the Far East via South Africa to join the ANZUK force at Singapore that December. In February and March 1972, she provided escort during Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh's tour of Southeast Asia, a prestigious royal duty, during which one of her helicopters crash-landed into the sea, forcing her to borrow HMS Lowestoft's Wasp helicopter for the remainder of the deployment. In 1973, she was dispatched to protect British trawlers during the Second Cod War, the escalating fisheries dispute with Iceland that saw Royal Navy frigates repeatedly shielding civilian vessels from Icelandic coastguard interference.

First of Her Class, Twice Over

HMS Cleopatra holds a genuinely notable technical distinction: she was the first Leander-class frigate to undergo the major Batch 2 modernisation, beginning in May 1973, which fitted her with four Exocet anti-ship missiles, three Sea Cat launchers, Bofors guns and STWS torpedo tubes alongside a Westland Lynx helicopter, rejoining the fleet as leader of the 4th Frigate Squadron in late 1975. She took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review in 1977, positioned between HMS Zulu and HMS Arethusa, and visited Salalah, Muscat and Basra that year, alongside what her service record describes as intelligence collection operations between January and March 1978. Remarkably, HMS Cleopatra went on to become the first Leander-class frigate converted to carry the Type 1031 towed array sonar, a conversion completed on 10 June 1983, giving her a second genuinely pioneering role within her own class, this time optimised for submarine hunting rather than surface and air defence.

A Long and Varied Retirement Path

HMS Cleopatra visited America between January and March 1984 and went on to lead the 7th Frigate Squadron in 1985, continuing a career that had already spanned two entirely different major conversions and some of the most significant Royal Navy deployments of the 1970s and early 1980s. She was finally decommissioned on 31 January 1992 and sold for scrap in 1993, closing out the career of a frigate whose technical history, as the trial ship for two separate major Leander-class conversions, makes her one of the more historically significant individual vessels of her entire class.