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

A Leander Laid Down at Devonport

HMS Cleopatra was built at Devonport Dockyard, her keel laid on 19 June 1963, launched on 25 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.

The Leanders earned their reputation. Twenty-six were built for the Royal Navy, which made them comfortably the largest and longest-serving class of British frigate of the Cold War, and they were a development of the Type 12 Whitby and Rothesay hull that had already proved itself: fast, strong and famously good in weather that made other ships a misery. What set them apart was that they were general purpose in a way nothing before them had been. A Leander carried a gun, a missile, an anti-submarine mortar and her own helicopter, which meant she could be sent anywhere and asked to do more or less anything. Which is exactly what happened to Cleopatra, twice over.

They were also the most successful British warship export since the war. The Netherlands built six of their own as the Van Speijk class, India built six as the Nilgiri class at Mazagon Dock in Bombay, Australia built two, and Chile and New Zealand took two apiece. And from 1973 the BBC put one on television every week, using HMS Phoebe as the fictional HMS Hero in the series Warship, with the result that a generation of British schoolchildren grew up believing a Leander was simply what a warship looked like. They were not far wrong.

Present at a Tragic Collision

HMS Cleopatra served two separate spells on the Beira Patrol, the Royal Navy's long campaign to enforce the United Nations oil embargo against Ian Smith's breakaway Rhodesia by blockading the Mozambican port of Beira. On 17 September 1968, one of her own Wasp helicopters, XT440, ditched and sank off the Dutch coast, a reminder that even routine flying in home waters carried real risk for the small helicopter flights these frigates carried. Her first Beira stint ran from that December through to October 1969, part of a wider Far East Station deployment; she returned to the patrol in May 1972, relieving HMS Lowestoft off the Mozambique coast.

It was during that first Far East deployment, on 3 June 1969, that HMS Cleopatra found herself caught up in one of the most notorious peacetime disasters of the Cold War-era Royal Navy. She was one of five ships screening the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne during the SEATO exercise Sea Spirit, alongside the American destroyers USS Frank E. Evans, USS James E. Kyes and USS Everett F. Larson and the New Zealand frigate HMNZS Blackpool. At a dinner for the five escort captains held just before the exercise began, Melbourne's own commanding officer had specifically warned of the dangers of close manoeuvring around a carrier, a bitter irony given his ship had already been involved in one fatal collision, with the destroyer HMAS Voyager, five years before. In the early hours of 3 June, Evans cut across Melbourne's bow while shifting escort station and was sliced clean in two; her forward section sank within minutes, taking 74 of her crew down with her, while Melbourne herself recovered the survivors still clinging to the stern section lashed alongside her.

How the collision actually happened, and why it had happened to the same carrier once before, is set out in the article on HMS Blackpool, who was a few miles off in the same formation. What belongs here is what happened to the people afterwards, because very little of it was creditable.

Melbourne's commanding officer, Captain John Stevenson, was court-martialled. He was cleared, and the court went further than that: it commended him for what he had done to try to prevent the collision. The finding, as after the Voyager collision five years earlier, was that the destroyer had turned across the carrier's bow. None of which did him the slightest good. He was reverted from commodore to captain, and he resigned, ending thirty-five years of service. In December 2012, forty-three years after the event, the Australian Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, wrote to him to say that he had not been treated fairly by the government of the day or by his own Navy. Stevenson was ninety-one, and said he had one regret about the letter: his wife had died five months before it arrived. He lived to ninety-eight.

The seventy-four men lost in Frank E. Evans have an argument of their own that is still running. They came from twenty-eight states, and three of them were brothers: Gary, Gregory and Kelly Sage of Niobrara, Nebraska, aged twenty-two, twenty-one and nineteen. Their names are not on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The Department of Defense ruled that because the ship was on a training exercise and outside the designated combat zone when she was cut in half, the deaths did not count as deaths in the conflict, notwithstanding that Evans had been on gunfire support duty off Vietnam shortly before. Bills to add the seventy-four names have gone before Congress repeatedly and have not yet succeeded. To their shipmates they are the Lost 74.

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. That May, back on patrol in the Indian Ocean, her Wasp helicopter, XV631, ditched some 290 nautical miles east-north-east of Gan; a week later, on 22 May, she relieved HMS Lowestoft on Beira Patrol duty off Mozambique, back to the unglamorous blockade work that filled far more of a Cold War frigate's career than the prestigious royal engagements ever did.

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 truly notable technical distinction: she was the first Leander-class frigate to undergo the major Batch 2 modernisation, a refit beginning in July 1973 at Devonport that 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.

It is worth picturing what that conversion actually involved. The twin 4.5-inch turret came off, the single feature that made a Leander look like a warship, and four Exocet launchers went on the forecastle in its place. In exchange for a gun that could shell something ten miles away she got a missile that could sink a ship at more than twice that, and the Wasp gave way to the considerably more capable Lynx. What it cost her was the ability to bombard a shore, which nobody in 1973 thought would ever matter again, and which mattered enormously to the Royal Navy nine years later in the South Atlantic. The programme ran in three streams: eight of the first ten Leanders had the Ikara anti-submarine missile put in place of the gun, seven had Cleopatra's Exocet fit, and the last broad-beamed ships were given Sea Wolf. Cleopatra was the first hull into the second of those, which is why the whole conversion is dated from her.

She ran her post-refit recommissioning trials in the Caribbean that November, putting the fleet's newest anti-ship missile fit through its paces about as far from the North Atlantic as a Devonport-based frigate could get.

She took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review on 25 June 1977, positioned between HMS Zulu and HMS Arethusa off Spithead, before departing Devonport that September as part of Task Group 317.6, a 7.5-month deployment to Australia and the Far East led by the cruiser HMS Tiger, in company with HMS Amazon, HMS Mohawk and her old Silver Jubilee neighbour HMS Zulu. She visited Salalah, Muscat and Basra along the way, alongside what her service record describes as intelligence collection operations between January and March 1978, before returning to Devonport that April.

A refit running into 1979 converted her flight deck and hangar to operate the newer Westland Lynx in place of her original Wasp, and that April she was granted the Freedom of Harrogate, the Yorkshire spa town she carried an affiliation with, marching through its streets with the ceremonial privileges the honour bestows.

Remarkably, HMS Cleopatra went on to become the first Leander-class frigate converted to carry the Type 2031 towed array sonar, a refit running from January 1982 and completed by April 1983, giving her a second remarkably pioneering role within her own class, this time optimised for submarine hunting rather than surface and air defence.

The towed array is the less visible of her two firsts and very probably the more important. Type 2031 is a passive sonar streamed a long way astern of the ship on a cable, and the length of the cable is the whole point: it listens from a position well clear of the noise the ship herself is making, at low frequencies that carry for hundreds of miles. It was the answer to a generation of Soviet nuclear submarines that had become genuinely difficult to hear, and it turned a handful of ageing Leanders into the Royal Navy's front line across the gap between Greenland, Iceland and Scotland, which is where those submarines had to pass to reach the Atlantic. Cleopatra came out of refit in April 1983 as the first of them. She had started her career with a 4.5-inch gun and a Wasp on the back. She finished it listening.

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.

Her final significant deployment came in October 1991, when she joined the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, NATO's permanent multinational squadron, a fitting last assignment for a ship whose whole career had been built around allied and Commonwealth cooperation; she entered Devonport for the final time on 17 December that year.

She was finally decommissioned on 31 January 1992 and sold for scrap in India 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.