HMS Cornwall (F99): The "Fighting Ice Cream" and the 2007 Iran Hostage Crisis

Built on the Clyde

HMS Cornwall was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun on the River Clyde, launched by Diana, Princess of Wales, in October 1985 and commissioned at Falmouth in 1988, a Batch 3 Type 22 frigate and, fittingly enough, the first Batch 3 vessel to be built, a distinction she would later bookend by also becoming the very last Type 22 of any batch to be decommissioned.

Her pennant number, F99, earned her the affectionate lower-deck nickname "the Fighting Ice Cream" among her own crew, the kind of irreverent nickname that seems to attach itself to almost every Royal Navy vessel sooner or later. Officially, her own embroidered ship's badge preferred the marginally more dignified "the Fighting 99", though nobody who ever served aboard seems to have used that version much.

For anyone who did not grow up buying ice cream in Britain, the joke needs unpacking. A ninety-nine is a cone of soft ice cream with a Cadbury's Flake stuck in the top of it, and it has been the standard order at every seaside van in the country for about eighty years. Give a warship the pennant number F99 and a lower deck will do the rest inside a week. The badge said the Fighting 99. Everybody else said the Fighting Ice Cream.

A Global Career

HMS Cornwall's early service took her across the Atlantic as guard ship for a 1992 deployment to the West Indies, calling at Bermuda, Tortola, Belize, the Bahamas, Pensacola, Key West and Curaçao, before a very different theatre entirely: multiple Persian Gulf patrols through 1993 and 1994, with stops en route at Singapore, Penang and Sri Lanka. That October 1994 Gulf deployment came as part of the American-led Operation Vigilant Warrior, a rapid show of force alongside HMS Cardiff after Iraq moved troops back towards the Kuwaiti border, a reminder that even routine peacetime patrols could turn serious with very little notice.

In 1996, she served as flagship for the First Sea Lord during the 300th anniversary celebrations of the Russian Navy in Saint Petersburg, before taking up duty as flagship of NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic, and in 2001 she took part in the opening operations of the invasion of Afghanistan as part of a Royal Navy task force, a particularly wide-ranging career even by the standards of a frigate built for exactly this kind of global, flexible deployment.

In between, in February 1998, she was diverted to Sierra Leone on humanitarian duty, relieving HMS Monmouth off Freetown, and her embarked Sea King spent the following weeks airlifting medical supplies and food to isolated communities at Bo, Kenema and Makeni, precisely the kind of unglamorous, unheadlined work that rarely makes it into a ship's highlight reel. Two years later she set off on an altogether more scenic itinerary, a round-the-world deployment that called at Gibraltar, Haifa, Oman, Singapore, Manila, Tokyo, Pusan, Shanghai and Vladivostok before crossing the international date line to Honolulu, San Diego and Venezuela and finally recrossing the Atlantic home to Plymouth, a genuine circumnavigation for a ship whose own crest never quite decided whether she was fighting or just terribly good value at the seaside.

The 2007 Iran Hostage Crisis

HMS Cornwall had left Devonport that January for an eight-month deployment to the northern Persian Gulf under Operation Telic, supported by RFA Fort Austin, when her best-known moment arrived on 23 March 2007: fifteen Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines from her ship's company, engaged in a routine boarding and search of a merchant vessel suspected of smuggling in the northern Persian Gulf, were seized by forces of the Navy of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The captured personnel were held in Iran for thirteen days before their release, a tense international incident that dominated headlines at the time and remains, for many people, the single episode most closely associated with HMS Cornwall's entire career, however much other, less dramatic service she performed around it.

The geography of it is the part most accounts skate over, and it matters. The boarding party had finished searching an Indian-flagged dhow and were alongside in their two boats when the Revolutionary Guard boats arrived. On the position Cornwall recorded, they were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi waters. So, awkwardly for Tehran, was the first set of coordinates the Iranians themselves gave the Foreign Office; a second set, placing the boarding inside Iranian waters, was issued later. But the underlying problem is that Iran and Iraq have never agreed a maritime boundary seaward of the Shatt al-Arab. There is no line. The map the Ministry of Defence produced for the television cameras, showing the boats comfortably on the correct side of a boundary, was drawing something that does not legally exist.

Two inquiries followed and both reported on 19 June 2007. Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fulton, Governor of Gibraltar and a former Commandant General Royal Marines, examined the military side; his report was not published. Tony Hall examined how the aftermath had been handled by the Ministry of Defence, and his was. Between them they found failings and what was called a collective failure of judgment, while being careful to say that none of it came down to one gross error or one person. The most quotable line to come out of the process was about the people making the decisions in the northern Gulf that spring: they did not know how much they did not know, in part because nobody stayed in post long enough to build up the local knowledge the job required.

The worst of it happened after everybody was safely home. The Ministry of Defence decided to let the returning personnel sell their stories, and Leading Seaman Faye Turney sold hers to The Sun and to ITV for a figure reported at around a hundred thousand pounds, while Operator Mechanic Arthur Batchelor sold his to the Daily Mirror. The reaction across the services and the country was close to universal, and the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, reimposed the ban inside about twenty-four hours. It was a small decision taken quickly and badly, and it produced the one genuinely unanswerable criticism of the whole affair: for a fortnight Britain had rightly complained that Iran was parading British service personnel on television for propaganda, and then it sold the same footage to itself.

Piracy Off the Horn of Africa

By this point she was serving as command ship for Combined Task Force 151, the multinational anti-piracy force patrolling the Gulf of Aden, having deployed from Devonport the previous October; it built on an earlier eight-month spell in 2009 as flagship of NATO's Standing Maritime Group 2, during which she once hosted a Chinese naval delegation aboard to compare notes on counter-piracy tactics.

HMS Cornwall returned to the Gulf region in a rather more successful capacity in February 2011, when her boarding teams, alerted by a suspicious South Korean merchant ship, took part in the rescue of five Yemeni fishermen who had been held hostage aboard their own dhow for 92 days since pirates seized it the previous November, and the capture of seventeen Somali pirates who had been using the vessel as a mother ship for raids further out to sea, a rescue that stood in useful contrast to the events of 2007 and demonstrated the same boarding and interdiction skills being put to more straightforwardly successful use.

The Last Type 22

HMS Cornwall returned to Plymouth on 26 April 2011 and was decommissioned on 30 June that year, the final Type 22 frigate of any batch to leave Royal Navy service, closing out a class that had entered service more than three decades earlier. The timing wasn't entirely her own choice: as recently as 2004 she had been due to serve until 2015, but the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review cut that short by four years. Her ship's company marched through Truro that July under the Freedom of the Duchy of Cornwall, and that October her own ship's bell was formally handed over to Truro Cathedral, where it remains.

The ship herself went to Portsmouth and sat there for two years while the Ministry of Defence worked out what to do with four perfectly serviceable frigates it had just decided it did not want. All four Batch 3s were sold for recycling in July 2013, and three of them, HMS Cumberland, Campbeltown and Chatham, were bought by a Turkish firm and towed out to Aliaga to be cut up.

Cornwall did not go with them. She was the one contract that went to a British yard, Swansea Drydocks in South Wales, and on 24 October 2013 she was towed out of Portsmouth for the last time and reached Swansea six days later. It is a small distinction and worth having, because most British warships end their lives on a beach or a slipway several thousand miles from anybody who served in them. The first Batch 3 built and the last Type 22 of any batch to pay off was also the only one of her four sisters taken apart in Britain, and she was broken up rather closer to the county she was named for than to the yard on the Clyde that built her.

She was not alone in that. All four Batch 3 Type 22s, Cornwall, Chatham, Cumberland and Campbeltown, were cut in a single stroke in the 2010 review, as set out in the article on HMS Boxer. They were the newest and by common consent the most capable general-purpose frigates in the fleet, and not one of them was replaced.

She was put up for sale alongside her sister ships in January 2013 and sold to Swansea Drydocks for demolition that July, finally leaving Portsmouth under tow for Swansea on 24 October 2013, bringing to an end both her own career and that of the entire Type 22 class in Royal Navy hands.