HMS Cumberland (F85): Cocaine Busts, Dead Pirates and a Libyan Evacuation

Launched With a Fitting Motto

HMS Cumberland was launched in 1986 and commissioned on 10 June 1989 under her first commanding officer, Captain Mike Gregory, a Type 22 Batch 3 frigate carrying the Latin motto Justitia Tenax, 'Tenacious of Justice,' a phrase that would prove fitting given the ship's later career.

She carried a formidable armament for her size, including two Sea Wolf anti-air missile systems, two quad Harpoon missile launchers, triple torpedo tube mounts for Stingray torpedoes, a 4.5-inch main gun and a Goalkeeper close-in weapons system, powered by Rolls-Royce Spey and Tyne gas turbines capable of driving her to 30 knots.

Early Deployments and the Falklands

HMS Cumberland's first two deployments took her to North America between 1989 and 1990, calling at Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, New York and various Canadian ports, before a rather colder posting: winter patrol duty around the Falkland Islands in 1990 and 1991, including visits to South Georgia and the old whaling station at Grytviken, a very different environment from her earlier transatlantic goodwill visits.

A Gulf Patrol Ends in Valletta

In the spring of 1999, HMS Cumberland was making her way home from a Gulf patrol, with Valletta in Malta lined up as her last port of call before Gibraltar and, finally, home to HMNB Devonport. It turned out to be rather more memorable than a routine stopover.

On 2 May, sailors from the ship's own 3HZ Mess, known onboard as "the Zoo," fell into conversation, and then into an extended round of arm wrestling, with the actor Oliver Reed at a Valletta pub called The Pub, where he was drinking during a break from filming Gladiator nearby. Reed, on famously good form, bought a final round of eight beers, twelve double rums and half a bottle of whisky before collapsing later that evening of a heart attack, the last drinking session of his life. Newspaper accounts of the night were, according to crew who were actually there, considerably embellished in the retelling, though the scale of that final bar bill was real enough.

The consequences of that evening ran further than the bar bill. Reed still had scenes to shoot; Ridley Scott had to finish the film around him, using a body double and, at considerable expense, some of the earliest digital compositing of a dead actor into new footage. Gladiator carries a dedication to him at the end. The Pub, on Archbishop Street, has been an unofficial shrine ever since, with the photographs and the newspaper cuttings on the wall, and a good many people who go in there to look at them have no idea that the men he spent the evening arm wrestling had a Type 22 frigate alongside in Grand Harbour and a passage to Gibraltar in the morning.

HMS Cumberland sailed on from Malta to Gibraltar and then home to Devonport, closing out a Gulf patrol that, thanks to one evening ashore, ended up rather better remembered for a Hollywood actor's last round of drinks than for anything that happened at sea.

Seventeen months later she was back in the same sea doing something considerably more serious. On the night of 26 September 2000 the Greek ferry Express Samina, running from Piraeus out to the islands with five hundred and thirty-three people aboard, hit the Portes rocks two miles off Parikia on Paros at eighteen knots and sank within fifty minutes. Cumberland was in the area, and she and the local fishing boats spent that night pulling people out of the water. Eighty-two of those aboard died.

What came out afterwards is why it is still remembered in Greece. The ship had been left running on autopilot with nobody keeping a watch on the bridge at all. Nine of her eleven watertight doors were open, which is against every regulation there is and is the reason she went down as fast as she did. And some of the crew, by the findings of the inquiry, did not stay to help the passengers off. Officers, crew and executives of the operating company were prosecuted on charges running from negligence to manslaughter, and two months after the sinking the company's manager threw himself out of his sixth-floor office window.

It is worth putting the two Mediterranean nights side by side, because they were seventeen months apart and involve the same ship. The first is the one everybody knows: a famous actor, a pub in Valletta, an arm-wrestling contest and a bar bill that has been retold ever since. The second was a black night off Paros with a ferry going down by the bow and small boats working among people in the water. Only one of them made the papers for more than a day, and it was not the one that mattered.

Fighting the Drug Trade

HMS Cumberland built a properly impressive record in counter-narcotics operations over the following years.

In 2003, working alongside RFA Wave Knight, she seized 3.6 tonnes of cocaine in the mid-Atlantic, and in October 2005, an interdiction off Nicaragua yielded a further two tonnes of cocaine with an estimated street value of £200 million, a particularly staggering haul that reflected just how significant a role Royal Navy frigates played in disrupting transatlantic drug trafficking routes, work that rarely made headlines to match its actual scale.

A Deadly Encounter With Somali Pirates

HMS Cumberland was assigned to anti-piracy duties with Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 from October 2008, patrolling waters off Somalia where piracy against merchant shipping had become a remarkably serious international problem.

On 11 November 2008, some 60 nautical miles south of the Yemeni coast in the Gulf of Aden, HMS Cumberland identified a dhow towing a skiff as the vessel responsible for an attack earlier that day on the Danish-flagged MV Powerful. When a boarding party moved in, the twelve pirates aboard opened fire with assault rifles; in the exchange that followed, Royal Marines returned fire, three pirates were killed and the remaining eight were captured, a stark and violent episode that underlined just how dangerous the waters off the Horn of Africa had become for merchant crews and naval patrols alike.

Two things about that action are worth setting down. The first is that it was the first time since the Falklands that the Royal Navy had killed anybody at sea. Two men were shot dead in the exchange of fire, and a third, a Yemeni, was found badly wounded and died despite being treated by Cumberland's own doctor; accounts differ over whether he was one of the pirates or one of the fishermen whose dhow they had taken, which is the sort of ambiguity that boarding a hijacked vessel at close quarters tends to produce.

The second is what happened to the eight men who surrendered. In 2008 there was no settled answer to the question of what a British warship was supposed to do with a captured pirate. Bringing them to Britain risked a claim to asylum on the grounds that they could not be safely returned to Somalia; releasing them, which had happened elsewhere, made the whole exercise pointless. Cumberland's prisoners were handed over to the Kenyan police under an arrangement between London and Nairobi, and that arrangement, hurriedly assembled around cases like this one, became the template for how the counter-piracy operation dealt with the problem for years afterwards.

Evacuating Benghazi

HMS Cumberland's final deployment had begun in late September 2010, a Gulf posting originally due to end with her return home for decommissioning. Over the following months she rotated between energy-security patrols protecting Gulf oil supply routes and the Al Basra oil platform, and escort duty for the French nuclear-powered carrier Charles de Gaulle; on Boxing Day morning 2010 she shepherded the French carrier through the Strait of Hormuz, work her commanding officer, Captain Steve Dainton, called proof of "the longstanding and close working relationship between the French Navy and us."

It is worth being blunt about why she was going home to decommission. Cumberland was one of the four Batch 3 Type 22s, 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 Strategic Defence and Security Review, as set out in the article on HMS Boxer. She was, in other words, already sentenced. What followed is one of the better arguments against that decision.

That posting turned into her final major deployment as the Libyan civil war erupted in early 2011. On 24 February that year, she entered the port of Benghazi and evacuated 454 passengers, including 129 British nationals alongside numerous other European and American citizens, carrying them to safety in Malta as the security situation in Libya deteriorated rapidly.

Lieutenant Commander James Farrant, one of her officers, later recalled the sudden change of plan bluntly: "We had literally just popped out the north end of the Suez Canal when we got the call." Captain Dainton described "fairly harrowing tales of violence" from those brought aboard, and "a great deal of relief" among evacuees at the sight of a Royal Navy warship arriving in Benghazi harbour.

HMS Cumberland went on to take part in Operation Ellamy that March, helping enforce the naval blockade against the Gaddafi regime during the wider international intervention in the Libyan civil war, before making her final entry into Devonport on 18 April 2011 following what was described as an intense and successful patrol that had encompassed oil production protection duties in the Gulf, counter-piracy operations, and the evacuation of refugees from Libya, a properly fitting final chapter for a frigate whose entire career had been built around exactly this kind of demanding, wide-ranging maritime security work.

The End of Service

HMS Cumberland was decommissioned on 23 June 2011, and was eventually sold to the Turkish shipbreaking company Leyal, scrapped in July 2013, closing out more than two decades of service that had taken her from Cold War North Atlantic deployments through drug interdiction, anti-piracy combat, and finally a dramatic evacuation from a city in the grip of civil war.

The name goes back to the 1690s, and the ship that carried it before her had form for this sort of thing too: the County-class cruiser HMS Cumberland (57) spent thirty-four hours at nearly thirty knots to get to the River Plate in December 1939 and arrived to find the fighting over, which did not stop her arrival being the thing that settled it. Justitia Tenax turned out to suit both of them. There has been no HMS Cumberland since 2011.