HMS Dido (F104): Laid Down as a Different Ship Entirely

A Ship That Changed Class Mid-Build

HMS Dido was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders of Glasgow, originally laid down on 2 December 1959 as a Rothesay-class frigate to be named Hastings, before her design was changed to the newer Leander class in 1960, a notably significant mid-construction redesign.

The renaming is the part worth pausing on, because it was a promotion. Hastings, Weymouth and Fowey are small-ship names, the sort given to sloops and elderly cruisers sent to sit off a river mouth in the 1930s and show the flag, and that is the register the Rothesays were named in. The Leanders took the names of the Second World War light cruisers instead, so the three hulls caught mid-build emerged as Leander, Ajax and Dido. The second of those had been at the River Plate. The third had spent her war being bombed in the Mediterranean, and her story is told in the article on HMS Dido (37). A frigate laid down as a Hastings finished as the successor to an anti-aircraft cruiser that fired the last naval shot of the war in Europe, which is a considerable upgrade in ancestry to get out of a change of drawing.

She was not the only one caught up in the switch. Two other Rothesay hulls under construction at the same time were converted the same way, lengthened by two feet and altered throughout: one, to have been named Weymouth, instead became the class leader herself, HMS Leander, and the other, to have been named Fowey, became HMS Ajax.

She was formally named Dido on 21 December 1961, with her launch delayed a day to 22 December owing to fog, and commissioned on 18 September 1963 at a total construction cost of £4,600,000, displacing 2,380 long tons standard.

The Far East and the Confrontation

HMS Dido was assigned to the Far East in 1964, joining the 22nd Escort Group and taking part in the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, the low-level but remarkably dangerous undeclared conflict fought over the formation of Malaysia. She spent much of her time on patrol off the coast of Borneo, one of as many as eighty Royal Navy, Royal Australian, Royal Malaysian and Royal New Zealand Navy ships, mostly frigates, destroyers, minesweepers and patrol craft, watching that stretch of coastline for Indonesian infiltrators between 1963 and 1966.

She became leader of the 21st Escort Group in 1965, before reassignment to NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 1969, taking part in the fleet review at Spithead marking NATO's twentieth anniversary on 16 May that year.

A Television Career and a Major Rebuild

Like her sister ship HMS Danae, HMS Dido found herself playing the fictional HMS Hero in the BBC television drama Warship during the 1970s, a curious shared claim to fame between the two Leander-class frigates. The main stand-in was actually HMS Phoebe, who conveniently shared Hero's fictional pennant number, F42, but a whole supporting cast of real frigates took their turn in front of the cameras alongside Dido and Danae, including HMS Diomede, HMS Hermione, HMS Juno and HMS Jupiter, with HMAS Derwent standing in for location filming in Hong Kong and Singapore in 1976. Hero, it turned out, needed rather a lot of body doubles.

HMS Dido underwent an extensive refit at Devonport between July 1975 and October 1978, converted to the Batch 1B Ikara configuration at a cost of £23,000,000. Ikara was an Australian-designed anti-submarine weapon that flew a homing torpedo out to a suspected submarine's last known position rather than firing one through the water, a substantial extension of her attack range that kept her properly relevant for a further stretch of front-line service.

Ikara is worth describing properly, because it is one of the more elegant ideas of the Cold War and almost nobody remembers it. The name is an Aboriginal word for a throwing stick, which is precisely what it did. The ship's sonar found a submarine; the missile went off the rail and was flown out under radio command from the ship's own plot, up to about ten nautical miles; at the calculated point it shed its rear fin and the covering over its payload and dropped a Mark 44 or Mark 46 homing torpedo on a parachute. Then, rather cleverly, the missile body flew on and splashed down a good distance clear, so that its own arrival in the water would not give the torpedo's seeker head something else to chase. A contact ten miles off could be attacked in a couple of minutes instead of the half hour it took a frigate to close the range, and the frigate never had to enter the submarine's own torpedo envelope to do it. The Royal Navy fit on the converted Leanders was GWS.41, with twelve missiles in the magazine.

What it cost her was the whole forward gun. The twin 4.5-inch turret came out and nothing replaced it; in its place went a zareba holding the launcher, with the magazine and handling gear buried underneath, and two Sea Cat launchers went up on the hangar roof. From October 1978 a 2,500-ton frigate went to sea with nothing heavier aboard than a pair of 40mm Bofors, a Sea Cat launcher for aircraft and a helicopter. It was a wholly logical answer to the Soviet submarine problem and no answer at all to anything else. She was the eighth and last of the eight Leanders put through the conversion, following Leander herself in 1972, then Ajax, Galatea, Aurora, Euryalus and Arethusa. The arithmetic deserves a second look too. Twenty-three million pounds to rebuild a ship that had cost four and a half million to build, over three years and three months, which is very nearly as long as it took Yarrow to construct her from a bare slipway in the first place.

She returned briefly to the Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 1983.

A New Life as HMNZS Southland

Following the 1981 Defence Review, which led to significant reductions across the Royal Navy's frigate fleet, the New Zealand government agreed to purchase HMS Dido on 19 October 1981. She was formally handed over and renamed HMNZS Southland at Portsmouth on 18 July 1983, then sailed for Southampton the very next day for a five-month, $15 million refit at the Vosper yard, before finally being properly commissioned into Royal New Zealand Navy service on 21 December 1983.

The reasoning behind that purchase says a good deal about how small navies actually work. New Zealand needed to replace two ageing frigates, Otago and Taranaki, and had no prospect of affording new construction; the 1981 British review, busy cutting perfectly serviceable ships out of the Royal Navy, put a shelf of them on the market all at once. The Defence Minister, David Thomson, put it plainly enough: in the existing financial circumstances it was necessary to seize any opportunity to acquire effective operational part-life vessels rather than buy a new ship. Two were taken, Dido and Bacchante, the latter becoming HMNZS Wellington. Some New Zealand accounts are blunter still, and suggest Dido was the ship the RNZN had to take in order to be allowed Bacchante, which was the one it actually wanted. What made her worth having on her own account was the Ikara installation: an anti-submarine system only five years old, arriving complete, on a hull the buyer could afford.

Southland departed Southampton for New Zealand on 9 May 1984, sailing by way of the eastern seaboard of the United States, the Panama Canal and Pearl Harbour, and, after calling at Bluff and Wellington, reached her new home port of Auckland on 26 July 1984, giving her a substantial second career on the other side of the world.

The Ikara did not last. New Zealand had acquired the only such system it would ever operate, and within a few years the sums had turned against it. Plans drawn up around 1986 for a major refit that would have kept the capability viable into the mid-1990s were shelved, and in 1989 Ikara was withdrawn from Royal New Zealand Navy service altogether; a low-cost refit at the dockyard in Auckland filled the hole and turned her back into a general-purpose frigate, which is what she remained for the rest of her career. She had been converted at Devonport in Plymouth and unconverted at Devonport in Auckland, and the specialism that had been the whole argument for buying her lasted six years out of her thirty-two.

She went on to serve as Waitangi Day guardship on several occasions, took part in search and rescue operations for the yachts Salano in 1991 and Windsong in 1993, and in 1992 was deployed rather less gloriously against paua poachers off Bluff as part of Operation Octanus, a joint operation with New Zealand's Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the Police. She was decommissioned on 1 March 1995.

The End of Service

The former HMS Dido was towed to the Philippines in November 1995, where her boilers were removed, before being sent on to Goa in India for final scrapping, closing out a career that had begun life under an entirely different name and class, and ended it having served two different Commonwealth navies across more than three decades of continuous service.