HMS Dumbarton Castle (P265): From Falklands Despatch Runs to the Beirut Explosion

Built at Aberdeen

HMS Dumbarton Castle was built by Hall, Russell and Company at Aberdeen, yard number 986, her keel laid on 25 April 1980, launched on 3 June 1981, and completed on 12 March 1982, commissioning at Rosyth on 26 March that year, a Castle-class offshore patrol vessel displacing 1,350 long tons standard, capable of 20 knots, and carrying capacity for 25 embarked Royal Marines alongside her own crew of six officers and thirty-nine ratings.

There were meant to be six of her and there were two. The Castle class was designed by David K. Brown as an answer to a set of complaints about the Island-class patrol vessels that had gone before: too slow, uncomfortable in a seaway, and with nowhere to land a helicopter. The Castles were about three hundred tonnes bigger, some three knots faster, far steadier in bad weather, and carried a flight deck large enough to take a Sea King, which on a ship of this size is a startling amount of deck to give up. Four of the six were never ordered. The two that were built spent their careers proving the design had been right, which is a familiar shape of story in British shipbuilding.

The name in that design credit deserves following up, because David K. Brown is one of the more remarkable figures in modern British naval architecture and almost nobody outside the trade has heard of him. He was born in Leeds in 1928, spent his entire working life in the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, and retired at the end of 1988 as Deputy Chief Naval Architect at the Ministry of Defence. Two designs were his personally: the preliminary design of the Tribal-class Type 81 frigates in the 1950s, the ships that took HMS Ashanti (F117) and her sisters east of Suez, and the full design of the Castles.

What he did afterwards is the unusual part. Having spent thirty-five years designing warships, he sat down and wrote the history of designing warships, and did it better than any academic has managed. Warrior to Dreadnought, The Grand Fleet, Nelson to Vanguard and Rebuilding the Royal Navy between them cover British warship design from 1860 to the 1990s, written by a man who had actually done the sums, and they are still the standard works. He also wrote the centenary history of his own corps in 1983. His last book, Atlantic Escorts, came out shortly before he died in 2008.

It gives the two-ships-out-of-six story a slightly different flavour. The man who drew this ship went on to write the definitive account of how the Royal Navy has designed its ships and, by extension, of how often perfectly good designs were cut short for reasons that had nothing to do with the ships. He would have known exactly what happened to the other four Castles, and precisely why.

What they were built for is worth stating, because it connects to a war Britain lost. The Castles were fishery protection ships, drawn up to police the United Kingdom's two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone. That zone existed because Iceland had spent the best part of twenty years fighting the Royal Navy for the right to declare one, and had won; the principle became universal in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, the same year Dumbarton Castle commissioned. That story is told in the article on HMS Diomede (F16). The Royal Navy fought hard against the two-hundred-mile limit and then built ships specifically to enforce its own.

Racing South Within Weeks of Commissioning

HMS Dumbarton Castle sailed from Rosyth on 26 April 1982, barely a month after commissioning, and called first at Portsmouth to be hurriedly fitted with extra communications equipment and a desalination plant, kit her original design had never anticipated needing but that a sudden war in the South Atlantic made essential. She departed for the South Atlantic on 1 May, arriving at Ascension Island on 11 May amid the Falklands War.

She served as a despatch vessel, ferrying stores between Ascension Island and the main Task Force, a particularly urgent and useful role for so new a ship to be thrust into so soon after entering service, and one that earned her the battle honour Falkland Islands 1982.

Two Decades Guarding the Falklands

HMS Dumbarton Castle went on to spend the better part of two decades alternating with her sister ship HMS Leeds Castle on Falkland Islands and South Georgia guard ship and fishery protection duty, including a three-year deployment beginning in August 1991 and a further three-year deployment between 1998 and 2000, notably long stretches of demanding, remote service protecting British interests in the South Atlantic. On station she flew "up threat" radar picket duty, resupplied the small garrison on South Georgia and paid visits to outlying settlements whose residents sometimes hadn't seen another soul in months, but her real bread and butter was policing the Falklands' own fishing grounds against large foreign factory ships. The tactic was pure cloak and dagger: on more than one occasion, under cover of darkness, Dumbarton Castle would douse her proper navigation lights, switch on the lights of an ordinary fishing boat, and drift in among a suspected illegal trawler fleet entirely unnoticed, before suddenly switching her lights back and putting a boarding party across before anyone had a chance to dump the evidence.

She had one other job that rarely gets mentioned. From May 2002 to May 2003 Dumbarton Castle served as flagship of Commander Mine Countermeasures Force (North), which meant a fishery protection vessel spent a year as the headquarters ship for the Royal Navy's northern mine warfare organisation. It is the sort of thing that happens to a ship with plenty of accommodation, a big flight deck and no pressing commitments elsewhere, and it says something about how useful a well-designed general-purpose hull turns out to be once the navy stops thinking about what it was drawn for.

Her ship's company's contribution was recognised in rather more permanent fashion than a mere line on a list. In 2007, under Lieutenant Commander Wood, the crew were given permission to add her name to the hillside above Stanley in individual stones, each letter weighing four tons and the whole memorial measuring fifteen by seven metres, a task Chief Petty Officer Jamie Stewart later said left him feeling "you could really sense the belonging of Dumbarton Castle to the Falkland Islands." Her commanding officer called it a fitting finale for a ship whose company had, in his words, embraced the job with "a robust sense of humour" right to the end.

The End of Royal Navy Service

HMS Dumbarton Castle was finally replaced by HMS Clyde, leaving Mare Harbour in the Falklands for the last time on 27 September 2007 and returning to Portsmouth after her final patrol on 22 November that year, streaming the traditional paying-off pennant, one foot for every day of her commission, as she came home. It closed out twenty-five years of Royal Navy service, almost all of it connected in some way to the Falklands mission she had first sailed toward within weeks of her original commissioning.

The pattern she established outlived her. HMS Clyde, the ship that took her place, was a River-class patrol vessel built specifically for the Falklands job and leased rather than bought, and the Batch 2 Rivers that police British waters today are direct descendants of the same idea: a cheap, roomy, long-legged hull with a flight deck, sent to do the unglamorous constabulary work that the fleet's expensive ships cannot be spared for. Dumbarton Castle spent twenty-five years demonstrating that this was worth doing, mostly in the South Atlantic, mostly in the dark, mostly in weather.

A New Life, and the Beirut Explosion

HMS Dumbarton Castle was sold to Bangladesh in April 2010, departing Portsmouth on 21 May that year for a regeneration project at Newcastle, completed that December, before recommissioning into the Bangladesh Navy in March 2011 as BNS Bijoy, considerably more heavily armed than she had ever been under the White Ensign.

In an extraordinary twist to her story, BNS Bijoy was moored within 200 metres of the blast site when Beirut's port went up on 4 August 2020 while she was serving with the UNIFIL Maritime Task Force off the coast of Lebanon, one of the largest accidental explosions in recorded history. Around 21 to 23 of her Bangladeshi crew needed hospital treatment, and the ship herself suffered genuine structural damage: doors and hatches blown off their fittings, electronics and navigation equipment wrecked. She was relieved on station by the newly commissioned corvette BNS Shongram on 9 August and sent on to Turkey for repair, a remarkable and entirely unexpected final chapter for a vessel originally built to patrol the cold waters of the South Atlantic, whose career had already spanned a war, two decades of remote island patrol, and a complete change of flag.

The scale of what she survived is difficult to convey. Roughly 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had been sitting in hangar 12 at the port since October 2014, offloaded from a Moldovan-flagged ship called the Rhosus that had put in the previous November and never left. When it went up it released energy comparable to 1.1 kilotons of TNT, registered on seismographs as the equivalent of a magnitude 3.3 earthquake, killed 218 people, injured about seven thousand, damaged seventy-seven thousand apartments and left some three hundred thousand people without a home. Bijoy was two hundred metres away. That she lost her doors, her hatches and her electronics but stayed afloat, upright and manned, with her people walking off to hospital rather than being carried, is a considerable testimonial to a small Aberdeen-built patrol ship then in her thirty-ninth year.

She did not stay in Turkey long. The ocean tug TCG İnebolu took her under tow to the Turkish naval shipyard at Aksaz, on the Aegean coast, where the damage was made good, and she was home in Bangladesh on 25 October 2020, which is less than three months from the morning the port went up.

The ship that took her place is worth a note, because it says a good deal about how the Bangladesh Navy has changed. BNS Shongram is not a Castle and is nobody's sister: she is a Chinese-built Type 056 guided missile corvette, launched at Wuchang in February 2018, handed over in March 2019 and commissioned on 18 June 2020. She sailed for Lebanon on 9 August 2020, seven weeks after commissioning, to relieve a thirty-eight-year-old patrol ship that had just had her doors blown off.

Bijoy's actual sister went the same way she did. HMS Leeds Castle (P258), the only other Castle ever built, was decommissioned at Portsmouth in August 2005 after twenty-four years and also went to Bangladesh, where she serves as BNS Dhaleshwari. So both of David K. Brown's patrol vessels are still at sea in the Bay of Bengal, forty-odd years on, doing more or less the job he drew them for. Four were cancelled to save money. The two that were built have outlasted a great deal of what was bought instead of them.