HMS Duncan (F80): The Cod War Frigate Given the Freedom of Hull

Built by Thornycroft

HMS Duncan was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company, her keel laid on 17 December 1953 and launched on 30 May 1957, a Blackwood-class Type 14 anti-submarine frigate commissioned into the Royal Navy on 21 October 1958, displacing 1,456 tons at full load, 310 feet in length and armed with three 40mm Bofors guns and two Limbo Mark 10 anti-submarine mortars.

Those two mortars were the entire point of her, and they are worth describing. Limbo, formally Anti-Submarine Mortar Mark 10, was the last and best of the British ahead-throwing weapons, the end of a line that ran through Hedgehog and Squid. Three barrels threw three bombs of about four hundred pounds apiece, each carrying a 207lb charge, out ahead of the ship in a triangular pattern at anything from four hundred to a thousand yards, fused to burst at a depth set before firing so that the three explosions boxed the submarine in rather than merely landing near her. The whole thing loaded and fired automatically with every man under cover, and it was aimed not from the bridge but from the sonar control room, where three operators worked the Type 170 attack set and effectively pointed the weapon in bearing, range and depth; the captain gave the order from the operations room next door and somebody else pressed the button. It is a remarkably modern way of fighting for 1958, and it is why a ship with three small guns and half an engine room was taken seriously.

She was, by design, a cut-price ship. The Blackwood class was built specifically to do one job cheaply rather than several jobs well, packing only half the machinery of the pricier Type 12 Whitby-class frigates and, in early service, no proper gun at all, earning the whole class the affectionately unkind nickname "futility frigates" in the wardroom. The joke rather backfired: precisely because they were too specialised to be pulled off for anything else, Blackwoods spent more time on pure anti-submarine training than their supposedly superior sisters and were, for a while, reckoned the sharpest submarine-hunters in the fleet.

The economics behind that are worth spelling out. A Whitby-class Type 12 cost the Admiralty about £3.5 million a ship, which in the early 1950s was more than the Treasury was prepared to spend on the numbers the Navy said it needed against the Soviet submarine fleet. So the constructors were asked for something with the same sonar and the same mortars and nothing else at all, built faster and cheaper. The result was the Type 14; there was never a Type 13. What went overboard was half the machinery, most of the armament and the second propeller shaft, which is the detail that mattered most in practice. A single screw behind a single large rudder makes a ship cheap and makes her handy at low speed, and it also means that a serious defect in the engine room leaves you waiting for a tow. What the class kept was the ability to find and kill a submarine, and its own guide is worth a look for the full picture: Royal Navy Blackwood Class Frigates.

Leading the Fishery Protection Squadron

HMS Duncan served as leader of the Fishery Protection Squadron from 1958 to 1965, and in that role took part in the First Cod War against Iceland, a sharp three-month dispute from September to November 1958 that was the earliest of three postwar confrontations between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights. At its height, 37 Royal Navy warships were operating in Icelandic waters, working in defensive "boxes" that physically blocked Icelandic patrol boats, dismissively nicknamed "gunboats" by the British press, from reaching the trawlers they were trying to arrest.

The First Cod War is the least remembered of the three and it set the template for both the others. Iceland's twelve-mile zone came into force at the end of August 1958 and took effect on 1 September; Britain refused to recognise it and sent the fleet. What Duncan and her consorts actually did was not fight. They formed boxes, patrolling a defined area of sea around a group of trawlers so that an Icelandic patrol vessel physically could not get in to put a boarding party on anyone, and the trawlers fished inside them. Real clashes were rare. It was three years of exhausting, freezing, largely uneventful seamanship, and it ended in 1961 with Britain recognising the twelve-mile limit after all, in exchange for some limited access over the following three years, with Reykjavik once again raising the possibility of leaving NATO. Two more rounds followed, and Britain lost those as well; the whole arc is set out in the article on HMS Diomede (F16).

The Iceland patrols exposed a genuine weakness in the Blackwood-class design: their hulls, built light to save cost and weight, proved too flimsy for the heavy seas routinely encountered off Iceland and had to be reinforced mid-dispute simply to keep the ships seaworthy on station, an inconvenient discovery for a class whose whole selling point had been doing more for less.

It is worth appreciating what that actually meant for the men aboard. A 1,456-ton frigate with a light hull, in a North Atlantic winter, hove to off Iceland for weeks at a time, was an extremely unpleasant place to be, and the ships were coming back with structural complaints rather than battle damage. The Admiralty had bought cheap seakeeping along with everything else it had bought cheap, and the bill arrived in the one place nobody had expected to be sent.

In August 1960, between spells guarding the fishing grounds, HMS Duncan took on rather more dignified duties, serving as escort to the Royal Yacht Britannia.

Her contribution to defending the interests of British trawlermen during the Cod War dispute was formally recognised when she received the Freedom of the City of Hull, a notably significant civic honour reflecting just how closely the fortunes of Hull's fishing fleet were tied to the Royal Navy vessels sent to protect them.

The name she carried had form for this sort of work. She was named for Adam Duncan, who won the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 and who, a few months before it, held the entire Dutch battle fleet in port with two ships and a great deal of nerve; that story is told in the article on HMS Duncan (D37). Hull gave the frigate that carried his name its freedom for standing between Icelandic gunboats and Hull trawlermen. Fifteen years later Britain conceded the two-hundred-mile limit, and Hull's distant-water fishing fleet ceased to exist. The city kept the honour. It did not get to keep the industry.

In 1964, HMS Duncan fired ceremonial guns to mark the opening of the Forth Road Bridge, a rather more festive duty than her usual fishery protection work.

A Training Ship for Anti-Submarine Warfare

Following a 1966 refit and modernisation at Rosyth Naval Dockyard, HMS Duncan transitioned to anti-submarine training duties, serving first with the Londonderry Squadron and then, from 1969, with the Portland Training Squadron, work focused on preparing sailors for the specialised demands of submarine detection and prosecution rather than front-line operational service. She paid off from this training role on 2 April 1971.

The Londonderry posting was a more serious business than the word squadron suggests, and it did not last. The Joint Anti-Submarine School sat at Ebrington Barracks on the Foyle, commissioned as HMS Sea Eagle, and it existed because submarine hunting is the one form of warfare that cannot be taught anywhere but at sea with real ships, real submarines and real aircraft all in the water together; the full account of it is in the article on HMS Grafton (F51). What is worth adding here is why Duncan moved to Portland in 1969. The closure of the Londonderry school had been announced in 1965 and it was wound down over the rest of the decade; in 1970 the site went back to the British Army, took its old name again and became the headquarters of 8th Infantry Brigade. The place where the Royal Navy had taught the Atlantic alliance to hunt Soviet submarines became a garrison headquarters for the Troubles, more or less overnight.

A Final Chapter at Rosyth

During the early 1980s, HMS Duncan served at Rosyth Dockyard as a harbour training ship for marine engineering apprentices, a quiet but remarkably useful final chapter for a ship whose earlier career had put her at the centre of a properly significant national dispute over fishing rights.

She was decommissioned in 1984 and broken up in February 1985, closing out more than a quarter century of service that had carried her from Cod War confrontations off Iceland to training the next generation of Royal Navy engineers back home in Scotland.

One last thing about the design, because the Type 14 has a coda nobody expects. Twelve were built for the Royal Navy, Blackwood, Duncan, Dundas, Exmouth, Grafton, Hardy, Keppel, Malcolm, Murray, Palliser, Pellew and Russell, and three more were supplied to India as Khukri, Kirpan and Kuthar. The Indian ships were the same cheap, single-screw, mortar-armed submarine hunters, sold to a navy that needed exactly what the Admiralty had needed and had the same difficulty paying for it.

On the evening of 9 December 1971, off the coast of Gujarat, Khukri and Kirpan were hunting a Pakistani submarine. They found her, or rather she found them. PNS Hangor, a French-built Daphne-class boat, fired first at Kirpan; the torpedo failed to go off. Kirpan turned away and fired her mortars. Khukri increased speed and turned towards the submarine, which is exactly what she had been designed and built to do, and Hangor put a second torpedo into her under the oil tanks. She sank in minutes with eighteen officers and a hundred and seventy-six sailors aboard, among them her commanding officer, Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla, who is said to have given away his own lifejacket and stayed with the ship.

She remains the only Indian warship ever lost in action. She was also the first warship anywhere sunk by a submarine since 1945, and the only one until HMS Conqueror sank the General Belgrano eleven years later. So the cheap little anti-submarine frigate that the wardroom called a futility frigate, the one design in the postwar Royal Navy built for nothing but killing submarines, holds the distinction of being the first ship in a generation to be killed by one. There is no arguing with that, and there is not much to say about it either.

The British ships had quieter ends, with one genuine exception. HMS Exmouth (F84) was taken in hand in 1966 and came back to the fleet in June 1968 with an Olympus gas turbine for full power and two Proteus for cruising and nothing else at all, the first major warship in the world to run entirely on gas turbines. The Olympus went on to power the Type 42 destroyers and the Type 21 and Type 22 frigates and became one of the most successful British defence exports there has ever been. The cheapest ships the Navy could bring itself to buy turned out to be the ones it could afford to experiment with, and the experiment settled how every British warship since has been driven.