HMS Dundas (F48): First of Her Class, Once Filmed With Ava Gardner

Cowes-Built

HMS Dundas was built by J. Samuel White and Company at Cowes, her keel laid on 17 October 1952 and launched on 25 September 1953, a Blackwood-class Type 14 anti-submarine frigate acquired by the Royal Navy in March 1956 and commissioned on 16 March that year, the first ship of her class to enter service, ahead of her many sister ships built to the same specialised anti-submarine design.

HMS Dundas shared her builder with two of her sister ships, HMS Exmouth and HMS Grafton, also laid down at J. Samuel White's yard at Cowes, while the rest of the twelve-strong Blackwood class was built across four other yards on the Clyde, the Tyne and the Solent. The design itself was a deliberate economy measure: the Admiralty's Whitby-class frigates were excellent submarine hunters but expensive and slow to build, so the Type 14 Blackwoods were conceived as a cheaper, stripped-down "second-rate" alternative, trading top speed and heavy gun armament for a sonar and anti-submarine mortar fit that matched the larger ships almost pound for pound. Dundas herself cost £1,434,000 to build, a modest sum even by the standards of 1956.

What that economy actually bought, and what it cost in the water, is set out in the article on HMS Duncan (F80). The figure to hold against that £1,434,000 is £3.5 million, which is roughly what a Whitby cost. The Admiralty got two and a half submarine hunters for the price of one, and what it gave up was everything else a frigate might conceivably be asked to do.

It did not quite work out that way, either, and the Cod Wars are where the bill arrived. The Type 14s were so narrowly specialised that the Royal Navy had real difficulty finding them anything else to do, and one of the things it found was fishery protection off Iceland. They were the wrong ships for it. A hull designed and pared down for hunting submarines in the open Atlantic on a fixed budget was never intended to be shouldered by a gunboat, or driven hard through ice and a northern winter, and the class's hulls turned out to be too weak for the work; they had to be strengthened before they could go on doing it. A frigate that was cheap because it did one thing properly was sent to do a different thing and had to be rebuilt in order to survive it.

One of those two Cowes-built sisters went on to change the Royal Navy, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write about a Type 14. In 1966 HMS Exmouth had her steam turbines and boilers taken out altogether and replaced with gas turbines: one Olympus for full power and two Proteus for cruising, in an arrangement known as COGOG, in which the two types could not be run at the same time. She was the first major warship in the world to go to sea on gas turbines alone. It did not begin well. An entire ring of Olympus blades failed after sixty-four hours of running, which is precisely the sort of thing a trials ship exists to find out. She spent the 1970s proving the idea until it worked, and every Type 42 destroyer, every Type 21 and every Type 22 frigate that followed went to sea on the engine she had debugged. The cheap frigate nobody wanted turned out to be the one that mattered, and her own story is told in the article on HMS Exmouth (F84).

The yard has gone. J. Samuel White of Cowes had been building ships on the Medina since the eighteenth century and destroyers since the beginning of the twentieth, and it closed for shipbuilding in the mid-1960s, less than a decade after Dundas commissioned. She is one of the last warships it ever produced.

Like the rest of her class, HMS Dundas was named after a Napoleonic-era naval officer, in her case Admiral Sir James Whitley Deans Dundas, who commanded the Mediterranean fleet during the Crimean War, directed the bombardment of Sevastopol in October 1854, and was relieved of the command in January 1855 on completing his term, a rather more explosive career than anything the frigate that carried his name would go on to see.

He was also a man whose war did not go especially well, which the record tends to smooth over. Deans Dundas moved the army to the Crimea, supported the landings at the Alma and directed the ships in the bombardment of Sevastopol on 17 October 1854, an attack on stone forts by wooden ships that achieved very little and cost him a good deal. He and his second-in-command, Sir Edmund Lyons, disliked each other cordially and disagreed about almost everything, and when Deans Dundas completed the usual term of command and went home in January 1855 it was Lyons who took over for the rest of the war. There is a second Admiral Dundas in the same conflict, which is where a good deal of confusion comes from: the Baltic Fleet in 1855, ninety-nine warships and 3,318 guns, was commanded by Rear-Admiral the Hon. Richard Saunders Dundas, who is not the man this ship was named after.

A Brush With Hollywood

HMS Dundas made an unexpected appearance in popular culture in 1957, featuring in the Ava Gardner film The Little Hut, an MGM adaptation of a French stage farce about a shipwrecked love triangle marooned on a desert island, whose plot obligingly resolves itself once a passing vessel turns up to rescue the cast, precisely the kind of unglamorous cameo a real frigate is built for. It was a properly unusual claim to fame for a purpose-built anti-submarine frigate barely a year into service, and she made a second, briefer appearance in 1964 in "The Price of Valour", an episode of the Look at Life documentary series screened in cinemas up and down the country, giving her a small but real footprint in mid-century British cinema and television alongside her actual naval duties.

Portland and the Silver Jubilee

HMS Dundas served with the 2nd Frigate Squadron based at Portland from 1966, taking part in Portsmouth Navy Days that year, and underwent a fourteen-month refit at Gibraltar completed with her recommissioning on 21 June 1968.

She returned to Portsmouth Navy Days in 1970, still serving with the Second Frigate Squadron, and took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's twenty-five years on the throne.

An Abrupt End to Active Service

HMS Dundas's active career ended in unusual fashion: an unrepairable defect was discovered in her propeller shaft shortly after departing Portsmouth, serious enough that she was transferred directly to Chatham Dockyard rather than repaired at sea or in ordinary refit, and her crew transferred to her sister ship HMS Hardy, salvaging spare parts and equipment from HMS Dundas in the process, an unceremonious practical end to her seagoing duties rather than any planned decommissioning ceremony.

The End of Service

HMS Dundas arrived at Troon on 31 March 1983 to be broken up, tying up at the harbour's East Breakwater alongside the many other Cold War escorts that met the same fate once cheaper, missile-armed frigates made her generation's specialised anti-submarine design obsolete. She was scrapped there that April, closing out a service life of twenty-seven years that had begun as the very first Blackwood-class frigate to commission and had, along the way, included a notably surprising credit in a mid-century Hollywood film.

The manner of her ending deserves a note, because it says something about how the Royal Navy handled these ships. There was no ceremony, no last entry into Portsmouth, no paying-off pennant. A shaft defect was found, the ship was declared not worth repairing, her company walked across to another frigate, and men then came aboard to strip out anything Hardy might need. She had been the first of her class into service and she went out as a source of spares for one of her own sisters. Twenty-seven years of work ended with somebody unbolting her fittings.

Twelve Type 14s were built for the Royal Navy and three more for India, and it is one of the Indian ships that gave this modest, unloved design its permanent place in naval history. INS Khukri was a Blackwood, built to the same drawings as Dundas and doing the same job. On 9 December 1971, off Diu on the Gujarat coast, she was hunting a Pakistani submarine when the Daphné-class boat Hangor found her first and put a torpedo into her that went off under her oil tanks. She sank in a matter of minutes. Eighteen officers and a hundred and seventy-six sailors died with her, among them her captain, Mahendra Nath Mulla, who stayed aboard and was lost; he was posthumously given the Maha Vir Chakra and remains the only Indian commanding officer ever to go down with his ship.

That night mattered well beyond the two countries involved. Khukri was the first warship anywhere in the world sunk in action by a submarine since the Second World War, and she is still the only warship independent India has lost in a war. There is a memorial to her above the sea at Diu: a scale model of the ship in a glass case on a hilltop, facing out towards the water she went down in.

Which leaves the Type 14 with an oddly distinguished record for a class nobody wanted. Designed as the cheap option and too specialised to be much use at anything else. Found too lightly built for Icelandic weather and strengthened after the fact. One of them rebuilt into the first major warship in the world to go to sea on gas turbines alone, and another lost in the only submarine kill of the entire postwar era. Dundas herself did none of it. She made a film in 1957, hunted submarines out of Portland for twenty years, went to the Jubilee Review, broke a propeller shaft and was taken to pieces for spares. Somebody has to be the ordinary one.