HMS Eskimo (F119): Blockading Rhodesia's Oil, Then Caught by the Six-Day War

Laid Down at Cowes

HMS Eskimo was built by J. Samuel White at Cowes, at a cost of £4,670,000, laid down on 22 October 1958, launched on 20 March 1960 and commissioned on 21 February 1963, a Tribal-class general-purpose frigate designed with an eye towards the kind of long-range, flag-showing colonial and post-colonial duties that increasingly defined the postwar Royal Navy's workload.

She displaced 2,300 tons standard, rising to 2,700 tons at full load, and featured a notably innovative combined steam and gas propulsion system, pairing a 12,500 shaft horsepower steam turbine with a 7,500 shaft horsepower Metrovick gas turbine on a single shaft, the two very different engines married together by gearing supplied from Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering on the Clyde at Govan, an early example of the combined propulsion arrangements that would become increasingly common in later warship designs.

Her armament included two 4.5-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, Sea Cat missiles and a Limbo anti-submarine mortar, a well-balanced fit for a frigate expected to operate independently, far from home, for long stretches at a time.

Almost everything unusual about her comes from one decision: these seven ships were designed for the Gulf and the tropics rather than for the North Atlantic. That gave the Tribals a set of features no previous British frigate had. They were fully air conditioned throughout, in the accommodation, the working spaces and the operations room alike, so that they could be sent to the Persian Gulf and simply stay there rather than needing to be modified for it. Everybody slept in a bunk instead of a hammock, which was a novelty in the Royal Navy of 1963 and mattered a great deal to anybody living in it. They were designed from the start around a helicopter, and the class was used to trial the Westland Wasp before it entered service. And they were meant to work alone: a small ship with a gun, a missile, a mortar, a helicopter and enough of everything else to deal with whatever turned up, several thousand miles from anyone who could help.

The propulsion arrangement deserves unpacking, because it looks like an eccentricity and was in fact a very practical answer to the job. A steam plant takes hours to raise from cold; a gas turbine will start and be at full power in minutes. A frigate lying at anchor off a Gulf port that suddenly needs to be somewhere at thirty knots does not have hours. So the Tribals were given both, a 12,500 horsepower steam turbine and a 7,500 horsepower Metrovick gas turbine, geared together to drive one propeller: steam for economical cruising, gas for a standing start or a sudden dash, and both together for full speed. The cost was that single shaft. One propeller and one rudder makes a ship markedly less handy, slower to accelerate and stop, and entirely dependent on nothing going wrong in the one place it can go wrong. The Admiralty knew all that and accepted it, because the ships were being built to police an empire rather than to fight a fleet.

The Beira Patrol

HMS Eskimo began her third commission in October 1966 and deployed in May 1967, sailing into a theatre already defined by perhaps the most politically fraught duty the Royal Navy took on anywhere in the world at the time: the Beira Patrol, its long-running operation to enforce international sanctions against the white minority government of Rhodesia, which had unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965 rather than accept a transition to majority rule.

The patrol had begun in March 1966, backed eventually by UN Security Council Resolution 221, after Rhodesia's own commerce minister rashly predicted that the arrival of the first sanctions-busting tanker at Beira would "win this economic war". The Admiralty took the bait with real force: the carriers HMS Ark Royal and HMS Eagle flew Gannet early-warning aircraft out to 350 miles from Beira to spot tankers, vectoring in Buccaneers or Sea Vixens to investigate and frigates to intercept, backed later by RAF Shackletons flying twelve-hour patrols from Madagascar. Most of what they found were, in the Admiralty's own dry phrase, "phantom tankers", ships that turned out not to exist or to be entirely innocent, and the whole operation nearly came unstuck within weeks when the Greek tanker Joanna V sailed brazenly into Beira under a frustrated Royal Navy escort that had no legal authority to stop her. A second stand-off in 1967, with the French tanker Artois ignoring a warning shot from HMS Minerva, eventually forced London to authorise gunfire at a tanker's bridge or engine room as a last resort. For the sailors actually on station, though, the abiding memory was rarely drama: one officer's account, printed in the Sunday Times in 1978, summed up a typical fortnight off Beira as "intense boredom, relieved only by kite-flying competitions, the dropping of mail into the sea from ancient Shackletons, while watching with increasing apathy as the ships passed unmolested".

The patrol's specific purpose was to intercept oil tankers attempting to deliver fuel to the Mozambican port of Beira, from where oil could be pumped by pipeline into landlocked Rhodesia, and it represented an unusual role for the Royal Navy, enforcing a diplomatic blockade against what had until recently been a British colony, in support of a policy that remained politically contentious both at home and internationally throughout its duration.

It is worth stating the verdict on that patrol plainly, because the Royal Navy did it superbly and it achieved essentially nothing. It ran from April 1966 to 25 June 1975, nine years and three months. Seventy-six warships took part. It cost the British taxpayer more than £100 million. And Rhodesia did not run short of oil, because the oil came in by rail from South Africa and by half a dozen other routes that had nothing to do with the Beira pipeline, some of it handled by British companies. By 1967 the government in London privately understood that the embargo had failed. The patrol was kept going for another eight years anyway, largely because withdrawing it would have been read internationally as Britain abandoning sanctions altogether. Every ship on that station, Eskimo included, was maintaining a policy its own government had already concluded did not work.

It ended, in the end, not because anybody decided anything but because the map changed underneath it. Portugal's revolution led to Mozambican independence in 1975, and the new government in Maputo gave an undertaking that no oil would be transhipped to Rhodesia. The pipeline the whole operation existed to close was closed by the country it ran through. The Royal Navy went home on 25 June 1975 having stopped, over nine years, no meaningful quantity of oil whatsoever.

Caught by the Six-Day War

Under the command of Captain Simon Cassels, a career naval officer who would go on to become Second Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Personnel by the mid-1980s, HMS Eskimo arrived at Port Said on 5 June 1967, intending to transit the Suez Canal as part of her onward journey, only to find her plans overtaken by events entirely beyond naval control: that very day marked the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours, a conflict that would shortly see the Suez Canal closed to shipping entirely and remain closed for years afterwards.

With her planned transit no longer possible, HMS Eskimo instead spent three months operating out of Malta in the Mediterranean before being rerouted the long way round entirely, via Gibraltar and Simonstown on the southern tip of Africa, a considerably longer and more roundabout journey than originally planned. It did, however, put her exactly where the Beira Patrol needed her: she ran two patrols off the Mozambique coast during the passage before continuing on to Mombasa and finally arriving on station in Bahrain in December 1967, seven months after leaving Portsmouth.

Supporting the Withdrawal from Aden

HMS Eskimo reached Bahrain in December 1967, and in 1968 replaced her sister ship HMS Ashanti off Aden, supporting the British military withdrawal from the colony as it moved towards independence, part of the broader wave of decolonisation east of Suez that was reshaping Britain's military commitments across the region during this period.

It was exactly the kind of steady, unglamorous presence duty, protecting withdrawing forces and shipping rather than fighting any set-piece action, that increasingly defined naval service in the Gulf and Arabian Sea region as the British Empire's formal presence there wound down.

Tristan da Cunha to the Bicentennial

The 1970s took HMS Eskimo just as far afield in rather less fraught circumstances. In September 1970 she called at Tristan da Cunha, the remote, still-inhabited British island territory in the South Atlantic that ranks among the most isolated year-round settlements on Earth, before returning home to Chatham for a lengthy modernisation refit beginning in July 1971. Under the command of Alan Grose from 1974 to 1975, she then deployed to the Caribbean as West Indies Guardship, a posting that turned genuinely historic in 1976: Eskimo called at Montevideo at a moment of Argentinian sabre-rattling in the South Atlantic, then escorted the Royal Yacht Britannia, with the Queen embarked, to the American Bicentennial celebrations, before making the long way home via Goose Bay in Canada.

Reserve, Cannibalisation, and Scrapping

Due to a manpower shortage within the Royal Navy, HMS Eskimo was reduced to reserve status in 1980 and placed on the disposal list the following year.

Rather than being sold on intact, she was cannibalised in 1984 for spare parts to support three of her Tribal-class sister ships that had been sold to Indonesia, a quietly useful final contribution, keeping former fleet-mates running even after her own operational life had ended.

That detail is worth sitting with. Three of the Tribals went to Indonesia in the mid-1980s and needed keeping running; Eskimo, laid up and unwanted, was taken apart to supply them. A ship built at Cowes for £4,670,000 in 1963, designed to be self-sufficient at the far end of the world, finished her existence as a parts bin for her own sisters under a foreign ensign. She then sat at Pembroke Dock for six years reserved as a gunnery target, was never actually shot at, and was towed to Spain in 1992 to be cut up. It took the Royal Navy twelve years to finish disposing of her, which is longer than the Beira Patrol lasted.

She did not go quietly even then. On 16 January 1986 the hulk was towed from Portsmouth to Pembroke Dock with the intention of using her as a live target ship, a fate that in the end she never suffered; she sat there degrading instead until, on 14 May 1992, the tug Ardneil finally towed her out for the last time, arriving at Bilbao, Spain, five days later to be broken up by Demolicion Naval del Norte S.A. It closed out the career of a frigate whose most memorable work had involved not combat against an enemy fleet, but the patient, politically fraught business of enforcing sanctions and supporting an empire's gradual, orderly retreat.