HMS Euryalus (F15): From Borneo's Rivers to Two Tours Blockading Rhodesia

Greenock-Built

HMS Euryalus was built by Scotts Shipbuilders at Greenock, who also provided her steam turbines, with the gearing supplied by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering on the Clyde at Govan, exactly as on her Tribal-class predecessors. She was laid down on 2 November 1961, launched on 6 June 1963, and commissioned on 16 September 1964 at a cost of £4,350,000, a Leander-class general-purpose frigate, one of the most successful and numerous classes of frigate the Royal Navy ever operated.

She measured 267 feet 10 inches in length with a beam of 48 feet 4 inches, displaced 2,450 tons standard, and her Yarrow boilers and Admiralty steam turbines produced 44,000 shaft horsepower for a notably brisk top speed of 33.6 knots.

She carried a crew of 256 and, from her mid-1970s modernisation onwards, an Ikara anti-submarine rocket system, Sea Cat missiles, Bofors guns and a Wasp helicopter, a well-rounded fit typical of the Leander class's versatile design.

Upon commissioning, HMS Euryalus became leader of the 26th Escort Squadron based in the Far East, adopting the motto 'Omnia Audax', meaning daring in all things, borrowed from the Lancashire Fusiliers. The choice was not arbitrary: an earlier armoured cruiser of the same name had carried the 1st Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, ashore at Cape Helles on 25 April 1915, the Gallipoli landing that became known as "six VCs before breakfast" after six of the battalion's men won the Victoria Cross in a single murderous morning, a fittingly bold motto to inherit for a ship about to be thrown straight into an active regional conflict of her own.

The Indonesian Confrontation

HMS Euryalus spent much of the mid-1960s involved in the Indonesian Confrontation, the low-level but dangerous undeclared conflict fought between Britain and its Commonwealth allies against Indonesia over the formation of Malaysia, primarily patrolling the rivers and coastal waters around Borneo, work that demanded constant vigilance against infiltration and raids by Indonesian forces in a truly challenging, close-quarters riverine and coastal environment quite unlike the open-ocean escort duties her design had primarily been built around.

What a frigate could actually contribute to that campaign is worth explaining, because it was not what the phrase riverine patrol suggests. Euryalus drew too much water to go up a Borneo river; the close work inshore and in the creeks was done by minesweepers, small craft and the Royal Marines. What a Leander did was hold the outer line. Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo share a land border of roughly a thousand miles of jungle, and the sea approaches are longer still, so the campaign turned on stopping infiltration parties crossing at night in small boats. A frigate sat offshore with a radar, a helicopter and the communications to run everything smaller than herself, watching an enormous stretch of empty coast for objects the size of a fishing canoe. It is one of the harder tactical problems there is, and it is essentially the same one the Royal Navy is still solving in the Channel today.

STANAVFORLANT and the Far East

Following a refit at Devonport, HMS Euryalus joined the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, NATO's multinational squadron, in April 1967, calling at Bodø and Tromsø in Norway, Stockholm in Sweden, Iceland, Newport in Rhode Island, Halifax in Canada for the Canadian Centennial, Montreal for Expo 67, Quebec, and finally St John's in Newfoundland, a remarkably wide-ranging tour showcasing allied naval cooperation at the height of the Cold War.

She deployed to the Far East again in December 1967 as leader of the 1st Frigate Squadron, spending Christmas at Simonstown in South Africa before a six-week Beira Patrol in early 1968, part of the ongoing Royal Navy effort to enforce oil sanctions against the white minority government of Rhodesia by intercepting tankers bound for the Mozambican port of Beira.

From there she sailed straight into a rather different kind of duty: Internal Security in Mauritius in the tense weeks before the island's independence, where race riots between rival communities had already left at least seventeen dead by the time the Commons was briefed on 23 January 1968, prompted London to fly in a battalion of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry from Singapore and send two frigates of its own, and were assessed by the island's own Governor as rooted in gang rivalry rather than any organised political cause. From there Euryalus continued a genuinely round-the-world itinerary: Sydney, Auckland, Vila in the New Hebrides, Tsuruga and Yokohama in Japan, Sabah, Hong Kong and Singapore, then Auckland again, Fiji, Pearl Harbor, San Diego and the Panama Canal on her way home, finally returning in December 1968.

There is a larger story running underneath that deployment, and it is worth knowing about. Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968, a few weeks after Euryalus was there. Three years earlier, as part of the negotiations preceding that independence, Britain had detached the Chagos Archipelago from the colony to create the British Indian Ocean Territory, and had agreed to make its largest island, Diego Garcia, available to the United States as a military base. Between 1968 and 1973 the entire Chagossian population, something in the order of fifteen hundred people, was removed from the islands and resettled, largely in Mauritius, where a good many of them ended up destitute. Britain has been litigating and negotiating over it ever since. Euryalus was patrolling the waters of a colony at the precise moment that colony was being made independent minus an archipelago, and nobody aboard would have had any reason to connect the two.

A Second Beira Patrol and a New Missile System

HMS Euryalus served as Gibraltar guard ship in 1970, and returned to the Beira Patrol once more in 1972, continuing the sanctions enforcement effort against Rhodesian oil imports that had by then stretched on for years without fully resolving the underlying political dispute.

What that patrol was for, how long it went on and what it actually achieved is set out in the article on HMS Eskimo (F119). The short answer is that it ran for nine years, involved seventy-six warships, cost over £100 million and stopped no meaningful quantity of oil, because the oil came overland from South Africa. Euryalus did two tours of it, four years apart, and the second was no more useful than the first.

Between 1973 and 1976, she underwent a substantial modernisation at Devonport, during which her original twin 4.5-inch gun mount was removed and replaced with the Ikara anti-submarine missile system, a significant upgrade in her anti-submarine capability that reflected the Royal Navy's growing focus on the Soviet submarine threat through the later Cold War decades.

That trade is a bigger one than it sounds, and worth spelling out. She gave up her only real gun. Out came the twin 4.5-inch turret that had been the whole of her surface armament since 1964, and in its place went a launcher for a rocket that carried a homing torpedo out to about ten nautical miles and dropped it on a submarine. What Ikara was and how it worked is described in the article on HMS Dido (F104). Euryalus emerged from Devonport in 1976 as a specialist submarine hunter with nothing heavier aboard than a 40mm Bofors, which was a rational answer to the Soviet Northern Fleet and would have been no answer whatever to the sort of work she had been doing off Borneo and Beira for the previous decade.

Jubilee Fleets and a Fire at Sea

Fresh out of her Ikara conversion, HMS Euryalus took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in June 1977, sailing alongside HMS Scylla and HMS Danae for the Queen's own inspection of the assembled fleet. The following year she worked up with the 2nd Frigate Squadron at Portland, taking part in "Thursday War", the regular full-scale exercise pitting the Royal Navy against allied fleets, before a run of European port visits to Bayonne in France and Aalborg in Denmark and a "Meet the Navy" visit home to her adopted town of South Shields, the bond that would earn her the Freedom of the Borough of South Tyneside in May 1981, a right allowing her ship's company to march through the borough with fixed bayonets.

That same year she was sent on Middle East patrol at a genuinely tense moment, the early stages of the Iran-Iraq War, a reminder that a Cold War frigate's watch increasingly meant keeping an eye on brand new regional conflicts as much as the Soviet fleet. In 1982, alongside her sister ship HMS Leander, she helped rescue 45 crew from the Portuguese vessel Ave Maria after it caught fire off the Essex coast, and by 1986 she had become leader of the 1st Frigate Squadron in her own right, a senior role for a frigate by then approaching the end of her third decade in commission.

Decommissioning and the End

HMS Euryalus was decommissioned on 31 March 1989, and was subsequently purchased by Devonport Management Limited with a view to possible resale to a foreign navy, a common enough fate for retired but still serviceable Leander-class frigates, several of which went on to long second careers with other nations' navies.

In HMS Euryalus's case, however, no such sale materialised, and in 1990 she was sold for scrap and broken up at Millom in Cumbria alongside her fellow retired frigate HMS Ajax, closing out a career that had taken her from the confrontation-era rivers of Borneo to two separate tours enforcing sanctions off the African coast.