HMS Falmouth (F113): The Frigate That Rammed an Icelandic Gunboat at 22 Knots

Built by Swan Hunter

HMS Falmouth was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson, her keel laid down on 23 November 1957, launched on 15 December 1959, and commissioned on 25 July 1961, a Rothesay-class anti-submarine frigate displacing 2,560 tons at full load. She measured 370 feet in length with a 41-foot beam, and her Babcock and Wilcox boilers driving English Electric turbines produced 30,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 29 knots. Her original armament included twin 4.5-inch guns, a twin 40mm anti-aircraft mount, two Limbo anti-submarine mortars and twelve torpedo tubes, a well-rounded fit for a frigate designed primarily around convoy and fleet escort duties.

HMS Falmouth joined the 20th Frigate Squadron at Londonderry in August 1961, and suffered an early setback on 5 December that year when she was badly damaged in a collision with the oiler RFA Tideflow in Lyme Bay, a rough start to what would prove a genuinely eventful career.

The Far East and the Beira Patrol

HMS Falmouth became leader of the 30th Frigate Squadron from December 1963, and deployed with it to the Far East Fleet between September and December 1964, and again between June and December 1965. She took part in the Beira Patrol, the long-running Royal Navy operation to enforce an oil embargo against the white minority government of Rhodesia, patrolling off Mombasa in January 1967 as part of the effort to intercept tankers attempting to deliver fuel to the Mozambican port of Beira.

HMS Falmouth underwent an extensive modernisation at Portsmouth Dockyard from August 1968 through to 6 January 1971, receiving a hangar and flight deck for a single Westland Wasp helicopter along with a Seacat missile launcher, upgrades that considerably enhanced her anti-submarine and self-defence capabilities for the demanding decade that lay ahead.

Ramming Speed in the Third Cod War

HMS Falmouth's most dramatic moment came on 6 May 1976, during the Third Cod War against Iceland. With the Icelandic gunboat V/s Týr attempting to cut the fishing nets of the trawler Carlisle, Captain Gerald Plumer ordered HMS Falmouth to ram the Icelandic vessel at over 22 knots, a genuinely aggressive manoeuvre that came close to capsizing his own ship in the process. The first ramming left Týr heavily damaged, but after the Icelandic gunboat succeeded in cutting the trawler's nets anyway, HMS Falmouth rammed her a second time. The collision left HMS Falmouth herself with serious structural damage to her bow, serious enough to require repairs in Portsmouth dry dock, a genuinely costly encounter for both sides in a dispute that, whatever its diplomatic subtleties, was fought with real ships taking real damage.

Following the UK's expansion of its Exclusive Economic Zone to 200 nautical miles in January 1977, HMS Falmouth deployed to the North Sea, protecting British fishing stocks and the growing number of oil platforms and installations that had, by the late 1970s, become just as important a national interest to defend as fishing rights had been during the Cod Wars themselves.

Saved by the Falklands

HMS Falmouth left active service in 1980 and transferred to the Standby Squadron at Chatham, and by early 1982 she faced disposal amid the defence budget cuts of the era, the same round of cuts that nearly saw the Royal Navy's South Atlantic capability stripped away entirely. Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 abruptly reversed those plans, and HMS Falmouth received a refit, though she ultimately did not take part in the Falklands War itself. She went on to conduct South Atlantic patrol operations between May and September 1983, and deployed to the Middle and Far East between March and August 1984, a genuinely active final stretch of service for a ship that had so nearly been scrapped just two years earlier.

The End

HMS Falmouth was decommissioned in July 1984 and laid up as a stationary training ship at HMS Sultan that December, providing several more years of quiet, useful service training naval personnel before finally being scrapped in Spain from 4 May 1989 onwards, closing out the career of a frigate whose service had ranged from enforcing sanctions off East Africa to a genuinely dramatic ramming duel in the North Atlantic.