HMS Fife (D20): A World Cruise, a Hurricane Relief Mission, and a Second Life in Chile

The First of the Batch 2 Counties

HMS Fife was the first unit of the Batch 2 County-class destroyers, ordered by the Ministry of Defence on 26 September 1961, laid down by Fairfield Shipbuilding on 1 June 1962, launched on 9 July 1964, and commissioned on 21 June 1966.

The yard that laid her down was, within three years, one of the great industrial disasters of the decade, and it is now the only one of the Clyde yards still building warships. Fairfield of Govan filed for bankruptcy in 1965, while Fife was fitting out, leaving hulls on the stocks including two P&O liners that only got finished because the government stepped in. In 1966 the firm was reconstituted under government guarantee as Fairfields (Glasgow) Ltd, and what followed was the Fairfield Experiment: a deliberate attempt, watched by everybody in British industry, to run a shipyard on genuinely new terms between management and unions, with modern production methods and an end to the demarcation disputes that had been strangling the Clyde for a generation.

It did not get the chance to prove itself. The Geddes Report recommended consolidation, and in 1968 Fairfield was merged with five other yards into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, becoming simply the Govan yard. UCS was in liquidation by 1971 and produced the famous work-in. Govan Shipbuilders emerged from the wreckage in 1972, was folded into British Shipbuilders in 1977, and, unlike almost everything else on that river, kept going. It is still there, and it is now part of BAE Systems: the yard that laid down Fife in 1962 laid down HMS Diamond (D34) in 2005 and is building the Type 26 frigates today. Of all the Clyde yards that were working when Fife went down the slipway, that one is the survivor.

A Mark 2 guided missile destroyer, she was designed around area air defence, carrying the Seaslug Mark 2 surface-to-air missile system on a twin-rail launcher, backed by Seacat missiles, Oerlikon cannon and twin 4.5-inch gun turrets, one of which was later replaced by four Exocet anti-ship missile launchers during a mid-1970s upgrade.

She displaced 6,200 tons, rising to 6,800 tons at full load, a properly substantial destroyer built to project British naval power across the globe.

What made her the first of the Batch 2 is worth setting out, because it is not just a later hull number. Seaslug itself, and why a County had to be built the size of a small cruiser to carry it, is explained in the article on HMS Devonshire (D02). The Batch 2 ships were built around the Mark 2 version of the missile, which was supersonic and reached out to about thirty kilometres where the Mark 1 had been close to obsolete on the day it entered service, and they carried the sensors to use it: the improved Type 965M double bedstead aerial, a Type 992Q for low-angle search on a taller foremast, and, most importantly, ADAWS. The first four Counties plotted the air picture by hand, with men moving markers on a table. Fife and her three sisters had a computer doing it. That is the real dividing line in the class, and it is invisible from outside.

The Exocet conversion was a bigger change than it sounds, and it filled an embarrassing gap. Until the mid-1970s the Royal Navy had no anti-ship missile whatever. A British destroyer that wanted to attack another warship had to close to gun range or use torpedoes, at a time when the Soviet Navy had been building ships around long-range surface-to-surface missiles for fifteen years. Taking out B turret and bolting four single MM38 Exocet boxes onto the deck in its place was not elegant, and it cost Fife half her gun armament, but it meant that for the first time a Royal Navy destroyer could sink another ship from over the horizon. The Leanders got the same treatment for the same reason.

A World Cruise

HMS Fife departed Portsmouth on 1 April 1970 for an epic round-the-world deployment, visiting Safi in Morocco, the first call there by a British warship in over a century, then on to Lagos in Nigeria, Simon's Town in South Africa and the Maldives, taking in a stint on the Beira Patrol off Mozambique enforcing sanctions against Rhodesia along the way.

Sailing on to Singapore, she conducted the first live firing trials of the Seaslug Mark 2 missile system in the South China Sea, a significant technical milestone for the weapon system she had been specifically designed to carry, before continuing on to Hong Kong and Kobe, where her visit coincided with the Expo '70 world's fair, then Pearl Harbor, Long Beach and Acapulco, transiting the Panama Canal and working her way home via Puerto Rico, Toulon, Malta and Gibraltar, a truly remarkable itinerary that took her to every ocean the Royal Navy had any meaningful presence in.

A Silver Jubilee and a Hurricane

HMS Fife took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead on 28 June 1977 as part of the 2nd Flotilla, marking twenty-five years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, and in 1979 provided significant humanitarian assistance to the Caribbean island of Dominica after it was severely struck by Hurricane David, one of the most destructive storms to hit the region that decade.

She emerged out of the grey morning mist off Woodbridge Bay on 30 August 1979, the very first foreign vessel to reach the island after David had torn through barely a day before, a storm that by then had flattened around 95 per cent of Dominica's houses.

The scale of what she found there is worth putting into figures. Hurricane David crossed Dominica on 29 August 1979 with winds at times over 250 kilometres an hour, killed thirty-seven people, and left something like sixty thousand homeless, which on an island of that size was close to three-quarters of the entire population. The banana and citrus crops the economy ran on were destroyed outright. Fife came out of the mist off Woodbridge Bay the following morning as the first foreign ship to arrive, which means that for a period measured in days a British destroyer's helicopter, boats, medical staff, engineers, fresh water and stores were a significant fraction of everything available to an entire country. Warships are useful for this in a way nothing else is: they arrive self-contained, needing no port, no fuel and no accommodation ashore, into a place where none of those things exist any more.

Her relief efforts there were formally recognised with the Wilkinson Sword of Peace, an award given for outstanding contributions to peace and humanitarian causes, a fitting tribute to work carried out far from the missile trials and fleet reviews that otherwise defined her career.

The award she was given for it is a rarer thing than the phrasing suggests: one sword a year for the whole Royal Navy, given for humanitarian work rather than for fighting, as explained in the article on HMS Enterprise (H88).

A Training Ship, Then Chile

HMS Fife was converted to a training ship in her later Royal Navy years, and between 1985 and 1987 carried out a series of Dartmouth Training Ship deployments to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and North America, including a voyage all the way into the Great Lakes, an unusual destination for a Royal Navy destroyer.

She was decommissioned in June 1987 after 21 years of service, and sold to Chile on 12 August that year, renamed Blanco Encalada in Chilean service.

She underwent a further refit at Talcahuano, where her now-obsolete Seaslug system was removed to make way for an extended quarterdeck and a new hangar, completed in May 1988, giving her a particularly substantial second career with the Chilean Navy that would ultimately outlast her original British service by more than a decade and a half. Her air defences were modernised again in 1996, when the old Seacat launchers were themselves swapped out for the Israeli-built Barak point-defence missile system.

The name they gave her is worth knowing, because the first Blanco Encalada has a claim on naval history that almost nothing else does. She was an armoured frigate, built in Britain in 1875, about three and a half thousand tons with six 9-inch guns, and in the War of the Pacific she took the Peruvian monitor Huáscar, which made her a national ship in the way that Victory is a national ship. Then Chile fell into civil war, and on the night of 23 April 1891 two torpedo gunboats loyal to President Balmaceda, Almirante Lynch and Almirante Condell, went into the anchorage at Caldera Bay where she lay.

A torpedo from Almirante Lynch opened a hole in her that was later measured at something like seven feet by fifteen, below the waterline. She sank in about two minutes and took a hundred and eighty-two men with her. It was the first time in history that a warship had been sunk by a self-propelled torpedo, and every navy in the world read the report, because the implication was unmistakable: a boat costing a fraction of a capital ship, crewed by a couple of dozen men, could now kill one in the dark in under two minutes. Everything from the destroyer to the anti-torpedo bulge to the modern submarine follows from that night in Caldera Bay.

So Fife spent her second career carrying the name of the ship whose loss invented the threat that a guided missile destroyer exists to counter. Chile has kept both names in use, incidentally: the frigate Almirante Condell in the modern Chilean fleet is another former Royal Navy ship, and she carries the name of the other torpedo gunboat that went into Caldera Bay that night. Both of them, boat and frigate, are named for Carlos Condell, who had taken the little schooner Covadonga against a Peruvian ironclad in 1879 and got away with it.

Her Chilean career is worth finishing, and there is an awkward history behind it. Fife was sold to Chile in August 1987, at a point when the country was still ruled by Augusto Pinochet, and five years after Chile had quietly provided Britain with radar coverage, intelligence and the use of its territory during the Falklands campaign, help that Margaret Thatcher never forgot and never entirely explained. As Blanco Encalada she outlasted her own Royal Navy service by a wide margin, and was not decommissioned until 12 December 2003, sixteen years after Chile bought her and more than twice as long as she had spent under the White Ensign after her own last British refit. She was sold for scrap in 2005 and finally broken up in Turkey in 2013, forty-nine years after she was launched on the Clyde.

The End

The former HMS Fife, by then the Chilean destroyer Blanco Encalada, was finally decommissioned from the Chilean Navy on 12 December 2003, sold for scrap in November 2005, and eventually broken up by the Turkish shipbreaking firm Leyal Gemi Sokum at Aliağa in 2013, closing out an extraordinarily long working life spanning nearly half a century and two navies, from a round-the-world Cold War deployment under British colours to decades of further service flying the Chilean flag.