HMS Grafton (F51): A Cold War Frigate's Quiet Twelve Years

A Purpose-Built Submarine Hunter

HMS Grafton was built by J.S. White and Co Ltd, laid down on 25 February 1953 and launched on 13 February 1954 by Lady Grantham, wife of Admiral Sir Guy Grantham, later Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, one of twelve Type 14 Blackwood-class frigates ordered as dedicated, no-frills anti-submarine escorts for the early Cold War fleet, built for roughly half the price of the contemporary Whitby-class frigates by stripping out everything not directly useful for hunting submarines.

The admiral whose wife broke the bottle deserves better than a parenthesis, because his war is extraordinary even by the standards of that generation. Guy Grantham commanded the cruiser HMS Phoebe (43) through the evacuation of Greece in 1941 and got a DSO for it. He then did a spell as a liaison officer in the Western Desert, came back to sea in the cruiser HMS Naiad, and was aboard her when she was torpedoed and sunk in March 1942. He was given HMS Cleopatra next and fought her at the Second Battle of Sirte, the action in which a British cruiser and destroyer force drove off an Italian battle squadron to get a convoy through to Malta. His last wartime command was the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable (92) for the Sicily landings.

Three cruisers, one of them sunk under him, and a fleet carrier, in four years. Afterwards he went up quickly: chief of staff in the Mediterranean in 1946, Flag Officer Submarines in 1948, second in command in the Mediterranean in 1950, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff in 1951. That is the job he was doing when his wife launched Grafton in February 1954. Later that year he took the Mediterranean command and the NATO appointment that went with it, and in 1956 he commanded the naval task force for Suez.

He became Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth in 1957, and then, in retirement from the Navy, Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Malta from 1959 to 1962, which put him in the Palace at Valletta at precisely the moment the island's relationship with Britain was coming apart. He died in 1992, aged ninety-two. It is a fair reminder that the names on the launch card of an unglamorous little frigate are rarely as incidental as they look.

That cost-cutting earned the class a distinctly unaffectionate nickname of its own: their own crews took to calling them "Futility Frigates", a dig at just how single-purpose and inflexible a Blackwood was for anything other than the one job she was designed to do. It was, in a roundabout way, rather unfair. Precisely because their crews trained on almost nothing but anti-submarine warfare, the class was frequently judged among the most effective frigates in the entire fleet at exactly that job right through to the mid-1960s, proof that a ship built to do one thing and nothing else can still do that one thing rather well.

She displaced 1,456 long tons at full load, measured 310 feet in length and could make 27 knots, with a complement of 140 officers and ratings, a properly compact and purposeful design built around one job: hunting Soviet submarines rather than trying to be a general-purpose warship. Her offensive punch came from two Limbo Mark 10 anti-submarine mortars, a genuinely capable weapon for the period, backed up by three 40mm Bofors guns for close-range self-defence rather than any serious surface or air armament. She commissioned on 8 January 1957.

The economics behind all that, and what the Admiralty was willing to give up to get twelve hulls instead of six, are set out in the article on HMS Blackwood (F78), the name ship of the class. The single most consequential economy was under the waterline: a Type 14 had one shaft and one propeller, where any other frigate of the period had two, which halved the machinery, halved the cost and meant that a bad day in the engine room left the ship waiting for a tow. One of her sisters later turned that liability into a distinction by having her steam plant taken out altogether and gas turbines put in, as described in the article on HMS Exmouth (F84).

Portland and Londonderry

HMS Grafton served with the 2nd Frigate Squadron based at Portland Harbour, a training and workup hub that saw a great deal of the fleet's anti-submarine expertise developed and refined, until March 1963, when she began a refit at Portsmouth Dockyard.

Portland in those years was the centre of gravity of British anti-submarine warfare, and Grafton arrived at exactly the moment it was changing. HMS Osprey, the anti-submarine establishment on the harbour, had been brought back after the war specifically to work out what helicopters could do about submarines, and while Grafton was there the answer arrived: an air station was built alongside in 1958 and commissioned the following year, and in April 1959 a squadron of twelve Whirlwinds flew in to join it. In the same year, 1958, Flag Officer Sea Training was set up at Portland, which is the organisation that from then on decided whether a British warship was fit to join the fleet. Grafton spent her first six years in the middle of all of it, as one of the ships the fleet practised on and against. A frigate whose weapons reached about a thousand yards was sharing an anchorage with the aircraft that would make her obsolete.

Following her modernisation, she joined the 20th Frigate Squadron based at Londonderry in Northern Ireland, a posting that placed her squarely on the front line of Britain's Cold War anti-submarine effort in the waters of the North Atlantic approaches, where Soviet submarines were a genuine and closely watched concern throughout the period.

Londonderry was the other half of that world, and it was a more serious posting than it sounds. The Joint Anti-Submarine School was at Ebrington Barracks on the east bank of the Foyle, commissioned as HMS Sea Eagle, and it existed because anti-submarine work is the one kind of warfare that cannot be taught without ships, submarines and aircraft all in the same water at the same time. The 20th Frigate Squadron was based there from April 1960 to provide the ships. The North Channel and the approaches beyond it are where a submarine coming south from the Norwegian Sea has to pass, which is why the school was where it was and why, on the Soviet side of the map, HMS Sea Eagle sat on the top tier of nuclear target lists. A quiet posting in Derry, in other words, meant being permanently aimed at.

HMS Grafton appeared at Portsmouth Navy Days in both 1967 and 1968, giving the public a rare look at exactly the kind of unglamorous but essential vessel that made up the bulk of the Cold War frigate fleet, ships whose value lay less in dramatic individual actions and more in the sheer, patient consistency of their patrol and exercise work.

It is worth saying plainly what those years actually consisted of, because the absence of incident is the story rather than a gap in it. A Type 14 in the 1960s spent her time on Joint Maritime Courses and NATO exercises in the Western Approaches, running attack after attack on a friendly submarine and being attacked in turn; on workup periods at Portland with the training staff finding fault; on North Atlantic patrols in weather that a three-hundred-foot ship with a low freeboard feels very keenly; and on the occasional showing of the flag at a Navy Days. Nobody wrote any of that up because nothing went wrong. The measure of the Cold War at sea is not what happened but what did not, and a squadron of purpose-built submarine hunters sitting across the North Channel year after year is a large part of the reason for that.

A Straightforward Ending

Detailed records of HMS Grafton's individual deployments and exercises during her Londonderry years have proven difficult to trace in the sources available, which is not unusual for a frigate whose career was defined more by steady routine than by headline-making incident.

The name has had a busier time of it than she did. It comes from the Dukes of Grafton, the title Charles II gave one of his illegitimate sons, and the Royal Navy has used it since the seventeenth century. The destroyer that carried it before her was sunk off Dunkirk in May 1940 while stopped in the water picking up survivors from another ship, as told in the article on HMS Grafton (H89). The one that took it after her was a Type 23, which spent part of her career pretending to be a different ship altogether for a television series, and is covered in the article on HMS Grafton (F80). Between them the three make a reasonable summary of the twentieth-century Royal Navy: one sunk in a rescue, one that spent twelve years quietly doing the job nobody reported, and one sold abroad.

She was paid off in April 1969 after nearly twelve years of service, and was eventually broken up at Inverkeithing from December 1971, closing out the career of a Type 14 frigate whose contribution to Cold War security was real, even if it left a comparatively modest paper trail behind it.

There is a straightforward reason she went to the breakers at seventeen years old rather than being modernised, and it is the same reason she was cheap in the first place. The hull was too small. Everything that would have kept a frigate useful into the 1970s, a better sonar, a helicopter and a flight deck, a decent gun, missiles, needed weight, volume and electrical power that a fourteen-hundred-ton single-screw ship simply did not have and could not be given. The class had been bought as a wartime-style expedient, and when the war it was designed for did not arrive, there was nothing else to do with the ships. All twelve were gone by the end of the 1970s, most of them a good deal earlier.