HMS Grafton (F80): The Frigate That Played a Fictional Ship on Television

Built on the Clyde

HMS Grafton was built by GEC Marconi Marine (formerly Yarrow Shipbuilders) at Glasgow, laid down on 13 May 1993 and launched on 5 November 1994, a Type 23 Duke-class frigate measuring 133 metres in length and displacing 4,900 tonnes.

She was fitted with a CODLAG propulsion system giving her a top speed of 28 knots and an impressive range of 7,800 nautical miles at a cruising 15 knots, and armed with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, the Sea Wolf air defence system, a 4.5-inch main gun and four Sting Ray torpedo tubes for anti-submarine work. She commissioned into the Royal Navy on 29 May 1997.

The Type 23 began life as an attempt to build a frigate cheaply, and it is worth knowing how badly that went. The requirement was drawn up in 1983 for a simple ship to tow a sonar array around the North Atlantic listening for Soviet submarines, with a helicopter, a modest gun and not much else; the phrase used at the time was that she would be a cheap and cheerful towed-array escort. Then the Falklands happened. Everything learned in the South Atlantic about fire, smoke, damage control and sea-skimming missiles went into the design, and the ship that resulted was larger, quieter, tougher and considerably more expensive: something like £75 million a hull in 1980, £110 million by 1985, and £135 million by the time the last of the sixteen was finished in 2001. She was also given a planned service life of eighteen years, on the assumption that a cheap ship would be replaced quickly. That figure has since been stretched to twenty-eight and beyond, and the class is only now being succeeded by the Type 26, as described in the article on HMS Glasgow (F88).

A Tragedy in Malaysia

HMS Grafton's service was marked by tragedy on 23 September 1998, when a Lynx helicopter operating from her flight deck struck the sea during a night exercise some 90 nautical miles north east of Singapore, part of a bilateral exercise with the Singapore Navy. Her pilot, Lieutenant Commander Andy Hurry, was pulled from the water by a Singaporean naval vessel after roughly an hour adrift, but her observer, Lieutenant Toby Beale, 27, was lost. Malaysia, though not party to the exercise, offered two ships to help with the search, an offer gratefully declined once the wreck itself had already been located, a small diplomatic footnote to a genuinely sober reminder that the demanding, round-the-clock nature of naval aviation carries real risk even far from any combat zone.

It is worth being specific about what makes that kind of flying so unforgiving. A frigate's flight deck is a small moving platform at the back of a ship that is itself pitching, rolling and heaving, and at night in the tropics there is no horizon at all: the sea, the sky and the ship's wake give the crew almost nothing to fly by, so the aircraft is flown on instruments to within a few feet of a deck that is not where the instruments last said it was. Every navy in the world does it, because a helicopter that can only work in daylight is worth very little, and every navy in the world has lost aircrew doing it. Toby Beale was twenty-seven, and he is one of a long list of Fleet Air Arm names on memorials that record no battle at all.

Adopted by Ipswich, and a Brief Television Career

HMS Grafton developed a warm affiliation with the Suffolk town of Ipswich over the course of her career, visiting frequently enough that her crew were granted the Freedom of the Borough in 2000, a formal civic honour reflecting the strength of the bond between ship and town.

In a rather more unusual episode, HMS Grafton was used between May and late June 2003 as a filming location for the ITV drama series 'Making Waves', appearing on screen as the fictional Royal Navy warship 'Suffolk'. The production team physically swapped out her name plates, funnel badges and even her battle honours for the cameras, while a support vessel was required to shadow her at sea throughout filming in case anyone from the crew went overboard. Alex Ferns, fresh from EastEnders, played her fictional captain, with Lee Boardman of Coronation Street also in the cast, and Lieutenant Commander Kevin Fincher, acting as the Navy's liaison on set, said the aim was for the series to be "entertaining for the British public, but... true to the Navy and their families." When Making Waves finally aired on 7 July 2004, it was pulled from the schedule after just three episodes for poor ratings, a small but memorable brush with television fame for a working frigate rather more used to the unscripted business of naval patrol, and rather better at that than at holding a primetime audience.

What that involved for the ship is more interesting than the programme was. Making Waves was a Carlton production for ITV, created by Ted Childs, and the Royal Navy cooperated fully because a popular drama about life in a frigate is worth a great deal in recruiting terms and costs the taxpayer nothing. The practical consequence was that Grafton went to sea for filming with a deliberately reduced ship's company, so that there were bunks for actors, a director, camera crews and continuity staff. A warship at sea with part of her ship's company swapped out for a film unit is an unusual proposition, which is why a support vessel had to shadow her throughout in case somebody who had never been to sea before went over the side. Six episodes were made in all. Three were broadcast, the remaining three were never shown in Britain, and the whole series appeared on a limited-edition DVD that December, which is how most of the people who worked on her have ever seen it.

HMS Grafton deployed to the Persian Gulf in early 2004, part of the sustained Royal Navy presence supporting operations in the region during that period, before her retirement was announced in July of that year.

The decision behind that announcement is worth setting out, because it was startling at the time and looks worse now. On 21 July 2004 the Defence Secretary published a review called Delivering Security in a Changing World, and among the savings in it were three Type 23 frigates: Norfolk, Marlborough and Grafton, to be paid off and sold. Grafton was seven years old. The three went to Chile for £134 million altogether, which is to say that the Royal Navy sold three modern anti-submarine frigates for roughly the price of building one of them. The reasoning was that the threat they had been designed for had gone away and the money was needed elsewhere. Within a decade the Royal Navy was short of escorts, the submarine threat in the North Atlantic was back, and the replacement class had not yet reached the water.

The most telling thing about her last two years is that nobody let her stop working. The announcement in July 2004 said she was to be paid off; the decision to sell her to Chile was not made public until June 2005. In between, in February 2005, she was photographed by the United States Navy on patrol in the Arabian Gulf on what the caption calls a regularly scheduled deployment. So a ship whose future had already been decided in Whitehall spent the winter of 2004 and the spring of 2005 doing maritime security work at the head of the Gulf, with a ship's company who knew perfectly well that she had already been marked for disposal and that most of them would be drafted elsewhere at the end of it. That is a harder thing to ask of people than it sounds, and it happened without any of it reaching a newspaper.

Decommissioning and a New Life in Chile

HMS Grafton was formally decommissioned on 31 March 2006 after roughly nine years of service, and on her final visit to Ipswich that year, her ship's bell was presented to the town as a lasting memento of their long association, a fitting small gesture given how much of her career had been bound up with the place.

The bell did not go into a glass case in a museum, either. It hangs in the reception of Grafton House, the borough council offices in Ipswich, where people come in to pay council tax and report a broken streetlight, which is a more useful sort of memorial than most. Ship affiliations are easy to dismiss as civic decoration, and for some ships they are; this one clearly was not, given the Freedom of the Borough in 2000 and the number of times she went back. When she left for Chile the name went with her and the bell stayed, which is the usual arrangement and, on this occasion, plainly the right one.

HMS Grafton was sold to the Chilean Navy and delivered at Portsmouth on 28 March 2007, renamed Almirante Lynch after Rear Admiral Patricio Lynch, a War of the Pacific hero who, in a neat little circularity, began his own naval career as a Royal Navy lieutenant before ever putting on a Chilean uniform.

She underwent a further modernisation with the Chilean Navy between 2019 and 2020, receiving CAMM Sea Ceptor missiles and updated combat management systems, and continues in active Chilean service under her new name and flag today, a second working life for a frigate whose first had ranged from the Persian Gulf to, however briefly, primetime British television.

There is a final twist to the arrangement, and it is quietly instructive. Between 2019 and 2021 the Chilean Navy put its three ex-British frigates through a modernisation, and the missile they chose was CAMM, sold in Britain as Sea Ceptor. That is the same weapon now going into the Royal Navy's own Type 26 frigates. A ship the Ministry of Defence sold in 2004 as surplus to a requirement that no longer existed is now sailing under the Chilean flag with the newest British air-defence missile in her silos, twenty-odd years after she was declared unnecessary, and she is likely to still be at sea when the Royal Navy's last Type 23 has gone. Almirante Lynch is expected to serve into the 2030s.