HMS Hampshire (D06): The First County-Class Destroyer to Fall

The Fifth Ship of the Name

HMS Hampshire was ordered on 27 January 1956 and built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 26 March 1959 and launched by Princess Margaret on 16 March 1961, the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry the name and a County-class guided missile destroyer displacing 6,200 long tons normal, rising to 6,800 tons at full load.

She measured 521 feet 6 inches overall and used a combined steam and gas turbine propulsion system giving her a top speed of 30 knots and a range of 3,500 nautical miles at a cruising 28 knots.

Her armament centred on two twin 4.5-inch gun turrets, the Seaslug surface-to-air missile system and the shorter range Seacat, alongside a single embarked Wessex helicopter, a capable all-round design for its era. She commissioned on 15 March 1963.

East of Suez

HMS Hampshire deployed to Singapore in March 1964 as part of the British military response to the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation, a low-level but properly dangerous undeclared conflict fought largely in the jungles of Borneo and the waters of the surrounding archipelago, in which the Royal Navy played a substantial supporting role protecting Malaysian and British interests against Indonesian incursions.

Confrontation is one of the least known wars Britain has fought, largely because neither side ever admitted it was one. It ran from December 1962 to September 1966, it was never declared, and it was fought mostly along the Borneo border by small patrols under rules that forbade anybody to say where they had been. At sea the job was different again: the Royal Navy had to keep Indonesian infiltrators out of the Malacca Strait and the Singapore approaches while simultaneously demonstrating, in public, that the international straits through the Indonesian archipelago were international. That produced a genuine crisis in the weeks after Hampshire arrived. In August 1964 the carrier Victorious and two destroyers proposed to pass through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, giving notice as a courtesy; Jakarta responded by announcing that the strait would be closed for its own naval manoeuvres, and for a fortnight the two governments stared at each other over a piece of water. It was settled by the British going round by the Lombok Strait instead, which allowed everybody to claim they had won. That is the sort of war it was, and Hampshire spent it as the largest and most conspicuous piece of evidence Britain had in the region.

She spent much of the rest of the decade shuttling between such deployments and home waters: in May 1967 she left Portsmouth for a spell off the north-west Atlantic and the Canadian east coast, returning that July, before heading further afield again that November as part of the Royal Navy task force covering Operation Magister, the final British military withdrawal from Aden.

Operation Magister was the end of a very long story, and worth understanding as more than a line in a service record. Britain had held Aden since 1839 and run its entire naval position east of Suez from it; by November 1967 the Emergency had made the place ungovernable and the last few thousand men came out under the guns of a task force lying offshore, of which Hampshire was part. What that withdrawal actually involved is described in the article on HMS Gurkha (F122). For a ship like Hampshire the significance was direct: the Counties had been built to escort a fleet with bases from Malta to Singapore, and within four years of her commissioning most of those bases were being given up.

HMS Hampshire went on, from 1967, to fly the flag of the Flag Officer, Flotillas, Western Fleet, a senior seagoing command appointment reflecting her status as one of the more capable and prestigious destroyers then in service.

In January 1969 she set off on a three-month deployment to South America by way of the Panama Canal, calling in at Callao in Peru, before returning home in time to take part in the Royal Review at Torbay that July, a considerably more ceremonial occasion than her earlier deployments; the Queen reviewed the assembled Western Fleet from the Royal Yacht Britannia and presented a new colour aboard the carrier HMS Eagle.

The Torbay review was a larger occasion than the phrase suggests. The Western Fleet assembled off Torquay on 26 July 1969, the Queen went through the lines from Britannia on the 28th, and the ships dispersed on the 29th; something like thirty-five warships and a group of Royal Fleet Auxiliaries were there. The point of it was not the steaming past but what happened aboard Eagle, where the Queen presented the Western Fleet with a new Colour. A Queen's Colour is not a decoration; it is a formal statement that a body of the armed forces exists as a distinct thing with the sovereign's authority behind it, and presenting one to a fleet is done perhaps once in a generation. The Western Fleet itself lasted another two years before being merged away in a reorganisation, which gives the whole afternoon a slightly elegiac quality in hindsight.

Her final overseas call to arms came in the summer of 1974, when she was sent with a Royal Navy task force to Akrotiri Bay in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Cyprus emergency, standing by as the island was partitioned. Throughout these years she carried her own embarked Wessex flight, changing aircraft and parent squadron several times over the course of her career, from 829 Naval Air Squadron's original Wessex HAS.1 to 737 Squadron's newer Wessex HAS.3 by the mid-1970s.

First of Her Class to Go

HMS Hampshire was decommissioned in 1976, the first of the eight County-class destroyers to leave service, a somewhat unglamorous distinction for a ship that had, in her time, represented the very latest in British guided missile destroyer design.

She paid her last visit to London that March, mooring above Tower Bridge alongside the veteran cruiser HMS Belfast, a fitting final public appearance for a ship about to disappear from the fleet list a month later.

Her early retirement, after barely thirteen years and not a single major refit, did not go entirely unremarked. In the House of Lords that June, the Earl of Selkirk pressed the Government on why such a comparatively young and capable ship was being scrapped so soon, only for the Minister, Lord Winterbottom, to reply that she was in poor material condition, needed an unusually large crew to keep running, and was overdue a refit whose cost, given her age, was better spent elsewhere. It was, at heart, a story about money rather than the ship herself: defence spending was being squeezed hard by the mid-1970s economic crisis, and newer, more automated Type 42 destroyers, HMS Sheffield chief among them, were already queuing up to take her place.

The Minister's answer was more honest than it probably sounded at the time, and the arithmetic behind it is stark. A County-class destroyer required 471 officers and ratings to run. The Type 42 that replaced her needed about 253. In a navy being squeezed on both money and manpower, one County cost the same in people as very nearly two of her replacements, and the people were the harder of the two things to find. On top of that she was steam, with a boiler-room routine and a maintenance load that a gas-turbine ship simply does not have; her Seaslug installation swallowed an enormous amount of hull to deliver a missile designed in the early 1950s; and the refit she was due would have been the first of her life, on a hull that had been driven hard for thirteen years. The Type 42 was itself the product of a Treasury ceiling of £11 million a ship, which is why it turned out cramped and short. Hampshire was not scrapped because she had failed. She was scrapped because she was expensive in the one currency the Royal Navy had run out of.

Rather than being preserved or simply scrapped outright, she was cannibalised for spare parts to help keep her surviving sister ships operational, a remarkably practical if slightly undignified fate that nonetheless extended the useful service life of the rest of her class.

The cannibalising was more consequential than it sounds, and it was mostly about the missiles. Seaslug was a system of the 1950s, built in small numbers, with a launcher, a below-decks handling arrangement and a set of guidance radars that nobody was ever going to manufacture again. Once production had stopped, the only source of a replacement part for the remaining seven ships was another County, which meant the first ship out of service became the parts bin for everybody else. It is a bleak thing to do to a ship and an entirely rational one; Hampshire spent three years alongside being taken to pieces, and every one of her sisters that went south in 1982, Antrim and Glamorgan among them, was to some degree kept running by her. She was the first County to go and she is a reason several of the others were still there sixteen years later.

She was finally sold for scrap in 1979 and broken up at Briton Ferry by Thos. W. Ward, closing out the career of a destroyer whose final contribution to the Royal Navy came less from her own guns and missiles than from the parts she left behind for others to use; by the summer of 1980 she had ceased to exist entirely.

The name went with her for a while. She was the fifth HMS Hampshire, and the fourth had been the armoured cruiser that took Lord Kitchener to the bottom off Orkney in June 1916, an episode described in the article on HMS Hampshire (1903). There has been no HMS Hampshire since 1976, which is a long gap for a county name in a navy that recycles them constantly, and there is no sixth on the list. For the moment the name belongs to a cruiser lost with 737 men and a guided missile destroyer taken apart to keep her sisters at sea.