HMS Hecate (A137): The Survey Ship That Survived a Bombing and Patrolled the Falklands

Built on the Clyde

HMS Hecate was ordered in February 1964 and built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, Glasgow, laid down on 26 October 1964, launched on 31 March 1965 and commissioned on 20 December that year, a Hecla-class ocean survey vessel measuring 260 feet 2 inches in length and displacing 2,733 long tons at full load.

She was powered by three Paxman Ventura diesel engines driving electric motors for a top speed of 14 knots, with a complement of 127, and was based at Plymouth for the bulk of her career, tasked with the patient, unglamorous but essential work of hydrographic survey, carrying her own embarked Wasp helicopter from 829 Naval Air Squadron's Hecate Flight to help with offshore survey work.

The Hecla class was a genuine departure, and worth describing properly. These were the first Royal Navy survey ships designed from the keel up to do oceanography as well as hydrography, which are related but not the same thing: hydrography is charting the sea so that ships do not hit the bottom, oceanography is understanding the water itself, its temperature, salinity, currents, chemistry and the shape and composition of what lies under it. They were built to merchant standards rather than warship ones, on lines close to the research ship Discovery, ice-strengthened at the bow and air-conditioned throughout so that the same hull could work off Greenland or in the Gulf. Inside they had wet and dry laboratories, a survey chartroom, a photographic darkroom and heavy winches for lowering instruments and taking cores from deep water. The single most telling fitting was the bow thruster, paired with stabilisers, which let the ship stop and stay exactly where she was while somebody worked over the side. Three were ordered in the early 1960s to replace HMS Scott and HMS Shackleton, and a fourth, Herald, followed a decade later.

Charting the Gulf, and Surviving a Bomb

HMS Hecate opened her decks to the public at Plymouth Navy Days in both 1966 and 1970, attended the Fleet Review of colours at Torbay on 29 July 1969, and spent much of the mid-1970s conducting hydrographic surveys in the Persian Gulf, operating out of Bandar Abbas in Iran, work that helped keep charts of one of the world's most strategically vital waterways accurate and up to date.

There was a harder reason for all this than keeping the charts tidy, and it belongs to the Cold War. From the 1950s the National Institute of Oceanography worked directly with the Royal Navy on anti-submarine warfare, because everything a submarine does underwater depends on the water. Sound does not travel through the sea in straight lines: it bends according to temperature, salinity and pressure, so that a layer at one depth will hide a submarine completely from a ship a mile away, and a deep channel at another depth will carry a noise for hundreds of miles. Finding out where those layers sat, season by season, across whole oceans, was the difference between a sonar that worked and one that did not, and the same knowledge told a submarine captain where to hide. A ship taking water samples and temperature profiles in the Persian Gulf in the mid-1970s looked like science, and was, and was also part of the reason the Royal Navy could find things underwater.

In April 1977 she sailed rather further afield than most survey commitments required, serving as flagship of the Hydrographer of the Navy for the 11th International Hydrographic Conference at Monaco, and that June took her place among the assembled fleet for the Silver Jubilee Review off Spithead, a rare pair of ceremonial outings for a ship usually more concerned with the seabed than the guest list.

In a truly alarming episode on 2 November 1981, HMS Hecate survived a bombing attempt while visiting Nantes in France. After three days alongside, a small explosion on the dockside sent most of her 120-strong crew ashore before dawn, and French navy divers subsequently found and removed a device containing 2.2 pounds, roughly a kilogram, of plastic explosive fixed to her hull just below the waterline. An anonymous caller to the local newspaper, Presse Ocean, later claimed the attack on behalf of a "Bobby Sands group," named for the IRA hunger striker who had died in the Maze Prison that May, saying the bombing was meant to support "the political and military combat of Irish republicans for freedom and national independence," a startling reminder that even a dedicated survey ship on a peaceful mission could find itself caught up in the political violence of the era.

The Nantes attack was not an isolated piece of local madness either. From the late 1970s the IRA had extended its campaign to British targets on the European continent, on the reasoning that a British serviceman or a British ship was a British target wherever it happened to be, and that attacks abroad carried a political weight out of proportion to their size. 1981 was the year of the hunger strikes, in which ten men died in the Maze between May and August, and the wave of anger that produced ran a very long way beyond Ireland. What made the Hecate attempt notable is what she was: not a warship in any meaningful sense, an unarmed survey vessel with laboratories in her, alongside on a courtesy visit in a French port. A kilogram of plastic explosive below the waterline would have killed people and might well have sunk her. The dockside explosion that sent her crew ashore before dawn appears to have been what saved them.

Ice Patrol Ship in the South Atlantic

HMS Hecate's most dramatic chapter came in the aftermath of the 1982 Falklands War.

Painted grey and hastily fitted with two 20mm guns and Blowpipe surface-to-air missiles, a considerably more martial fit than her survey work usually called for, she left Britain on 23 July 1982 with her own Wasp helicopter embarked to relieve HMS Endurance as Ice Patrol Ship, taking on the vital task of maintaining a British naval presence in the South Atlantic during the tense period immediately following the conflict.

Why a survey ship had to go and be a warship at all is one of the more uncomfortable stories of the period. Britain kept a single ice patrol ship in the South Atlantic, HMS Endurance, painted red and lightly armed, whose real function was presence: she was the standing evidence that Britain took the Falklands and South Georgia seriously. In 1981 John Nott's defence review decided to withdraw her to save money. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, wrote to Nott urging him not to, warning that it would send exactly the wrong signal to Buenos Aires while the sovereignty dispute was live. A British intelligence assessment recorded that the Argentines had already read the announcement as a deliberate political gesture. Endurance was under a month from being paid off when Argentine personnel landed on South Georgia in March 1982. Her own account of all this is in the article on HMS Endurance (A171). Hecate went south in July 1982 to do the job the Treasury had decided a year earlier did not need doing.

The fitting out for that deployment is worth pausing on, because of what it says about the state of the fleet. A survey ship has no armament, no armour, no magazines and no fire control; she has laboratories and winches. Turning Hecate into a South Atlantic guardship meant painting out the white and buff, bolting on a pair of 20mm cannon and issuing Blowpipe, a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile the operator has to steer onto the target by eye with a thumb control, which had already proved in the Falklands to be extremely difficult to hit anything with. It was not a serious combat capability and nobody pretended it was. It was enough to argue with a trawler and enough to make the point that a British warship was there, which in the South Atlantic in the winter of 1982 was the entire requirement.

She carried out surveys at Mare Harbour and Bay of Isles, visited British Antarctic Survey bases, and her crew spent Christmas 1982 at Grytviken on South Georgia, attending a candlelit Christmas service in the settlement's old whaling church, a suitably remote and hard-won posting for a ship that had, only months earlier, been carrying out routine survey work thousands of miles away.

Christmas at Grytviken has more to it than the picture suggests. Grytviken was a Norwegian whaling station, abandoned since 1966, a rusting sprawl of tanks, flensing plats and machinery at the head of a fjord in South Georgia, and it had been in Argentine hands until the Royal Marines retook it in April. The church the crew went to on Christmas Eve was the whalers' own Lutheran church, put up in 1913, and about a hundred yards away is the cemetery where Ernest Shackleton was buried in 1922, having died aboard his ship in the harbour on his way south. Spending Christmas 1982 in that place, at the end of the year Britain had just fought a war over these islands, with the crippled Argentine submarine Santa Fe still lying at the jetty at nearby King Edward Point where she had been abandoned in April, is about as strange a Christmas as the Royal Navy has handed anybody.

After seeing in the New Year at the Falklands, she became the first Royal Navy ship to visit South America since the conflict, embarking a Chilean pilot at Punta Arenas for the passage through the Patagonian Channels to Talcahuano before heading home the long way round, through the Panama Canal and by way of a four-day call at Antigua, finally reaching Britain on 18 February 1983, having played a remarkably important, if quiet, role in the immediate post-war period.

The End

HMS Hecate continued in survey service for a further seven years after her South Atlantic deployment, including a further refit at Devonport between October 1985 and March 1986, before being decommissioned in 1990. She was finally towed to Pipavav in India for scrapping, arriving there on 29 January 1994, closing out the career of a ship whose working life had ranged from the Persian Gulf to the South Atlantic, and had included both a brush with a terrorist bomb and an unexpected turn as an armed guardship in one of the most remote corners of the world.

There is a small irony in her having been the one sent. Of the four Hecla-class ships, three, Hecla, Hydra and Herald, were taken up during the Falklands War itself and converted into ambulance ships and hospital carriers, painted white with red crosses and used to move casualties out of the war zone under the Geneva Conventions. Hecate was the only one of the four not used that way. So when the shooting stopped and somebody was needed to go south, armed, and hold the line in the ice for six months, she was the sister who happened to be available. The class had been designed in the early 1960s to take temperature profiles and chart the ocean floor. Between them the four of them spent 1982 and 1983 carrying wounded men and standing guard in the South Atlantic, which is not on any of the drawings.