HMS Herald (H138): A Survey Ship That Became a Red Cross Vessel in the Falklands

The Build: Leith

HMS Herald was built at the Robb Caledon shipyard in Leith, laid down on 9 November 1972, launched on 4 October 1973 and completed on 22 November 1974, commissioning that same year as a Hecla-class ocean survey vessel, sister ship to HMS Hecla, HMS Hecate and HMS Hydra, all built for the patient, essential work of hydrographic and oceanographic survey around the world's coastlines and oceans. She was launched by Mrs Hall, wife of the Navy's Hydrographer of the day, and entered service equipped with echo-sounding gear, underwater cameras and her own Wasp helicopter for aerial survey work, a far cry from the two very different roles the Royal Navy would later call her up for.

She was the odd one out of the four, and it shows in the dates. Hecla, Hecate and Hydra were ordered together in the early 1960s and built by Yarrow on the Clyde; Herald came almost a decade later, from Robb Caledon at Leith, and was completed in 1974 to a modified version of the same design. That gap matters, because it meant she was the newest of the class throughout her life and outlasted all three of her sisters in Royal Navy service. What the Heclas were designed to do, and the harder Cold War reason for measuring the ocean quite so carefully, is set out in the article on HMS Hecate (A137).

A Red Cross Ship in the Falklands

HMS Herald's steady survey career was interrupted in dramatic fashion by the 1982 Falklands War, when she was reassigned to serve as a Red Cross ship, ferrying wounded casualties from the landing beaches at San Carlos to Montevideo in Uruguay for onward treatment, a vital humanitarian role carried out under the protection of the Red Cross emblem amid an active war zone, a considerable departure from her usual chart-making duties.

Herald sailed from Portsmouth on 24 April 1982 alongside her sister ship HMS Hydra, her hull and superstructure repainted white and marked with prominent red crosses to satisfy the Geneva Convention, her messdecks turned over to makeshift wards. Working the shuttle route between the neutral Red Cross Box, where the liner-turned-hospital-ship SS Uganda took on wounded from both British and Argentine forces, and the safety of Montevideo, she and her two sister ships between them carried up to 100 non-critical patients a trip, together landing 251 casualties for onward RAF VC10 flights home.

The rules she was operating under in 1982 were exacting, and they cut both ways. Being declared a hospital ship under the Geneva Conventions meant she could not be attacked; it also meant she had to be notified in advance to the International Committee of the Red Cross, painted and lit so as to be unmistakable, unarmed, and carrying nothing whatever of military use, no troops, no cargo, no weapons and no intelligence-gathering equipment. For a survey ship that last condition is a real sacrifice: her sonar, her survey computers and everything she normally exists to do had to be idle, because using them would have been using a protected ship for a military purpose and would have forfeited the protection for every other hospital ship in the war. How the arrangement worked, and the neutral box of water where British and Argentine ships lay in sight of one another exchanging wounded, is described in the article on HMS Hecla (A133).

Supporting the Minehunters Toward the Gulf War

HMS Herald was deployed once again for operational support following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, this time to the Eastern Mediterranean, arriving in September 1990 as part of the multinational build-up against Saddam Hussein, where she served as a support ship for the minehunters of the 3rd Mine Countermeasures Squadron, her flight deck strengthened to take a Lynx helicopter in place of her usual Wasp and her ship's company swollen to around 128 officers and men for the deployment.

She continued supporting the squadron through the Persian Gulf as the international coalition built up its forces, before being relieved by her sister ship ahead of the air campaign that opened the Gulf War in January 1991, having played a remarkably important logistical role in getting the minehunting force ready for the operations that followed.

Her Gulf job in 1990 needs explaining, because support ship undersells it. A minehunter is a small vessel with a crew of about forty, limited fuel, limited stores, no workshop worth the name and nowhere to put anybody who is injured, and the ones sent to the Gulf had to get there from Britain and then work for months. What they needed was a mother: a larger ship carrying fuel, fresh water, food, spare parts, divers' equipment, a workshop, a doctor, a helicopter and somewhere for exhausted crews to get a proper meal and a night's sleep. Herald did that for the 3rd Mine Countermeasures Squadron, with her flight deck strengthened to take a Lynx instead of the smaller Wasp. The mines those minehunters went on to clear, and what they did to two American warships before the clearance began, are described in the article on HMS Bicester (M36).

Back to Routine Survey Work

With Kuwait liberated, Herald went back to the patient, unglamorous work she had been built for, chart-updating and survey duties around British and Mediterranean waters, for a spell operating out of Malta, where she reportedly became rather popular with the locals. She was still hard at it in the mid-1990s, pictured alongside at West India Dock in London's Docklands in July 1995 and off Devonport the following May, a rather more urban backdrop than her usual charting grounds.

A Mayday in the Mediterranean

HMS Herald's career also included notable humanitarian work closer to routine peacetime operations: in December 2000, she and the Royal Air Force answered a Mayday from the 35-metre Cypriot ferry Royal Prince, sinking in heavy seas off Cyprus: an RAF helicopter from nearby RAF Akrotiri winched the ferry's crew to safety and set them down on Herald's own deck moments before the vessel went under, a reminder that a well found, well crewed naval vessel is often among the first and best placed to respond when disaster strikes at sea, regardless of what her primary mission happens to be.

Adopted by Warwick

For much of her career Herald also had the rather more sedate distinction of being Warwickshire's own ship: the town of Warwick adopted her in the early 1980s, after its previous wartime affiliate, the destroyer HMS Warwick, was torpedoed and sunk in the Second World War. Councillors, veterans and schoolchildren visited whenever she was alongside at Portsmouth or Devonport, a Coten End School party travelling all the way to Liverpool to see her in June 1995, and a model of the ship, reputedly made by an admirer in Malta, still sits in Warwick's Town Council Chamber today.

The ship whose place she took in Warwick's affections had a hard end and a long memory attached to her. HMS Warwick was a First World War destroyer, and on 20 February 1944 she was patrolling off Trevose Head on the north Cornish coast when U-413 put an acoustic torpedo into her stern. She sank in minutes and took 66 men with her; their names are on the naval memorial on Plymouth Hoe. Exactly six months to the day afterwards, the Hunt-class destroyer HMS Wensleydale sank U-413. And there is one further connection that explains why the town cared: in April 1918 Warwick had been the ship from which Roger Keyes flew his flag during the raid on Zeebrugge, and after her loss that ensign was given to the town of Warwick in memory of the men who died in her. A town that had a First World War raid, a destroyer sunk with two thirds of a crew and a flag in its keeping was not going to be satisfied with nothing, and in the early 1980s it adopted a survey ship.

Decommissioning and a Final Voyage

HMS Herald was paid off on 12 April 2001 and formally decommissioned on 31 May that year, superseded by the newer Echo-class survey ships then entering Royal Navy service.

Rather than being scrapped immediately, she was sold to Hanley Marine Services of Waterford and renamed Somerville, after the wartime admiral Sir James Somerville, going on to conduct further hydrographic surveys in Irish waters, before finally being sold to Indian ship breakers, arriving at Alang on 12 June 2004 and beached for demolition six days later on 18 June, closing out the career of a survey ship whose quiet chart-making work had, at critical moments, given way to truly vital humanitarian and military support roles.

The name she was given afterwards belonged to one of the more interesting admirals of the war. James Somerville had been invalided out of the Royal Navy in 1939 with suspected tuberculosis, went back in as a volunteer, helped organise the small boats at Dunkirk, and was then given command of Force H at Gibraltar, the independent squadron formed to fill the hole the French collapse had left in the western Mediterranean. He commanded it at Mers-el-Kebir, an operation he detested and carried out anyway, and through the Malta convoys; what Force H was and how it worked is described in the article on HMS Haydon (L75). He went on to command the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean and finished the war as head of the British naval mission in Washington. Putting his name on a survey ship working Irish waters is an odd afterlife for a fighting admiral, and a fairly typical one.

The place she ended is worth describing, because most people have never seen anything like it. Alang, on the Gulf of Khambhat in Gujarat, is about fifteen kilometres of beach with an unusually large tidal range and a gentle slope, and it is where roughly a third of the world's ships are taken apart. A vessel arriving there is not towed into a dock; she is driven ashore under her own power at the top of a spring tide, as hard and as far up the sand as her master can put her, and if she stops short she is winched in over the following days. Then several thousand men with cutting torches take her to pieces where she lies, and almost everything in her, steel, cable, pipework, furniture, is sold on. More than 8,600 ships have gone that way. Herald arrived on 12 June 2004 and was beached six days later, twenty-nine years after she went down the ways at Leith.