HMS Hermione (F58): The Frigate That Played HMS Hero on Television

Built on Two Yards

HMS Hermione was begun by Alexander Stephen and Sons but completed by Yarrow Shipbuilders, launched on 26 April 1967 and commissioned on 11 July 1969, a Leander-class general purpose frigate, laid down at Alexander Stephen and Sons' Govan yard on the Clyde on 6 December 1965, one of the most successful and numerous frigate designs the Royal Navy ever operated.

She deployed to the Far East and Pacific in 1970, part of the steady rhythm of worldwide deployment that characterised so much Leander-class service through the 1970s.

Leading the Fleet at the Jubilee

HMS Hermione served as leader of the 5th Frigate Squadron during the Queen's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, a notably prestigious role placing her at the head of one of the assembled squadrons for one of the great set-piece naval occasions of the decade.

A Star of Stage and Screen

HMS Hermione found an entirely unexpected form of fame during this period, appearing in the BBC drama series Warship as the fictional HMS Hero, giving television audiences a rare, if fictionalised, glimpse of life aboard a working Royal Navy frigate, and a small but genuine claim to cultural recognition well beyond the usual audience for naval history. She wasn't the only ship to play the part, and wasn't even the first: HMS Phoebe was the Navy's original choice of star, with Hermione, HMS Dido and HMS Jupiter all later taking their own turns wearing Hero's cap tallies, an oddly egalitarian arrangement for a fictional command that, on paper, could only ever have one crew. The series was created by a serving Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Ian Mackintosh, who left the Navy shortly after Warship ended and went on to create the spy drama The Sandbaggers, before disappearing without trace in a light aircraft over the Gulf of Alaska in 1979, a genuine, still-unsolved postscript to a show built entirely around ordinary naval routine.

Mackintosh himself is the strangest part of the whole business, and the reason Warship rang true is that he was not a writer who had researched the Navy. He was a Royal Navy lieutenant commander who had served in the Admiralty's Department of Naval Intelligence, and he retired early to write; the authenticity everybody remarked on in Warship, and later the almost unbearable bleakness of The Sandbaggers, came from a man describing a world he had actually worked in. On 7 July 1979, nineteen days short of his thirty-ninth birthday, he was in a single-engined light aircraft over the Gulf of Alaska with an experienced British Airways pilot and his partner Susan Insole. Three hours out the pilot radioed that they were losing oil pressure. There were forty-foot seas and breaking ice below them. No wreckage was ever found, none of the three was seen again, and the British government declined to investigate. The Sandbaggers was left with its final storyline unresolved. It is the sort of ending Mackintosh would have refused to write, on the grounds that nobody would believe it.

The business of the rotating cast is worth explaining, because it tells you something about how the Royal Navy of the 1970s worked. HMS Hero did not exist, and no real frigate could be tied up for four series of television, so the production simply used whichever ship happened to be available: Phoebe first, then Hermione, Dido and Jupiter, each of them wearing Hero's cap tallies and pennant number for the duration of filming, as described in the article on HMS Dido (F104). The Leanders were interchangeable enough on camera that nobody noticed, which is a backhanded compliment to a class of twenty-six near-identical ships, and the Navy cooperated throughout because a popular drama about frigate life was worth a great deal in recruiting terms.

Missiles Instead of Guns

HMS Hermione's modernisation at Chatham Naval Dockyard did not go entirely to plan: she arrived in August 1979, only for a national pay dispute to shut the project down and see her mothballed for four months before work finally got under way properly in January 1980, receiving the Sea Wolf point defence missile system and Exocet anti-ship missiles in place of her original twin 4.5-inch gun turrets, a significant upgrade that considerably sharpened her capabilities for the sort of modern naval combat the Falklands War, fought just as her refit was underway, had shown was now a real possibility rather than a theoretical one. It was Chatham's first Sea Wolf conversion, took some 46,000 man-weeks of labour and, by the time she finally left the Medway on 21 June 1983 with a formal escort from Rear Admiral W. Higgins, had the peculiar distinction of being the very last surface ship refit the 400-year-old Royal Dockyard would ever carry out before its closure the following March.

Her rebuild was one of the largest single pieces of surgery the Royal Navy ever performed on a frigate. She was one of only five ships taken to what was called the Batch 3A standard: the twin 4.5-inch turret, the Seacat and the old radars all came out, and in went a six-barrelled Sea Wolf launcher, four Exocet, new sonar and a rebuilt flight deck and hangar for the Lynx, which is set out in the article on HMS Charybdis (F75). Forty-six thousand man-weeks is roughly nine hundred people working for a year. And the timing was cruel: she went into Chatham in August 1979 and was immediately mothballed for four months by a national pay dispute, then spent the Falklands War in pieces in a dry dock while the ships that went south demonstrated precisely why she was being given Sea Wolf and Exocet in the first place.

The detail about being Chatham's last surface ship refit deserves more weight than a passing clause. In June 1981 John Nott announced that the Royal Dockyard at Chatham would close, and on 30 March 1984 the main gate was padlocked, ending 414 years during which the yard had built more than five hundred ships for the Royal Navy, Nelson's Victory among them. Around seven thousand dockyard workers lost their jobs at once, with perhaps ten thousand more in the surrounding area dependent on the yard, and unemployment in Medway went to something like sixteen per cent. Hermione left the Medway on 21 June 1983 with a formal escort from a rear admiral. She was the last warship a four-hundred-year-old naval dockyard would ever finish, and everybody standing on the wall watching her go knew what it meant for the town.

The Tanker War and the Gulf

HMS Hermione joined the 8th Frigate Squadron following her refit and saw service in the Middle East, including involvement in the so-called Tanker War, the campaign of attacks on merchant shipping that formed a dangerous side conflict of the wider Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s, protecting international shipping in the Persian Gulf from mines and missile attack.

The Tanker War she was sent to is one of the strangest conflicts of the twentieth century, and it fell almost entirely on civilians. From 1984 both Iran and Iraq began attacking neutral merchant ships as a way of hurting each other's economies: Iraq flew French-supplied Super Etendards with Exocet missiles against tankers loading at Iran's Kharg Island terminal, and Iran, which had no comparable air force, used small boats, gunfire and mines against ships serving Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because those states were financing Iraq. By the end of 1987 Iraq had made 283 attacks and Iran 168; 586 merchant ships were damaged and 430 civilian seafarers were killed. None of them were combatants. The Armilla Patrol, set up in September 1980 and running continuously afterwards, existed to put a British warship alongside British merchant ships in that water, and from October 1986 the Royal Navy formally accompanied British-flagged vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

She returned to the region in 1991 for a further Armilla Patrol deployment, continuing the Royal Navy's long-standing commitment to maintaining a presence in Gulf waters.

What accompanying actually meant is worth a moment, because it is not quite escorting. The Royal Navy was not at war with anybody; it could not fire first, could not attack the aircraft or boats that were doing the damage, and had no mandate beyond protecting British-registered ships. So a frigate would fall in with a tanker, stay close enough to be unmistakably present, watch every radar contact and every small craft in the vicinity, and rely almost entirely on the deterrent effect of being obviously there and obviously capable. It is a peculiarly nerve-wracking way to spend a deployment: fully worked up, weapons ready, in a sea where ships were being hit every few days, under rules of engagement that meant the first shot would probably be somebody else's. Hermione did it twice, before and after the Gulf War.

The End

HMS Hermione was decommissioned in 1992, and sold to India for scrap in 1997, closing out the career of a frigate whose service, spanning the Cold War, the Tanker War and the aftermath of the Gulf War, had also included a remarkably memorable turn in front of the television cameras as a fictional warship of her own.