HMS Hydra (A144): From Chatham Navy Days to the Indonesian Navy

Built on the Clyde

HMS Hydra was built by Yarrow and Company at Blythswood, Glasgow, laid down in May 1964, launched on 14 July 1965 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 5 May 1966, the third of the Hecla-class ocean survey vessels alongside HMS Hecla, HMS Hecate and HMS Herald.

She measured 260 feet in length, displaced 2,733 tons at full load, and carried a crew of 118, powered by three Paxman Ventura diesel engines driving a single propeller through an electric motor for a top trial speed of 14.5 knots and a remarkably impressive range of 20,000 nautical miles at a cruising 9 knots.

For all her workaday appearance, Hydra and her sisters were quietly rather strategic ships. Built to a hull design derived from the famous polar research vessel RRS Discovery and costing a modest £1.25 million apiece, they were funded chiefly out of the Polaris programme, since accurate oceanographic data on the layers and currents of the deep ocean was essential for Britain's ballistic missile submarines to find places to hide. She also carried two small survey launches, a Land Rover for work ashore, and a Wasp helicopter with her own flight deck and hangar, considerably more kit than her unassuming grey hull might have suggested.

It is worth saying what the work actually consisted of, because charting a coastline is one of those jobs everybody assumes was finished in about 1890. It was not, and it is not now. A survey ship runs endless parallel lines across a patch of sea, sounding continuously, at a speed slow enough to be useful and for long enough to make the whole thing miserable; her launches work the shallows she cannot enter; parties go ashore to fix positions, set up tide gauges and observe the rise and fall for weeks so that every sounding can be reduced to the same datum. Somebody then has to draw the fair sheet. In the days before satellite positioning, knowing where you were to within a few yards, hundreds of miles from anywhere, was itself a considerable feat of astronomy and arithmetic. The output was an Admiralty chart, and the reason that mattered far beyond the Royal Navy is that British charts covered most of the world's navigable water and were used by everybody's merchant fleets. A ship like Hydra was, in a very direct sense, working for the whole of world trade.

A Record Crowd at Chatham

HMS Hydra underwent five separate docking periods at Chatham for refits and maintenance between 1967 and 1971, and in 1968 took part in Chatham Dockyard Navy Days, an event that drew a record crowd of 65,000 visitors over the two-day event, of whom some 16,500 came aboard Hydra herself, a notably striking illustration of just how much public interest the Royal Navy could generate during this period, even for a comparatively unglamorous survey vessel rather than a fighting ship.

Sixteen and a half thousand people going aboard one survey ship in two days is worth pausing on, because it says as much about Chatham as about Hydra. The dockyard had been building and repairing warships since the sixteenth century, it was the largest employer for miles, and half the town had a relative working behind the gate; Navy Days was the one occasion when the public could walk in and go aboard. Sixteen years after that record crowd the yard was closed, in 1984, and seven thousand people lost their jobs at a stroke, which is described in the article on HMS Hermione (F58). The queue up Hydra's gangway in 1968 was, though nobody knew it, near the end of something.

Two Decades of Survey Work

HMS Hydra spent two decades engaged in the patient, essential work her design was built for, charting coastlines and ocean depths around the world to keep Admiralty charts accurate and up to date for the Royal Navy and merchant shipping alike, unglamorous but particularly vital duty carried out largely away from public attention.

In 1970 she spent months surveying a 185-mile stretch of the Malacca Strait, nine miles wide, one of the busiest and most navigationally tricky shipping lanes on Earth, reporting 63 separate shoal soundings for promulgation by Notice to Mariners before a refit at Singapore's Sembawang yard that summer. That November, disaster interrupted the schedule: the Bhola cyclone, still the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, struck East Pakistan on the 12th with a storm surge that killed several hundred thousand people, and on the 19th Hydra was detached to Bhola Island in the Bay of Bengal to join Operation Burlap, the resulting relief effort, putting her surveying skills to a rather more urgent use finding and marking safe channels so small craft could get food and supplies ashore.

The Malacca Strait survey was not routine chart-tidying either; it was a piece of infrastructure work with global consequences. The strait is the shortest sea route between the Indian Ocean and the Far East and carries an enormous proportion of the world's oil, and it is also shallow, narrow and littered with shoals, so the maximum draught a ship can safely take through it is a hard physical limit. That limit has a name in the shipping industry, and tanker designers have worked to it for sixty years. Sixty-three previously unrecorded shoal soundings along a 185-mile stretch is therefore not a footnote: every one of them is a place where a loaded tanker might have found the bottom, and each went out to the world's shipping as a Notice to Mariners. It is the sort of achievement that produces no medals and prevents disasters nobody can ever count.

The interruption in November 1970 deserves rather more than a sentence, because it is the deadliest natural disaster of the twentieth century and its consequences changed the map. The cyclone came ashore across the low islands of the Ganges delta on the night of 12 November with a storm surge many feet high, over ground that is barely above sea level and had almost no warning system; the accepted death toll is somewhere between three hundred thousand and half a million people, and nobody will ever know the real figure. The relief effort was a shambles, and the government in West Pakistan made it worse: the provincial governor initially gave the toll as about sixteen thousand, and the sense in East Pakistan that its own government did not much care whether it lived or died fed directly into the general election a month later, which the Awami League won by a landslide. Four months after that, East Pakistan declared itself Bangladesh, and by the end of 1971 it was independent after a war. The British relief operation Hydra joined, Operation Burlap, was built round a task force sent up from Singapore with helicopters and landing craft, and her particular job was the one only she could do: the surge had rearranged the channels through the delta, and the charts were now fiction. Somebody had to go and find out where the water was before the food could get in.

Later in the decade she surveyed the western Mediterranean through the summer of 1976, returning to Portsmouth after five years away, before a 1977 refit and a passage east that November to begin surveys in the Gulf of Oman. Those surveys, based out of Bandar Abbas from late in the year, ran on through 1978 and into 1979, when they were cut short so Hydra could help evacuate Western nationals from Iran during the revolution that toppled the Shah, a rather more dramatic assignment than her usual soundings and chart corrections.

The Iranian evacuation is another of those episodes that reads as a single line and was, for the people involved, an extremely tense fortnight. Hydra had been working the Gulf of Oman out of Bandar Abbas, an Iranian naval base, at exactly the point when the Shah's government came apart: strikes, then the army standing aside, then the Shah leaving the country in January 1979 and Khomeini arriving a fortnight later. British companies had a large presence in Iran, much of it connected with oil and with the arms contracts the Shah had signed, and getting families out through airports that had stopped functioning was not straightforward. A grey-hulled survey ship with 20,000 miles of range, a helicopter and a great deal of spare accommodation turned out to be exactly the right thing to have in the neighbourhood. She stopped surveying, took people off, and left.

1980 brought a quieter posting surveying off the west coast of Scotland, followed by a summer refit, before the ship's routine was interrupted far more seriously in April 1982.

A War Interrupts the Survey Work

With the Falklands War underway, Hydra was redirected south to support the hospital ship RFA Uganda rather than continue surveying anything. On 25 May she rendezvoused with the requisitioned liner SS Canberra, and on 30 May she took up station in the designated Red Cross Box in the South Atlantic, where she embarked 49 casualties from Uganda for the passage north to Montevideo in neutral Uruguay, from where the wounded could be flown home, unarmed and unglamorous work that was every bit as essential, in its own way, as anything her gun-armed sisters were doing closer to the fighting.

Her Falklands service was a good deal heavier than that single trip suggests. In all she made four passages between the Red Cross Box and Montevideo and carried 251 British casualties, and the worst of them came after 8 June, when Argentine aircraft caught the landing ships Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram at Bluff Cove and set them on fire with troops still embarked. Burns are the injury that defines that war for the people who treated it: they need constant nursing, repeated dressing changes, enormous quantities of fluid and, above all, time, and a hospital ship in a war zone cannot afford to fill her wards with men who will be there for weeks. So the survey ships took them, in a hull never designed for it, on a passage of several days across the South Atlantic in winter. How the whole arrangement worked, and the extraordinary business of a neutral patch of sea where British and Argentine ships lay in sight of one another exchanging wounded, is set out in the article on HMS Hecla (A133), and what it took to convert a survey ship into a protected hospital vessel in a matter of days is in the article on HMS Herald (H138).

By November 1983 she was back to more familiar business, sailing via Gibraltar, Naples and the Suez Canal to begin a fresh survey off the north coast of Oman, then working up into the Red Sea before returning home through Suez and the Mediterranean, one last long working voyage before her Royal Navy career drew to a close.

A New Life as Dewa Kembar

HMS Hydra was placed on the Royal Navy's disposal list in 1986 and handed over to Indonesia on 18 April that year for refit, before being commissioned into the Indonesian Navy on 10 September 1986 as the survey ship Dewa Kembar, continuing the very same kind of hydrographic work she had carried out for two decades under British colours, now serving Indonesian waters instead, a fitting second career for a ship whose entire purpose had always been making the seas safer to navigate, regardless of whose flag she happened to be flying.

The Indonesian second act is more fitting than it looks. Indonesia is an archipelago of something over seventeen thousand islands with tens of thousands of miles of coastline, a great deal of it still indifferently charted, sitting astride the busiest sea lanes in Asia. If you were designing a country that needed a long-range deep-ocean survey ship, you would design Indonesia. She went east in 1986, was still on the Indonesian navy list more than thirty years later, and has therefore spent considerably longer surveying under a red and white ensign than she ever did under a white one. A ship built with Polaris money to help British missile submarines hide in the deep Atlantic has spent most of her life making it safer for other people to go to sea, which is a rather better outcome than the Treasury had in mind when it signed the cheque.