HMS Jaguar (F37): From a World Cruise to Two Cod Wars

The Last Frigate From a Famous Yard

HMS Jaguar was built by William Denny and Brothers, the very last frigate the celebrated yard would ever build for the Royal Navy, a particularly notable milestone marking the slow decline of an industry that had once been central to British shipbuilding.

Denny of Dumbarton deserves rather more than being called celebrated, because for a century they were among the most inventive shipbuilders anywhere. The firm started building steamers on the Leven in 1814 and went on to produce a very large number of the fast cross-channel and estuary steamers that made British coastal traffic work, along with a good deal of naval work. What sets them apart is that in 1883 they built the first ship model testing tank ever constructed by a shipbuilder: a covered trough three hundred feet long, designed with help from R.E. Froude, in which scale models were towed and their resistance measured so that a hull form could be optimised on paper before a single plate was cut. Every shipyard in the world does the equivalent now. Denny did it first, at their own expense, in 1883, and the tank is still there in Dumbarton as a museum. They also invented the Denny-Brown stabiliser, which is why modern ferries do not roll their passengers about. The firm went into liquidation in 1963, three years after Jaguar commissioned, having run out of orders like most of the Clyde.

A Leopard-class Type 41 frigate, she was unique among her sister ships in being fitted with controllable pitch propellers, and carried two twin 4.5-inch Mark 6 guns alongside a twin STAAG anti-aircraft mounting, later replaced by a 40mm gun.

She received a significant mid-1960s refit that saw her radar upgraded, Type 960 replaced by Type 965 and Type 293Q by Type 993, along with new electronic support measures and a mainmast converted from a lattice structure to a solid plated one.

The class she belonged to came out of a very specific piece of 1950s Admiralty thinking, and it is worth explaining because it explains her whole career. The Navy in 1951 needed a great many frigates quickly and could not afford a great many expensive ones, so it designed three types on broadly common lines: the Type 41 for anti-aircraft work, the Type 61 for aircraft direction, and an anti-submarine version, the Type 11, on the same hull. The first two were given diesel engines rather than steam turbines, which was a considerable break with British practice. The reasoning was sound: diesels burn far less fuel, need a much smaller and less highly trained engine-room department, are simpler to keep running a long way from a dockyard, and gave these ships an endurance of about 4,500 miles at fifteen knots. The catch was speed. A diesel frigate of that generation could not exceed about twenty-five knots, which was too slow to hunt a modern submarine, so the Type 11 was cancelled outright and replaced by the steam-turbine Type 12. By 1955 improved turbines had wiped out the fuel advantage as well, and the diesel frigates were curtailed at eight ships between two classes. What the Navy was left with was a small number of slow, immensely economical, extremely long-legged ships, and it used them accordingly: for foreign stations, the South Atlantic, the Persian Gulf, and anywhere a British warship needed to be present for months rather than fast for an afternoon.

A World Cruise and Medical Aid in the Seychelles

HMS Jaguar sailed from Chatham Dockyard in January 1969 on an extensive world cruise, calling at Gibraltar, South Africa, Mombasa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Fiji, Tonga, Rarotonga, Tahiti, Pitcairn, Panama and Florida, a notably impressive itinerary that showcased the Royal Navy's continuing global reach even as the empire that had once justified such a presence steadily receded. She made it home in good time for Christmas.

That itinerary is worth reading twice, because it is a farewell tour and everybody involved knew it. In January 1968 the Labour government had announced that Britain would withdraw all forces from east of Suez, other than Hong Kong, by the end of 1971; the Singapore base, Aden, the Gulf commitments, the whole imperial structure the Royal Navy had been built around for a century and a half was being wound up on a timetable. Jaguar sailed a year later and called at Gibraltar, South Africa, Mombasa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Pitcairn and Panama, which is a list of places where a grey ship with a white ensign had been a normal sight for generations and would shortly stop being one. Pitcairn is the giveaway: a British territory of fewer than a hundred people, three thousand miles from anywhere, which is visited because it is British and for no other reason at all. A ship with 4,500 miles of endurance and a small crew was exactly the right vehicle for that kind of gesture, and there were not going to be many more of them.

During the voyage, she provided medical assistance in the Seychelles, a welcome piece of humanitarian work carried out far from home.

In February 1972 she represented the Royal Navy at the Ethiopian Navy's own Navy Days celebrations in Massawa, on the Red Sea, mixing rather incongruously with warships from the United States, France and Sudan and, in a proper slice of Cold War theatre, a Soviet Kashin-class destroyer moored not far from Jaguar's own White Ensign.

The Massawa visit is a small period piece of Cold War manoeuvring. Ethiopia in 1972 was still ruled by Haile Selassie, was firmly in the Western camp, and had a small navy trained largely by Britain and Norway with an American-built base; Massawa was its principal port, on the Red Sea, and is now in Eritrea. Inviting the Americans, the French, the Sudanese and the Royal Navy to a naval open day, and having the Soviet Union send a Kashin-class destroyer to the same event, was Ethiopian foreign policy in miniature: play everybody, take everybody's money, commit to nobody. It did not last. Selassie was deposed in 1974 by a Marxist military junta, Ethiopia changed sides completely, the Soviets arrived in force, and within a few years the ships tied up at that jetty would have been shooting at each other's clients. Jaguar's crew spent a pleasant week in the sun and went home.

Colliding With an Icelandic Gunboat

HMS Jaguar deployed to Iceland in 1973 for the Second Cod War, the long-running dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights, and on 10 September that year collided with the Icelandic gunboat Thor, sustaining damage to her bow in one of the numerous close-quarters confrontations that characterised the dispute, in which Iceland's small but determined coastguard fleet repeatedly took on Royal Navy frigates many times their size.

The Thor collision needs the background, because these were not accidents in the ordinary sense. Iceland pushed her fishing limit out from twelve miles to fifty on 1 September 1972, Britain refused to accept it, and within days the Icelandic coastguard produced the tactic that defined the whole dispute: a device towed astern that cut the trawl warps of any British trawler fishing inside the line, so that the net and several thousand pounds of gear went to the bottom. They cut at least eighty-two of them. Britain sent frigates and ocean tugs in May 1973 to get between the gunboats and the trawlers, and what followed was a slow-speed contest in heavy weather between ships whose captains were forbidden to shoot and were therefore reduced to using their hulls. Iceland had a handful of gunboats of a few hundred tons; the Royal Navy had frigates of two and a half thousand. Both sides rammed and both sides claimed the other started it. The wider dispute and how it was fought is described in the article on HMS Eastbourne (F73). Britain withdrew her warships on 3 October 1973 and signed an agreement five weeks later limiting the British catch to 130,000 tons a year. Iceland had won, and would win again in 1976.

HMS Jaguar was recommissioned for further service during the Third Cod War in 1976, this time fitted with protective wooden sheathing to her bow and stern, a practical if somewhat old-fashioned response to the risk of further collisions.

The wooden sheathing on her bow and stern in 1976 was not eccentricity; it was the accumulated lesson of the previous three years. Ramming an Icelandic gunboat, or being rammed by one, does not sink a frigate, but it opens plating, distorts frames and puts a ship into dockyard hands for weeks, and by the Third Cod War the Royal Navy was fitting its ships with balks of timber, and in some cases lengths of railway track, bolted to the vulnerable areas so that contact could be absorbed rather than repaired. HMS Lincoln's version is described in the article on HMS Lincoln (F99). There is something faintly absurd about a modern warship being padded like a bumper car, and it is also a fair illustration of what the whole conflict actually was: two NATO allies, neither able to use a weapon on the other, settling a dispute about fish by shoving.

A Long Second Life in Bangladesh

HMS Jaguar was sold to the Bangladesh Navy on 6 July 1978 for £2 million, commissioned as BNS Ali Haider (F17), and went on to serve for well over three decades under her new flag, finally decommissioning on 22 January 2014 at Chittagong. Her replacement, rather neatly, kept both the name and the pennant number: a Chinese-built Jianghu-III class frigate was recommissioned as the new BNS Ali Haider (F17), taking over from the veteran British-built ship her old crew had known, closing out the career of a frigate whose service, spanning a round-the-world cruise, two separate confrontations with Icelandic gunboats and more than thirty years with a second navy, proved remarkable for a ship built as the last of a fading shipbuilding tradition.

Thirty-six years with the Bangladesh Navy is by a distance the longest phase of her life, and it says something about both ships and buyers. Bangladesh had become independent in 1971 and had essentially no navy at all; what she needed was ocean patrol capability she could afford to run, and a diesel frigate with enormous endurance, a small engine-room complement and no complicated machinery was very nearly the perfect answer. Jaguar cost £2 million in 1978 and gave thirty-six years of service for it, which is a better return than almost anything the Royal Navy bought new in the same decade. She was finally paid off at Chittagong in 2014, fifty-five years after she was launched on the Leven by a firm that had already been dead for half a century. The Type 41 was called a compromise design, too slow for a real war and built because the Treasury would not pay for better. It kept the sea for five and a half decades.