HMS Jupiter (F60): The Frigate That Hit London Bridge

Laid Down at Scotstoun

HMS Jupiter was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun on the Clyde, laid down on 3 October 1966, launched on 4 September 1967 and commissioned on 9 August 1969, a Batch 3 Leander-class frigate named, like the rest of her class, after a figure of classical mythology, and one that went on to enjoy a long and remarkably varied career touching four continents.

Being a Batch 3 ship matters more than it sounds. The Leanders were built over fourteen years in three groups, and the last of them, Jupiter among them, were given a beam some two feet greater than the earlier ships. That sounds trivial and was not: the extra width gave stability margin, and stability margin is what allows a ship to be modernised, because every radar, missile launcher and director added later goes high up and makes her more top-heavy. The broad-beamed Leanders could therefore take the substantial mid-life conversions that the narrow ones could not, which is why Jupiter finished her career carrying Exocet and Sea Wolf while some of her older sisters were paid off more or less as built. The class as a whole, and why it was the most successful British frigate design since the war, is described in the article on HMS Juno (F52).

Showing the Flag in the Caribbean and the Atlantic

She was despatched to the West Indies within a year of commissioning, and by April 1970 was standing off Trinidad as Britain rushed ships to the island during the Black Power uprising against the government of Eric Williams. Cabinet papers show that Defence Secretary Denis Healey ordered Jupiter to remain thirty miles offshore, with a second frigate, HMS Sirius, sent to join her and stay out of sight, a measure of how seriously Whitehall took the risk of a successful revolt spreading unrest to Britain's other Caribbean territories.

The Trinidad emergency of 1970 is one of the more startling episodes in the late history of British interests in the Caribbean, and it very nearly went the other way. Black Power demonstrations that began in February grew through the spring into something much larger, with tens of thousands marching in Port of Spain; the government declared a state of emergency on 21 April, and the following morning part of the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment mutinied at Teteron Barracks, seized the armoury and held it for several days. For about forty-eight hours nobody outside Trinidad knew whether the government would survive. What is striking in the Cabinet papers is how carefully Britain arranged to be able to intervene without appearing to: Jupiter was ordered to stay thirty miles off, over the horizon, and HMS Sirius was sent to join her with instructions to remain out of sight. Trinidad had been independent for eight years. Sending a frigate openly would have been an act of some significance; sending two and telling nobody was a way of having the option without taking the decision, and it is exactly how Britain handled the Caribbean for the next twenty years.

She joined NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic at Norfolk, Virginia in 1971, taking her place in the alliance's first permanent multinational squadron, and was back in the Caribbean the following year, covering for HMS Naiad off St Lucia after a mechanical breakdown sidelined her sister ship amid civil unrest on the island.

Rescuing a Trawler in the Cod Wars

HMS Jupiter found herself in the thick of the Second Cod War in 1973, and on 26 May that year she and her embarked Wasp helicopter came to the assistance of the Grimsby trawler Everton, which had strayed from the main fishing fleet and ignored a call from the Icelandic gunboat Aegir to heave to. Aegir fired warning shots across her bows first and, when Everton kept steaming, followed up with six or eight rounds of live fire that holed her forecastle and below the waterline, a dangerous escalation in a dispute that was supposed to be about fishing quotas rather than actual gunnery. Jupiter's boarding and salvage parties kept the trawler afloat long enough to bring her home, a reminder that the Cod Wars, however faintly comic they can seem in retrospect, involved real risk to real fishermen.

A Prince Aboard and a Ghost from Java

HMS Jupiter carried a rather more prominent crew member from 3 January 1974, when Lieutenant Prince Charles, the future King Charles III, joined as Ship's Communications Officer for her deployment to the Far East and Pacific. Nine days into the voyage, on 12 and 13 January, Jupiter diverted to assist the grounded tug Mediator off Indonesia and, in doing so, passed directly over the wreck of her own namesake, the destroyer HMS Jupiter (F85), mined and sunk with the loss of more than eighty men during the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, a quarter of the survivors taken prisoner later dying in Japanese captivity. The Prince took an active part in a service of remembrance held over the spot, the first time the Royal Navy had marked the wreck since the sinking, and the last time it would do so for another 46 years, until HMS Enterprise held a similar ceremony passing the same position in 2020.

The wreck she passed over is worth the whole story, and it has a grim postscript nobody could have foreseen in 1974. The Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February 1942 was the last stand of the ABDA striking force, a scratch squadron of Dutch, British, American and Australian ships under the Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, thrown against a Japanese invasion convoy with no common signal book, no air cover and no time to train together. It was annihilated. Doorman went down with his flagship De Ruyter; the destroyer Jupiter, hit while manoeuvring at night, was almost certainly mined by a Dutch field laid a few hours earlier and nobody had told her. Ninety-five of her men reached Java, and a substantial number of those who were taken prisoner did not survive the camps. Then, in November 2016, an expedition went out for the seventy-fifth anniversary and found that the wrecks were not there. De Ruyter and Java had gone completely; Exeter and Encounter had been almost entirely removed; Electra had been cut about; the American submarine Perch had vanished. Illegal salvage barges had lifted them for scrap, war graves and all, and the men inside them with the metal. Around a thousand Dutch and Indonesian sailors alone had died in that battle. There is nothing left to hold a service over.

The deployment carried on to New Zealand in February 1974, taking in a visit to Christchurch for the 1974 Commonwealth Games, before calling at Fiji and Western Samoa and pressing on to the United States by March. The Prince left the ship on 17 August 1974, having eventually swapped the bridge wing for cockpit training and, in 1976, command of his own ship, the minesweeper HMS Bronington.

HMS Jupiter later gained a rather different kind of fame by appearing as HMS Hero in the BBC drama series Warship, though HMS Phoebe did most of the actual filming duty, leaving HMS Jupiter with a supporting screen credit rather than a starring role.

Colliding With London Bridge

HMS Jupiter earned her most memorable, and least flattering, place in naval history on 13 June 1984. She had been moored bows-to-the-west alongside the museum ship HMS Belfast in the Pool of London and, with the tide flooding upstream rather than out to sea, her captain, Commander Colin Hamilton, needed to turn her round before heading back down the Thames. He chose to do it under his own steam rather than call on the two tugs standing by, Ionia and Sun Swale, misjudged the turn, and put Jupiter broadside into London Bridge, taking chunks out of the granite parapet and causing significant damage to the ship herself, a particularly spectacular piece of misfortune for a frigate navigating one of the most famous and closely watched stretches of river in the world.

Hamilton was court-martialled at Portsmouth that December, found guilty of leaving harbour incorrectly and of failing to use the tugs available to him, and was sentenced to the loss of seniority, a sobering conclusion to an incident that, however embarrassing, thankfully caused no serious injury and has since become one of the more frequently retold anecdotes in Royal Navy folklore. It evidently did not end his career either: he remained in command of Jupiter into 1985 and was later promoted to Captain.

It is worth being slightly fair to Commander Hamilton, because the Pool of London is a genuinely nasty piece of water for a warship. The Thames there runs fast, the tide reverses twice a day and the ebb and flood set differently against the banks, the channel between the moorings and the bridge is narrow, and a Leander is 372 feet long in a river that gives her very little room to swing. Turning a ship of that size in that space without tugs is a real feat of ship handling when it works, which is presumably why he tried it. The bridge he hit was also almost brand new: the present London Bridge had only opened in 1973, replacing the 1831 one that had been sold to an American entrepreneur and re-erected at Lake Havasu in Arizona. So a Royal Navy frigate managed to damage an eleven-year-old bridge in front of most of the City of London at lunchtime, alongside a museum ship that had survived the Arctic convoys and North Cape. The court martial was inevitable and the sentence, a loss of seniority, was mild by naval standards; that he kept his command and was later promoted suggests the Navy understood the difference between an error of judgement and a failure of character.

Missiles, the Gulf and a Long Goodbye

A long refit that began at the end of a Belize Patrol in late 1979, prompted by rising tension with Guatemala over the newly independent colony, was interrupted by the outbreak of the Falklands War in 1982 and finally completed in 1983, fitting HMS Jupiter with Sea Wolf and Exocet missiles and bringing her firepower up to a considerably more modern standard.

That refit was one of the most extensive rebuilds any British warship of the period received, and the timing tells its own story. The plan had been to strip out the Leanders' ageing anti-submarine mortar and replace it with Exocet anti-ship missiles and the Sea Wolf point-defence system, and it took years and a great deal of money per ship; only five Leanders ever received the full Sea Wolf conversion. What made it urgent was what happened while Jupiter was in dockyard hands. In the Falklands in 1982, British ships were hit by Argentine aircraft and by Exocets that their own defences could not stop, and Sea Wolf was the only weapon in the fleet that had shown it could reliably knock down a sea-skimming missile or a low-flying aircraft at close range; HMS Broadsword and HMS Brilliant demonstrated it repeatedly in San Carlos Water. A ship being fitted with exactly that system while the war was being fought was, in a sense, being given the answer to the question the Navy had just been asked. She came out of the yard in 1983 as a far more dangerous ship than she had been in 1979.

She spent 1985 and into 1986 on the Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf alongside HMS Newcastle and RFA Brambleleaf, calling at Gibraltar, Djibouti, Aqaba, Doha, Muscat and Mombasa on the way out and coming home via the Suez Canal and Piraeus, her exploits broadcast along the way by the BBC World Service. In January 1986, while transiting the Red Sea, she and Newcastle were ordered to Aden at full steam alongside the Royal Yacht Britannia as street fighting broke out between rival factions of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party, part of the multi-ship evacuation later known as Operation Balsac that brought more than a thousand people of 55 nationalities to safety. That September she joined the NATO exercise Autumn Train 86, spending a continuous four weeks in the Mediterranean before returning to her home port of Plymouth.

The Aden evacuation deserves more than a subordinate clause, because it was one of the strangest operations the Royal Navy has ever carried out. In January 1986 the Marxist government of South Yemen collapsed into a civil war between two factions of the same party, and the fighting in Aden was extraordinarily savage: tanks in the streets, naval vessels shelling the city, and something in the region of ten thousand people killed in about twelve days. The Royal Yacht Britannia happened to be in the area on her way to a royal tour, and she became the centre of the evacuation, sending her boats into a beach under fire and taking off more than a thousand people of some fifty-five nationalities, including a substantial number of Soviet citizens, who were then handed over to a Soviet ship. It is the only occasion on which Britannia was used operationally, and it is frequently cited by defenders of the royal yacht as the justification for her existence. Jupiter and Newcastle went down at full speed to cover the operation. A British warship, a royal yacht and a Soviet freighter cooperating to get civilians out of a Marxist civil war is not a scene anybody would have scripted.

Jupiter returned to the Gulf in January 1991 for the opening weeks of the First Gulf War, operating alongside HMS Battleaxe, before a final South Atlantic deployment that October kept her away until February 1992.

She was finally decommissioned on 30 June 1992, a few weeks after a last visit, from 24 to 28 April that year, to Middlesbrough, the town that had adopted her as its own warship since 13 May 1975. She was sold for scrap in 1997, resold to Samsung of Hong Kong the following January, and towed to India, arriving at Bombay on 3 May 1998 before being beached and broken up at Alang, closing out the career of a frigate whose service ranged from Cod War rescues and a royal posting to one thoroughly unforgettable encounter with a London landmark.

The London Bridge business is what she is remembered for, and it is a shame, because the rest of it is a better list than most frigates can show. She stood offshore during an attempted coup in Trinidad; she saved a Grimsby trawler that had been shot at with live rounds; she carried a future king and held the first service of remembrance ever conducted over the wreck of her own namesake; she was rebuilt in the middle of a war with the weapon that war had proved was needed; she covered an evacuation from a burning city in the Gulf of Aden; and she was in the Gulf for the opening of the 1991 war. She was then broken up on a beach at Alang. Twenty-three years, four continents, one bridge. There are worse epitaphs, and there is certainly a worse way to be remembered than as the ship that put a dent in something the whole City could see.