HMS Kent (D12): Guarding the Carriers Through the Cold War

One of the First Guided Missile Destroyers

HMS Kent was ordered on 6 February 1957 and laid down at Harland and Wolff's Belfast shipyard on 1 March 1960, launched by Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, on 27 September 1961 and commissioned on 15 August 1963, a batch-1 County-class destroyer displacing 6,200 tons standard, armed with a formidable fit for her time: a twin-arm Sea Slug surface-to-air missile launcher carrying 36 missiles, two Sea Cat launchers, four 4.5-inch guns and facilities for a Wessex helicopter.

The word destroyer is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. At six thousand two hundred tons standard she was longer than five hundred feet, carried a ship's company not far short of five hundred, and was in every practical respect a small cruiser. She was called a destroyer for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with naval architecture. When the design was first put up to the Treasury as a guided missile cruiser it was refused outright, on the grounds that cruisers were an obsolete type and the country was not going to buy any more of them. The story told inside the Navy ever afterwards is that Mountbatten, then First Sea Lord, took the paper back, struck out the word cruiser, wrote in destroyer, and resubmitted it otherwise unchanged, whereupon it was approved. Whether it happened quite that neatly or not, the effect is a matter of record: the Royal Navy acquired eight ships that were built, manned and fought like cruisers, wore destroyer pennant numbers for the next quarter of a century, and are filed under destroyers to this day.

The yard she was built in was in trouble even as she took shape on the slip. Harland and Wolff had built the Olympic and the Titanic, and in the Second World War turned out six aircraft carriers, two cruisers and something like a hundred and thirty other naval vessels; one of those cruisers is still afloat in the Pool of London and has her own article, on HMS Belfast (C35). By 1960 the jet airliner had killed the passenger liner trade, Japanese yards were undercutting everybody on price, and the British share of world merchant shipbuilding was on its way from over forty per cent to about six. Between 1953 and 1962 Harland and Wolff completed only twenty-five large ships, and by 1961 its annual profit was under a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The Royal Navy stopped ordering warships from Belfast altogether in the late 1960s, which makes Kent very nearly the last of a line running back a century. The woman who launched her had a connection of her own to the name: Princess Marina was the widow of Prince George, Duke of Kent, killed in August 1942 when the RAF Sunderland taking him to Iceland flew into a Caithness hillside at Eagle's Rock, fifteen dead and one survivor. She named the ship that carried his title.

Through much of the 1960s, HMS Kent and her County-class sisters represented the only guided missile-armed destroyers in the entire fleet, a particularly significant technological step for the Royal Navy at the height of the Cold War.

The armament list also conceals the fact that everything else about the ship was arranged around one weapon. Seaslug was nineteen feet long, weighed two tons, and needed a magazine that ran fore and aft through something like a third of the hull, with the rounds stowed nose to tail and hauled the length of the ship on rails to reach the launcher, which is the reason a County looks the way she does and why nothing smaller could have carried the system. What Seaslug actually was, how a beam-riding missile works and why it was already being overtaken by the time it went to sea are set out in the article on HMS Devonshire (D02), and the magazine and her unusual combined steam and gas turbine machinery in the article on HMS Antrim (D18). The consequence is the thing to hold on to here. Delivering one medium-range missile system took a ship the size of a light cruiser and a ship's company to match, at precisely the moment when the Royal Navy was about to run short of both money and people, and the sum that eventually did for the class is worked through in the article on HMS Hampshire (D06).

Escorting the Carrier Fleet

HMS Kent spent the great majority of her career as an escort to the Royal Navy's aircraft carrier fleet, deploying alongside HMS Victorious, HMS Eagle and HMS Hermes across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, exactly the kind of steady, high-value escort work her powerful anti-aircraft armament had been designed for.

Escort to the carrier fleet is a phrase that hides a very particular skill. A 1960s carrier group was arranged in rings by threat: the carrier in the middle, because she is the thing the enemy wants and the one ship that must not be hit; frigates and destroyers thrown out on the screen against submarines; and the missile ship stationed deliberately up-threat, between the carrier and whichever bearing an air attack was expected from, so that her radar saw it first and her missiles engaged it furthest out. The work consists almost entirely of holding a station, a state of readiness and an accurate picture, for weeks at a stretch, in the hope that nothing whatever happens; the measure of doing it well is that nobody notices. Kent did it with Victorious, Eagle and Hermes across the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, in a decade when the Royal Navy still kept a Far East Fleet based on Singapore and expected to be east of Suez indefinitely. It was, on paper, exactly the career the class had been designed for.

And then the reason for her existence was cancelled. In February 1966, less than three years after Kent commissioned, the Defence White Paper killed CVA-01, the new fleet carrier the entire surface fleet had been designed around, and with it the plan to keep the Royal Navy in the fixed-wing carrier business into the 1980s. Victorious paid off in 1968; Eagle went in 1972; Hermes was converted to carry commandos and then helicopters; Ark Royal held on until 1978 and then went too. So a class of expensive missile ships built specifically to screen fleet carriers spent the whole second half of its life watching those carriers disappear one at a time. That, and not any failing of the ship, is the honest explanation for a front-line career of only seventeen years. The vessel that suffered most conspicuously from the same decision, having been ordered as escort for a carrier that was never built and then completed anyway because she was too far advanced to stop, has her own article, on HMS Bristol (D23).

She also served as a host ship for talks on Gibraltar's future status, a small diplomatic footnote to an otherwise conventionally operational career, and in November 1976 suffered a fire during a refit at Portsmouth Dockyard, believed to have started from an electrical fault in her engineering spaces. Several months of repairs followed, and she was fully restored in time to take part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead the following June, a rather more celebratory occasion for a ship that had spent most of her working life on unglamorous escort duty.

A small diplomatic footnote considerably undersells what was going on in Gibraltar in those years. Spain had taken the claim to the United Nations, which in December 1966 called on both governments to negotiate and asked Britain to get on with decolonising the place; formal Anglo-Spanish talks had opened that May and got precisely nowhere; and Madrid was steadily strangling the frontier with customs delays and restrictions on movement, air and sea. The British answer was to ask the Gibraltarians what they wanted, and on 10 September 1967, on a turnout of just under ninety-six per cent, they voted twelve thousand one hundred and thirty-eight to forty-four to remain British. Franco's response was to shut the gates completely on 8 June 1969 and leave them shut for sixteen years, dividing families and cutting the Rock off by land until 1985. A warship is a genuinely useful venue for a conversation of that kind, because she is British ground that can be moved, she is private, she is comfortable, and she can leave. She is also a statement in her own right, and everybody sitting round the table knows it.

The 1976 fire deserves more respect than a subordinate clause, because a ship in refit is a ship with her own defences dismantled. The fire main may be drained, watertight doors are wedged open with cables and hoses, half the compartments are stripped, the ship's company is largely ashore, and there is welding and cutting going on in spaces full of paint, lagging and electrical runs. Every navy in the world has lost ships in dockyard hands, in peacetime, to exactly that combination. Several months of repairs later she was fit enough to take her place at the Silver Jubilee Review at Spithead on 28 June 1977, where the Queen went down the lines in Britannia past something like a hundred and eighty ships, Royal Navy, Commonwealth, foreign, merchant, Coastguard and sail training. It was the last review of its kind that Britain has held on that scale. Five years afterwards, a great many of the escorts lying at anchor that afternoon were in the South Atlantic, and some of them did not come back.

A Short Front-Line Career

HMS Kent was decommissioned from front-line service in the summer of 1980 after just seventeen years, a relatively short career for a major warship, and took over from HMS Fife as the Fleet Training Ship, moored at the lower end of Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour, outboard of the already-retired support ship HMS Rame Head.

During the Falklands War in 1982 she was surveyed for possible recommissioning, a measure of just how stretched the Royal Navy's resources were at the time, but was found to be too deteriorated to be worth the effort, a slightly deflating verdict for a ship that had once represented the cutting edge of British naval technology.

The 1982 survey is the sharpest moment in her story, because two of her sisters did go south and did fight. Antrim carried the flag for the recapture of South Georgia and took a bomb that passed clean through her without going off, an episode described in the article on HMS Antrim (D18); Glamorgan was hit off Stanley by an Exocet fired from a launcher the Argentine navy had improvised on the back of a lorry, which is set out in the article on HMS Glamorgan (D19). Both were younger than Kent, but only by a few years, and neither difference explains why one ship could go to war and the other could not. What explains it is that Kent had been lying alongside without a proper ship's company since 1980. A warship is kept alive by the people living in her, who chase the leaks, run the machinery and notice the corrosion before it matters; take them out and the ship goes off with startling speed. Two years of that had done what seventeen years at sea had not.

A Long, Quiet Wind-Down

Between 1982 and 1984 she served as a live training asset for artificer and mechanic courses run by the shore establishments HMS Collingwood and HMS Sultan, and from 1984 doubled as a harbour training ship for the Sea Cadet Corps besides. She was finally paid off from training duties in 1987, and remained as a training hulk for a further six years before being struck from the register in 1993, though she lingered on at the same Portsmouth pier, quietly rusting, until at least 1996.

Fleet Training Ship sounds like a euphemism for scrapyard and is nothing of the kind. There is no substitute, when teaching a young marine engineer or artificer, for a real ship: the actual noise and heat of a machinery space, the actual ladders and hatches, a real switchboard rather than a diagram of one, and the experience of finding a valve in the dark in a compartment designed by somebody who was thinking about something else. Kent did that job for the artificer and mechanic courses run ashore from 1982, and from 1984 doubled as a harbour training ship for the Sea Cadets, which is the naval equivalent of a grand old racehorse teaching children to ride. The awkward truth about the role is that a ship alongside is still a ship: steel corrodes just as fast at a wall as it does at sea, the pumps still have to run, and the bill arrives every year whether anybody is looking at the hull or not.

She was sold for scrap, and in 1998 was towed to India to be broken up, closing out the career of a destroyer that had been, in her prime, one of the most technologically advanced ships in the entire fleet, and ended her days as a slowly decaying hulk waiting for a war that, in the end, decided it did not need her after all.

The tow to India in 1998 is worth picturing, because it is now the ordinary end of a British warship. Portsmouth to the breaking beaches of western India is something like nine thousand miles at four or five knots behind a tug, months at sea with nobody aboard, in order to arrive somewhere that scrapping can be done by hand at a price nobody in Europe can match; the ships are run up the sand on a high spring tide under their own weight and taken to pieces where they lie. Add her life up and it comes to seventeen years in commission, a few more as a training ship, six as a hulk on the register and a couple more simply as something moored at a pier in Portsmouth that people had stopped noticing. She was, on the day she commissioned, close to the most technically advanced warship afloat, and she was overtaken within about a decade, not because anything was wrong with her but because the carriers she was built to protect were cancelled, the missile she was built around was outpaced, and the country concluded it could not afford the navy it had drawn up. That is less a story about one destroyer than a summary of the Royal Navy between 1957 and 1982, and she is as good a place as any to read it.