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.

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.

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.

She also served as a host ship during withdrawal negotiations in Gibraltar, a small diplomatic footnote to an otherwise conventionally operational career, and suffered a fire during a refit in 1976 before taking part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review the following year, a rather more celebratory occasion for a ship that had spent most of her working life on unglamorous escort duty.

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 became a training ship at Portsmouth Naval Base.

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.

A Long, Quiet Wind-Down

HMS Kent continued as a training asset until 1987, and remained as a training hulk for a further six years before finally being struck from the register in 1993.

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.