HMS Keppel (F85): Called Out of Reserve to Cover for a Broken Boiler

Scotstoun-Built

HMS Keppel was laid down by Yarrow Shipbuilders at their Scotstoun shipyard on 27 March 1953, launched on 31 August 1954 and completed on 6 July 1956, one of twelve Blackwood-class Type 14 anti-submarine frigates, a class specifically designed as fast, cheap, single-purpose submarine hunters for the early Cold War.

A word first about the ship herself, because the numbers explain the career. Her machinery was a single English Electric geared steam turbine fed by two Babcock and Wilcox boilers, fifteen thousand shaft horsepower on one shaft, giving twenty-five to twenty-seven knots depending on which reference you trust and five thousand two hundred nautical miles at twelve. She displaced 1,180 tons standard and about 1,479 deep, on a hull three hundred and twelve feet long. And here is the difficulty that shadowed the whole class. She was ordered against the threat as it was understood at the start of the 1950s, and she was laid down in March 1953 and not completed until July 1956. In 1958, two years after she commissioned, the first Soviet nuclear submarine went to sea, and she could hold better than thirty knots submerged for as long as her crew could stand it, indefinitely and without ever needing to come up. A frigate that cannot outrun her quarry is reduced to sitting on the last known position and hoping, and no amount of sonar quality fixes that. Everything the Type 14s later became, training ships and fishery patrols and finally scrap, follows from that one arithmetic problem.

Named after Augustus Keppel, an eighteenth-century admiral who served through the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence, and who was himself famously court-martialled and honourably acquitted in 1779 after an inconclusive clash off Ushant descended into a very public falling-out with one of his own subordinates, a piece of naming history that turned out to be oddly fitting for a ship later recalled from retirement herself. She displaced 1,180 tons, carried a crew of around 140, and was fitted with three 4cm Bofors guns and two Limbo anti-submarine mortars alongside an advanced sonar suite combining Type 174 search, Type 162 target-classification and Type 170 targeting systems, a truly sophisticated submarine-hunting fit for a relatively small and inexpensive ship.

She was the third ship to carry the name, and she inherited it from a hard act to follow. The second was a Thornycroft type flotilla leader ordered in the last spring of the First World War, too late to fight in it, who spent the Second sinking U-boats in the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea and came out of it with five battle honours and a reputation as one of the Royal Navy's most effective escorts. Her story is told in the article on HMS Keppel (D84). The frigate that took the name in 1954 never fired a shot in anger and never had the chance to, and yet the two ships had more in common than the twenty-nine years between their launches suggest. Both were built to a design chosen for cheapness. Both spent their careers doing anti-submarine work. Both were pulled out of retirement to fill a gap somebody else had left. The difference is simply that one of them was born into a war and the other into a very long, very cold peace.

There is a small joke buried in the Admiralty's naming of this class that seems to have gone entirely unremarked at the time. The twelve Type 14s were all named after distinguished officers of earlier centuries, and two of the names chosen were Keppel and Palliser. Augustus Keppel and Sir Hugh Palliser were the two men whose quarrel after Ushant in 1778 split the officer corps down the middle, produced two courts martial, brought a mob onto the streets of London and effectively ended both their sea careers. A hundred and seventy-five years later a committee in Whitehall put their names on two small frigates of the same class, built to the same drawings, and sent them to the same squadron at Portland to work alongside one another. HMS Palliser, whose own naming is very probably for the same Sir Hugh, is covered in her own article. Whether anybody in the naming committee noticed, the record does not say.

A Career Built Around Training

HMS Keppel joined the 2nd Training Squadron at Portland Harbour on commissioning, spending much of her early career preparing sailors for service across the fleet rather than serving on the front line herself, a notably important if unglamorous role given how many crews would pass through her decks over the years.

It is worth being precise about what the 2nd Training Squadron actually did, because "training" makes it sound like a classroom afloat and it was nothing of the sort. Portland in the 1950s was the Royal Navy's anti-submarine capital: the shore establishment HMS Osprey, an air station alongside from 1959, and from 1958 Flag Officer Sea Training, the organisation that decided whether a British warship was fit to join the fleet at all. What Portland needed was a permanent stock of competent ships available every morning to be exercised with, against and alongside, and that is what the squadron provided. Its ships were day runners: out of the harbour after breakfast, working with submarines and with whatever ship was under the FOST staff's scrutiny that week, and back alongside by evening. It is unglamorous in the way that a rugby scrum machine is unglamorous, and about as important. The world Keppel worked in is described in the article on HMS Grafton (F51), who spent her first six years in the middle of it.

One genuine advantage fell out of that arrangement. Because the training squadron ships stayed put while everything else in the fleet rotated through, their own companies did the same job over and over until they were extremely good at it, and the Type 14s consequently developed a reputation for performing better in anti-submarine exercises than a ship of their price had any right to. A single-purpose ship crewed by people who did nothing else is a formidable thing within its one purpose. The corresponding problem was that the purpose was all she had. At three hundred and twelve feet with a single shaft, three 40mm Bofors guns and no main armament worth the name, there was nowhere to put a helicopter, a missile or a modern gun, and no margin of size or power to fit one into. When the anti-submarine world moved on to helicopters and towed arrays, ships like Keppel had nothing else to offer and no room to be given anything.

She underwent a 1958 refit to strengthen her hull before returning to training duties, and briefly served with the Fishery Protection Squadron between 1963 and 1964, a change of pace from her usual instructional work. A photograph taken off Nieuw-Mathenesse near Rotterdam on 27 March 1969 catches her on one of the rather more scenic port visits that punctuated her long training career.

The 1958 refit deserves more than a passing mention, because the arithmetic of it is startling. She commissioned on 6 July 1956 and paid off in March 1958, twenty months later, and she did not rejoin the Portland squadron until September 1960. Two and a half years in dockyard hands to pay for twenty months at sea, in a ship whose entire justification was that she was quick and cheap to build. The reason was structural. To reach the required speed on half the machinery of a Whitby class Type 12, the constructors had given the Type 14 finer lines, less weight and a short forecastle, and the resulting hull turned out to be marginal in genuinely bad water. The class was coming back from heavy weather with structural complaints rather than battle damage, the Iceland patrols that began later that same year made the point unanswerable, one ship was escorted home to Scotland with a split hull, and the hulls had to be stiffened. What that meant for the men aboard, and what it cost the Navy in the Cod Wars a decade later, is set out in the article on HMS Duncan (F80).

The men who served in them were fond of the class and entirely unsentimental about how they behaved. The recollection that comes up most often is that a Type 14 would roll on a wet pavement, which is the sort of thing sailors say about a ship they liked, and there was a particular grievance about the rudder: a single large one behind the single screw, with a detachable lower portion so that the ship could sit on ordinary dock blocks, and the detachable portion had a habit of coming off at sea. None of this made them bad ships. It made them small ships doing the work of larger ones, which was precisely the bargain the Admiralty had struck when it ordered them, and the crews knew it. The affection in the accounts is real and so is the exasperation, usually in the same sentence.

The fishery protection posting from June 1963 to April 1964 was the only significant break in seventeen years of training work. The squadron was Rosyth-based in those years, and the job in that particular window was quieter than the Cod War headlines suggest: Iceland's twelve-mile limit had been fought over in 1958 and settled by agreement in 1961, and what remained was the unglamorous business of patrolling British waters, checking gear and net sizes, boarding and inspecting, and being visibly present so that everybody behaved. It was also, given the class's reputation for rolling, a distinctly uncomfortable way to spend a North Sea winter, and there was a certain irony in sending the flimsiest hulls in the fleet to do the job that most reliably found bad weather. Keppel went back to Portland in the spring of 1964 and stayed there, on and off, for another nine years.

Recalled to Cover for HMS Hardy

HMS Keppel entered reserve at Chatham in February 1973, and might well have ended her career quietly there had it not been for an accident aboard her sister ship.

The Standby Squadron was not quite reserve and not quite disposal. Ships in it lay in the basins at Chatham, out of commission, looked after by small maintenance parties rather than a ship's company, machinery turned over and hulls kept up, theoretically available if a crisis ever produced the men to man them. It was a way of keeping numbers on the Navy List without paying for them, and what it usually meant in practice was a waiting room for the breakers. It is described more fully in the article on HMS Hardy (F54), which is not a coincidence, because Hardy is the reason Keppel got out of it. By the summer of 1975 Keppel had already been listed for disposal. The paperwork that would have sent her to a breaker's yard was overtaken by a boiler letting go in another ship.

When HMS Hardy suffered a boiler explosion, HMS Keppel was brought back into active service to replace her in July 1975, serving with the 2nd Frigate Squadron until November 1976, a useful piece of fleet flexibility that let the Royal Navy plug an unexpected gap without waiting for repairs or a new build.

There is a neat symmetry to where she went. The squadron she was recalled into, the 2nd Frigate Squadron at Portland, was the 2nd Training Squadron under a different name; the Navy had renamed it in 1962. So a frigate pulled off the disposal list in July 1975 went straight back to the same berth, the same harbour and the same job she had commissioned into as a brand new ship in July 1956, nineteen years almost to the month. What the episode really illustrates is how little slack there was in the fleet by the mid-1970s. A boiler failure in one small, obsolete, single-purpose training frigate could not simply be absorbed. There was no spare hull to send instead, so the Navy went to Chatham, took a ship it had already decided to scrap, and put her back to sea for sixteen months. She finally came off the strength in November 1976, having done more sea time after being condemned than a good many ships manage before it.

HMS Hardy herself would go on to a rather more dramatic end nearly a decade later, used as a target ship for live weapons trials in the Western Approaches and finally sunk on 3 July 1984.

Hardy's end deserves a word, because it was rather more drawn out than a single date suggests. After the Falklands the Royal Navy had a pressing need to know what its own weapons actually did to a modern steel hull, and how a fire behaved inside one, so an obsolete frigate was taken into the Western Approaches and shot at properly with live rounds. It started with an Exocet in July 1983 and went on through Sea Skua strikes and torpedo hits that took her bow clean off, then months of shelling and mortar charges, and she was still afloat. She did not finally sink until 3 July 1984, and it was 20mm cannon fire that did it. The findings went straight into the design of the Type 23. It is a strange fate for a ship, and it is set out properly in her own article.

A Quiet End

HMS Keppel was placed back on the disposal list in 1977 and was scrapped at Sittingbourne in 1979, closing out the career of a frigate whose service, though never touched by combat, embodied exactly the kind of steady, adaptable, unglamorous naval work, training crews, patrolling fisheries, and stepping in at short notice when a sister ship broke down, that kept the wider fleet running through the long decades of the Cold War.

That yard is worth a footnote of its own. Sittingbourne is a Kentish creek rather than one of the great Scottish or Tyneside breaking beaches where warships usually finished, which tells you something about how little of her there was to break. She went in company, too: Malcolm had already gone in 1978 and Exmouth went in the same year as Keppel. Of the twelve, Murray, Pellew and Grafton had already been scrapped by 1971, and only Duncan and Russell lasted into 1985. Two decades is a short life for a frigate, and that is the real verdict on the experiment. The Admiralty had asked for a ship with the sonar and the mortars of a first-rate escort and nothing else, in the hope of buying numbers; what it got was twelve hulls that could do exactly one job, could not be modernised to do another, and wore out early because they had been built light. The conclusion drawn afterwards was that quality had to come first even if it meant a smaller fleet, and the Royal Navy has broadly stuck to it ever since. The full class story is set out in the Blackwood class guide.