HMS Leander (F109): The Ship That Gave Her Name to a Whole Class

From Rothesay Class to a New Design

HMS Leander was originally intended to be a Rothesay-class frigate under the name HMS Weymouth, but during her construction at Harland and Wolff's shipyard in Belfast, she was redesignated as the lead ship of an entirely new class, one that would go on to bear her own name for the rest of naval history.

Launched on 28 June 1961 and commissioned on 27 March 1963, HMS Leander displaced 2,450 tons standard, armed with twin 4.5-inch guns, Seacat anti-air missiles, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar and facilities for a Westland Wasp helicopter, and became the founding member of what would ultimately become one of the largest and most successful frigate classes in modern Royal Navy history, with 26 ships built for Britain alone and dozens more constructed for allied navies overseas.

The name is a great deal older than the ship and for once it is worth the detour. Leander was the young man of the Greek story who swam the Hellespont every night to reach Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite on the far shore, steering by a lamp she kept burning in her tower, until a winter gale blew the lamp out and he drowned in the dark. It is a story about a narrow strait with a savage current, which is a large part of why the Royal Navy took to it.

It was also field-tested, by the Navy, more or less by accident. On 3 May 1810 the frigate HMS Salsette lay in the Hellespont waiting for Ottoman permission to go up to Constantinople, and one of her passengers, Lord Byron, decided to find out whether the swim could actually be done. He went in with Lieutenant Ekenhead of the Royal Marines, against the firm advice of the British consul. The strait is about a mile across at that point and the current pushed them nearer four. Byron was an hour and ten minutes in the water. Ekenhead beat him by five minutes, which Byron never quite got over and wrote a poem about regardless.

Ekenhead was made captain the following year and died at Valletta in April 1812, of head injuries from a fall into the ditch at the Marina Gate. He had swum the Hellespont without difficulty and was killed by a gap in the fortifications of Malta, which is about as unfair as naval careers get.

The Leander immediately before this one was a light cruiser launched in 1931, and she was the name ship of her own class as well, so the same swimmer has now given his name to two entire classes of British warship. She was lent to New Zealand and commissioned as HMNZS Leander, and on the night of 13 July 1943 off Kolombangara in the Solomons a Japanese torpedo hit her amidships and killed twenty-eight of her ship's company. She and HMNZS Achilles were both knocked out within months of one another, which is why Britain ended up lending New Zealand a third cruiser, a story set out in the article on HMS Gambia (48).

Global Deployments and an Ikara Upgrade

HMS Leander deployed widely through the 1960s and 1970s, visiting the West Indies, the Pacific and the Persian Gulf, and in 1970 joined NATO's multinational Standing Naval Force Atlantic squadron, itself only recently activated in January 1968 as the alliance's first standing peacetime naval force, grown out of a series of trial deployments the Canadian, Dutch, British and American navies had run together under the name Matchmaker since 1965.

Between 1970 and 1972 she underwent a significant modernisation that saw her forward gun mount replaced by an Ikara anti-submarine missile launcher, a substantial upgrade to her underwater warfare capability that reflected just how central anti-submarine work had become to Cold War frigate design.

Ramming Icelandic Gunboats

HMS Leander found herself in the thick of the Third Cod War between 1975 and 1976, conducting fishery protection patrols off Iceland under the command of Captain John Tait, during Britain's most intense and confrontational fishing dispute with the Icelandic government.

In the course of that campaign she rammed not one but two Icelandic gunboats, Thor in January 1976 and Ver that following May, shattering her own stem in the second collision, a notably aggressive record even by the standards of a conflict that regularly saw British and Icelandic vessels manoeuvring at dangerously close quarters.

By 1977 she was back to the steadier business of goodwill and NATO-related port visits, a photograph from that year showing her alongside in Amsterdam, a rather more sedate occasion than her recent skirmishes off Iceland.

A Final Act as a Missile Target

HMS Leander went on to further Mediterranean deployments in 1983 and 1985, before being placed in reserve on 31 July 1986 and formally decommissioned in April 1987, laid up for a time in Fareham Creek, where she was photographed swinging quietly at her moorings on 7 May 1989, just over four months before her final active role.

Her final contribution to the Royal Navy came on 14 September 1989, when she was deliberately sunk during a live-fire naval exercise, struck by a single Sea Dart missile, three Exocet anti-ship missiles and a free-fall bomb, providing invaluable data on weapons effectiveness against a real steel hull.

It is worth reading that list of weapons again slowly. To sink a twenty-six-year-old frigate of two and a half thousand tons, empty, stopped, undefended, with no ship's company aboard to fight fires or shore up bulkheads, took a Sea Dart, three Exocets and a bomb dropped on her from an aircraft. Warships are a great deal harder to sink than films suggest. What usually finishes one is not the weapon but the fire and the flooding afterwards, fought by exhausted people in the dark.

Which is precisely why the trial was run at all. Britain came out of the Falklands with a set of extremely expensive lessons about how modern warships burn, and the only honest way to check the answers was to take a real hull into deep water and shoot at it properly. HMS Hardy went the same way for the same reason, and what that programme was for is set out in the article on HMS Hardy (F54). Leander gave her name to twenty-six British frigates and a good many more abroad, and then spent her last afternoon demonstrating how much punishment the design could absorb before it stopped floating. It is not a bad way for a name ship to finish.

It was a fittingly instructive end for the ship whose name and design had shaped an entire generation of Royal Navy frigates, going out not in battle but in the service of the weapons testing that would help protect the ships that followed her.