HMS Leeds Castle (P258): From the Falklands to Fishery Protection

Constructed at Aberdeen

HMS Leeds Castle was built by Hall, Russell and Company of Aberdeen, laid down on 18 October 1979, launched on 22 October 1980 and commissioned on 27 October 1981 as the very first of the Royal Navy's two Castle-class patrol vessels.

Designed for fisheries protection and oilfield patrol duties around the United Kingdom's exclusive economic zone, she displaced 1,350 tons and measured 81 metres overall, with a large helicopter deck capable of taking a Sea King or even a Chinook, and space to carry 25 Royal Marines alongside her own ship's company of 45.

The class existed because of complaints about the one before it. The Island-class patrol vessels, built by the same Aberdeen yard, had been criticised for being too slow, uncomfortable in a seaway and having nowhere to land a helicopter, which is a serious shortcoming in a ship whose working area is the North Sea in February. Those ships and the yard that built them are covered in the article on HMS Anglesey (P277).

The answer was drawn by David K. Brown, one of the more thoughtful naval constructors of the period: three hundred tonnes bigger, three knots faster, far steadier, and with a flight deck large enough to be genuinely useful rather than notionally present. Six were intended. Two were built, which is a sentence that recurs throughout British defence procurement in the 1970s and 1980s.

Two other things were designed into her that rarely get a mention. She carried detergent spraying gear for breaking up oil slicks, which for a ship whose beat was the North Sea oilfields was a good deal less theoretical than it sounds. And she could be fitted to lay mines, which made a fishery protection vessel one of the very few minelaying platforms the Royal Navy had left. That is what the 1983 trials were about.

Diverted South for the Falklands War

Leeds Castle had barely completed her first year of service when she was diverted to the South Atlantic on 22 April 1982 as the Falklands War broke out, arriving in the Total Exclusion Zone on 21 May to serve as a dispatch vessel, including acting as a refuelling platform for helicopters ferrying stores between transport ships, unglamorous but essential logistics work that kept the wider task force running.

For four of those days, under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Colin Hamilton, she was stationed directly between the main Task Group and the islands, deliberately placed in the likely path of any incoming Exocet missile with little more than a single Bofors gun for protection. "We didn't have protective measures, electronic warfare, any protection from inbound missiles," Hamilton later recalled. Four hours after Leeds Castle was pulled off that station to transfer stores to a tanker, an Exocet struck the container ship Atlantic Conveyor on 25 May 1982, a loss that cost the task force most of its heavy-lift helicopters and, indirectly, helped extend the war by several days. Hamilton has spent decades weighing up whether it would have been worth losing his ship and her crew to spare the far greater losses that followed, a question with no comfortable answer.

She returned to Rosyth on 20 August 1982 after a four-month deployment.

Decades of Fishery Protection

Much of Leeds Castle's subsequent career was spent on fishery protection patrols around Shetland, the English Channel and the North Sea, the quiet, steady work of enforcing British fishing rights that rarely makes headlines but occupies a great deal of the Navy's peacetime effort.

She also took part in minelaying trials in 1983, before returning to the South Atlantic to serve as the Falkland Islands guard ship, a post she held until being relieved in 2004.

A Second Career With Bangladesh

HMS Leeds Castle decommissioned on 8 August 2005 after 24 years of service, and was sold to Bangladesh in April 2010. Towed out of Portsmouth on 14 May that year, she underwent a major regeneration refit at the A&P Tyne shipyard in Newcastle, new engines, generators, deck cranes and crew accommodation among the work carried out, before recommissioning with the Bangladesh Navy in March 2011 as BNS Dhaleshwari, now armed with four C-704 anti-ship missiles, extending the working life of a hardy patrol vessel that had already seen action in the South Atlantic and spent decades safeguarding British waters.

She did not go alone, and neither of them has finished yet. Her only sister, HMS Dumbarton Castle, was sold to Bangladesh in the same deal in April 2010, and the pair were refitted together on the Tyne, the work completing in December that year. They were formally handed over on 24 September 2010 and recommissioned in March 2011 as BNS Dhaleshwari, this ship, and BNS Bijoy, her sister.

The Bangladesh Navy rates them as corvettes rather than patrol vessels, which given the anti-ship missiles now bolted to them is fair enough. Both are still serving. Dhaleshwari was photographed at the international defence exhibition in Abu Dhabi in 2019 and had been at the naval show in Singapore four years before that, which is to say she has spent her second career doing rather more travelling than her first.

It is worth stating plainly what that means. The Royal Navy's entire Castle class, both ships of it, is still afloat and in commission more than forty years after the first of them was launched at Aberdeen, in a navy on the other side of the world. Not many British warship classes can say that they are all still working.