HMS Leopard (F14): Over a Thousand Miles Up the Amazon

Built for the Anti-Aircraft Role

HMS Leopard was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 25 March 1953, launched on 23 May 1955 and commissioned on 30 September 1958, at a cost of £3,545,000, a Leopard-class Type 41 frigate designed with anti-aircraft convoy protection as her primary purpose, armed with two twin 4.5-inch gun turrets and a STAAG twin 40mm Bofors mount, backed up by Type 960 and later Type 965 long-range air search radar.

It was a design built with a very specific kind of war in mind, one that, as it happened, HMS Leopard would spend her entire career without ever having to fight.

A Voyage Up the Amazon

HMS Leopard served with the 7th Frigate Squadron in the South Atlantic and South America under Commander R. G. Gaunt, and in 1960 undertook one of the more unusual voyages of her career, sailing 1,144 miles up the Amazon River to Codajas, a particularly remarkable feat of inland river navigation for a frigate built for open-ocean convoy escort duty, and a striking illustration of just how far the Royal Navy's peacetime presence could stretch beyond conventional naval operations.

Relief at Tristan da Cunha

HMS Leopard's crew assisted in the relief effort following the 1961 volcanic eruption on Tristan da Cunha, one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth, helping with the evacuation and the recovery of personal belongings left behind by islanders forced to flee at short notice, a valuable humanitarian contribution carried out a very long way from any conventional naval battle.

The Tristan evacuation deserves the whole story, because it is one of the strangest things that happened to a British community in the twentieth century. The tremors started in August 1961 and a fissure opened in the ground behind the island's lighthouse. On 10 October the entire population, two hundred and sixty-four people, went off in the local fishing boats Tristania and Frances Repetto to shelter overnight on Nightingale Island. The Dutch ship Tjisadane picked them up the next day and took them to Cape Town, and from there the Stirling Castle brought them to Southampton on 3 November.

They were put first into huts in Surrey and then into a disused RAF camp at Calshot, on the spit at the mouth of Southampton Water, where they spent an unusually cold English winter. It is worth pausing on that. A community whose whole world was a volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic, most of whom had never seen a train or a traffic light, spent two years living in wartime huts on the Solent shore, a few miles up the coast from Portsmouth.

Most of them wanted to go home almost immediately, and most of them did. An advance party got back to the island in April 1963 and about two hundred followed that November, four Tristan women having married Englishmen in the meantime. What the Royal Navy did to make the island habitable again, including the road HMS Puma's crew blasted up from Garden Gate Beach, is set out in the article on HMS Puma (F34). Leopard's part was the first half: putting a landing party ashore under a live volcano to recover what the islanders had been forced to leave behind.

A Collision Off Cape Point

HMS Leopard suffered serious damage on 28 July 1963 when she collided with the South African minesweeper Pietermaritzburg during exercises off Cape Point. Ordinary Seaman Thomas Bolton was killed in the collision, the only casualty on either ship, and a Royal Navy board of inquiry later examined how it had happened as Leopard was sent into Simonstown for repairs before returning to Portsmouth, a sobering reminder that peacetime training exercises carried their own genuine risks.

The ship she hit is worth a note of her own, because Pietermaritzburg had a considerably more distinguished past than a training minesweeper usually does. She had been HMS Pelorus, an Algerine-class minesweeper built by Lobnitz of Renfrew and launched in June 1943, and on 6 June 1944 she led the 7th Minesweeping Flotilla as the most forward ship of the entire invasion, sweeping the channel through which the assault force reached Juno beach. Very little in the invasion fleet was further forward than she was that morning.

She was sold to South Africa in 1947, spent the rest of her life at Simonstown training midshipmen and then simply providing beds, and was finally scuttled off Miller's Point in November 1994 to make an artificial reef. Storms broke her into three pieces in 2006 and divers go down on her still. The collision that killed Ordinary Seaman Thomas Bolton in July 1963 involved, on one side, a brand-new anti-aircraft frigate that never fired at an aircraft, and on the other, a twenty-year-old minesweeper that had already done the single most important morning's work of the war.

The Cod Wars and a Quiet Retirement

HMS Leopard recommissioned for a fourth time in February 1966 for a Far East deployment under Commander N. R. D. King, who later rose to admiral, and was diverted to Bermuda in 1968 in response to civil unrest there.

She went on to support British trawlers during Iceland's fishing disputes, becoming embroiled in a diplomatic disagreement in 1973 when Iceland accused her of threatening to fire on the Icelandic patrol ship Aegir, a claim the British government firmly denied, countering instead that it was the Icelandic vessel that had fired shots, accusing Aegir of trying to cut the trawl wires of the German fishing vessels Teutonia and Dusseldorf and firing several rounds first, with Leopard's own warning said to be nothing more than a promise to return fire if further shots came her way.

She had shown herself off at Portsmouth Navy Days in 1968, part of the more public-facing side of the job, and went back out on fishery patrol for a single week during the 1975 dispute.

HMS Leopard was finally scrapped at Dartford in 1977, closing out nearly two decades of service that, for a ship purpose-built for anti-aircraft convoy defence, had turned out to be defined far more by an Amazon river voyage and a volcanic evacuation than by anything resembling the war she was designed to fight.