HMS Lincoln (F99): Padded With Railway Track for the Cod Wars

Built at Govan

HMS Lincoln was laid down in 1955 and built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, launched on 6 April 1959 and completed on 7 July 1960, a Salisbury-class Type 61 aircraft direction frigate named after the city of Lincoln, displacing 2,170 tons standard, and purpose-built to provide radar direction and control for aircraft rather than to fight in a conventional gunnery role.

The Far East and the Indonesian Confrontation

HMS Lincoln recommissioned at Singapore Dockyard on 13 July 1965 under Commander D. C. Nairne, and went on to conduct operations in the Far East during the Indonesian Confrontation, taking part in exercises with the United States Navy at Subic Bay and serving as guard ship in Hong Kong, before returning home to Plymouth in 1966, a remarkably varied and geographically wide-ranging deployment for a ship whose design had originally been optimised for a very specific radar-control role.

Reinforced With Railway Line

HMS Lincoln found herself drawn into the Second Cod War in October 1973 under Commander D. Howard, and after suffering stern damage from an earlier ramming incident, was fitted with sections of railway line protruding from her stern as improvised protective reinforcement, a properly resourceful, if slightly agricultural, engineering solution to the very real danger posed by close-quarters confrontations with Icelandic gunboats.

That earlier damage came during an attempt to ram the Icelandic gunboat Odinn, Lincoln fitted for the job with a girder protruding from her own forecastle, only for three Icelandic vessels to close in and force her to withdraw after taking several hits of her own, a bruising encounter that rather explains why the railway line came next.

Even with this reinforcement, she still sustained damage to both her port and starboard sides while manoeuvring between a trawler she was protecting and the Icelandic gunboat Aegir, a sharp reminder of just how physically confrontational the Cod Wars could become.

Wooden Padding for a Second Round

HMS Lincoln was decommissioned at Chatham in April 1974 and placed in reserve, but was called back into service for the Third Cod War in 1976, this time fitted with wooden padding on her bow, reportedly chosen for the role specifically because she was the one Type 61 frigate not fitted with hull stabiliser fins that might have interfered with the reinforcement.

Plans to sell her to New Zealand fell through that same year when the missing sonar equipment on offer proved unacceptable, and she went on instead to serve in the Arctic Circle and as Gibraltar's guard ship before returning to the standby squadron at Chatham in December 1977.

The New Zealand business is worth setting out properly, because it is the moment her class ran out of buyers. The Royal New Zealand Navy was looking to replace the Type 12 frigate Taranaki, the Wilson government offered four second-hand British frigates, and Lincoln was one of them. She was turned down on two counts. Her Type 174 sonar had already been taken out of her and putting one back was not a simple job. And what New Zealand actually wanted was a Leander.

That is the whole difficulty with a Type 61 in one paragraph. She was a warship built around her radar rather than her guns, a design explained in the article on HMS Chichester (F59), and by the middle of the 1970s a navy buying second-hand did not want a specialist. It wanted one hull that could do several things, and that meant a Leander.

A Final Few Years and a Quiet End

HMS Lincoln spent 1979 training submarine engineers and taking part in the earliest sea trials of the Sea Harrier alongside HMS Bulwark, providing radar coverage over Scandinavian waters during those crucial early tests of Britain's new jump-jet fighter.

The Sea Harrier trials are a better note to end her career on than they look. The FRS.1 had formally entered Fleet Air Arm service on 18 June 1979, and getting it to sea was the whole point: a fixed-wing fighter that could operate from a deck too small for anything conventional. Bulwark was used for the early work that year and the proper sea trials began aboard Hermes that October.

What made it work was the ski jump, a curved ramp at the forward end of the deck that throws an overloaded jump jet into the air on a rising trajectory and lets the wings catch up afterwards. It was a British idea, worked up in a university thesis in 1973, and by 1980 ramps were fitted across the carrier force, seven degrees on Invincible and Illustrious and a steeper twelve on Hermes. That story is told in the article on HMS Hermes (R12).

Lincoln's part was to sit out in the Norwegian Sea and provide the radar picture the trials were flown inside, which is precisely and exactly what a Type 61 had been built to do twenty years earlier. Three years later those aircraft won the air war over the Falklands. She was broken up the year after that.

Proposed sales to Egypt in 1978 and Bangladesh in 1981 both fell through, and HMS Lincoln was ultimately broken up in 1983, closing out the career of a frigate whose most memorable contribution to naval history came not from any grand action but from a particularly inventive piece of improvisation involving old railway track and wooden padding.

It is worth knowing what happened to the other three, because between them they cover every possible ending. Chichester went to the breakers. Salisbury actually sailed for the Mediterranean in 1978 while her own sale to Egypt was being negotiated, came home again when it fell through, spent 1980 as a harbour training ship and was sunk as a target in 1985.

And Llandaff, the one that got away, was handed over to Bangladesh at the Royal Albert Dock in London on 10 December 1976 and became BNS Umar Farooq. She was still in commission thirty-eight years later, and in 2014 she went out into the Bay of Bengal to look for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. She paid off on 30 December 2015, fifty-seven years after she was built. Her story is in the article on HMS Llandaff (F61). Four ships, one design: one scrapped, one shot at, one still working into the age of the mobile phone, and Lincoln, whom three separate navies looked at and none of them bought.