HMS Lindisfarne (P300): 180 Miles to a North Sea Disaster

Built on Trawler Lines

HMS Lindisfarne was built by Hall, Russell and Company and modelled closely on the ocean-going fishery protection trawlers FPV Jura and FPV Westra, launched on 1 June 1977 as one of the Island-class offshore patrol vessels designed for the steady, unglamorous work of guarding Britain's fishing grounds and North Sea oil and gas installations.

There is a reason a class of warships built on trawler lines turned up all at once in the late 1970s, and it is a piece of legislation. The Fishery Limits Act 1976 pushed British fishery limits out from twelve miles to two hundred, in force from 1977, which at a stroke handed the Royal Navy an area of sea it had no ships to police. Parliament had been arguing about who would do the policing before the Bill even passed.

Hence the shape of her. What the job needed was not speed or armament but the ability to stay out in the North Sea in February, week after week, without going home, and the people who had already solved that problem were the fishery protection trawler designers. Jura and Westra were the working answer and the Island class was that answer with a gun on it. What that meant in practice, and what these ships were like to live in, is set out in the article on HMS Anglesey (P277).

She commissioned into the Royal Navy on 3 March 1978 with a ship's company of just 39, entering service just as North Sea energy infrastructure was becoming an increasingly important part of Britain's economic and strategic interests.

Racing to the Alexander L. Kielland Disaster

HMS Lindisfarne took part in one of the most significant humanitarian operations of her career on 27 March 1980, when the Norwegian accommodation platform Alexander L. Kielland capsized in high seas and fog near the Ekofisk field, taking just 20 minutes to go over after one of her legs sheared off. Of the 212 men aboard, 89 survived and 123 died, a catastrophic disaster that remains one of the worst offshore accidents in North Sea history.

HMS Lindisfarne steamed 180 miles to reach the site, one of three Royal Navy vessels among a rescue fleet of some 80 ships and 19 helicopters drawn from Norway, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and West Germany. She found no survivors, but spent the grim two-day search ferrying bodies recovered by other vessels to the Edda platform, a harrowing operation that called on every bit of her crew's seamanship and resolve.

It is worth knowing what actually broke, because the Kielland is one of the most closely studied structural failures in the history of the North Sea. She was not a drilling rig but a semi-submersible flotel, a floating hotel for men working the Edda platform, and she was bridge-connected to it that night. She stood on five legs braced together underwater.

One of those braces, D6, failed. The crack that killed her had started at a welded sleeve for a hydrophone, an instrument fitting on a piece of structure nobody was ever going to look at again, and the investigation concluded that cracking at that weld had probably been there since she was built. By March 1980 less than half the sound metal was left. When D6 went, the remaining braces on that leg tore away one after another, the leg came off, and the platform went over in about twenty minutes in a gale.

A Commission of Inquiry was appointed by Royal Decree and reported in 1981, two years before anyone had managed to turn the rig back the right way up, which was finally done in 1983. It has never entirely settled. Forty years on, Norwegian survivors and the families of the hundred and twenty-three were still pressing for a fuller inquiry into how a fitting that size was allowed to sink an installation that size.

A Long Career of Fishery Protection

HMS Lindisfarne went on to spend the following two decades on the steady, essential work of fishery protection and coastal patrol that her class had been built for, the kind of unglamorous but truly important duty that rarely made headlines but kept British waters properly policed year after year.

A New Life as BNS Turag

HMS Lindisfarne was sold to the Bangladesh Navy on 29 January 2004, and made the long 8,000-mile journey from Britain to her new home, calling at ports along the way before arriving at Mongla Naval Base in May 2004.

She was formally commissioned into Bangladeshi service on 3 October 2004 as BNS Turag, under the Commodore Commanding Khulna, and has gone on to serve for over two decades in her new navy, with a crew of around 100 personnel, taking part in regional exercises and humanitarian operations, including a successful rescue of nine fishermen in September 2018, a fitting continuation of the rescue and patrol work that had defined so much of her earlier career under the White Ensign.

She did not go east alone. Lindisfarne and HMS Guernsey (P297) were the last two of the class left in Royal Navy service, and they were sold to Bangladesh together on the same day, 29 January 2004, for the same reason Britain had built them in the first place: to police an exclusive economic zone, this time in the Bay of Bengal.

It is a neat piece of symmetry for a design drawn round a trawler. Two ships built because Parliament extended a fishing limit in 1976 spent their second careers enforcing somebody else's, eight thousand miles away, and are still at it more than twenty years after they left Portsmouth.