HMS Llandaff (F61): From a Storm-Snapped Mooring to the Search for MH370

Constructed at Hebburn

HMS Llandaff was laid down on 27 August 1953 by Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Hebburn on the Tyne and launched on 30 November 1955, christened by Countess Mountbatten, wife of Earl Louis Mountbatten, a Salisbury-class Type 61 aircraft direction frigate built to provide radar control for carrier aircraft rather than to fight conventional gunnery actions herself.

A Dramatic Start Before She Even Commissioned

HMS Llandaff's career got off to a chaotic start. On 1 March 1956, still fitting out and not yet commissioned, she broke away from her moorings in a storm and collided with both HMS Bermuda and HMS Russell, along with a merchant vessel, sustaining damage in the process, a thoroughly inauspicious beginning for a ship that had not yet even entered active service.

The two ships she hit are both worth a look in their own right. HMS Bermuda (52) was a wartime colony-class cruiser with Operation Torch and the Arctic behind her, and HMS Russell (F97) went on to a Cod War career of her own. Llandaff managed to damage both of them, and a merchantman, before she had a ship's company.

She eventually commissioned on 11 April 1958, becoming the first ship to be trained by the newly established Flag Officer Sea Training organisation at Portland, an organisation that would go on to become a cornerstone of Royal Navy training for decades afterward.

Being the first ship through FOST is a better distinction than it sounds, and there is a neat piece of symmetry in it that the record does not usually join up. Flag Officer Sea Training was set up at Portland in 1958 by the First Sea Lord of the day, Earl Mountbatten. Llandaff had been christened three years earlier by his wife.

The organisation existed because of a change in how the Navy manned its ships. Under the old running commissions a ship kept much of her company for years at a time and learned her trade gradually. From 1954 the Navy moved to fixed Home, General and Foreign Service commissions, which meant warships being handed an entirely new crew far more often, and a brand-new crew in a brand-new ship is a dangerous combination. From September 1958 the answer was a seven-week shakedown at Portland: everything that could go wrong, made to go wrong, over and over, until the ship's company stopped having to think about it.

The idea was not new. It came straight out of the Second World War, where escorts bound for the Atlantic were worked up at Tobermory under a commodore whose methods are described in the article on HMS Alacrity (U60). What 1958 did was make it permanent and put an admiral in charge of it.

It worked well enough that it outlived Portland. FOST moved to Plymouth in 1995 and its headquarters went to HMS Drake at Devonport when the Portland base closed in 1999, and it is still going. Dutch and German officers have been part of the training staff since the Portland days, and something like a third of the ships it now works up belong to other navies altogether. Llandaff went through it first, in 1958, and by the time her own second career ended in Bangladesh the organisation that shook her down was nearly sixty years old.

A Flag-Showing Voyage Home

HMS Llandaff recommissioned at Singapore in 1967 and undertook an extensive flag-showing voyage home between June and September 1968, calling at the Solomon Islands, Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific before returning to British waters that September, completing her commission at Devonport in 1970, a lengthy and geographically wide-ranging deployment that gave the Royal Navy a genuine presence across a vast stretch of ocean.

A Long Second Life as Umar Farooq

HMS Llandaff was sold to the Bangladesh Navy on 10 December 1976 and renamed BNS Umar Farooq, going on to serve for the following four decades as a training ship, with accommodation modified to allow for female officers, a properly significant step for the Bangladesh Navy's own gradual modernisation.

Based at Chittagong, she carried out goodwill visits over the following years, and in April 2014, remarkably, took part in the international search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a striking illustration of just how far a ship's usefulness could extend well beyond her original design purpose.

She was sent into the Bay of Bengal after the Australian firm GeoResonance claimed to have detected a debris signature, consistent with aluminium, titanium and jet fuel residue, roughly 120 miles south of Bangladesh. Umar Farooq found nothing, and the claim was ultimately dismissed by the international Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which remained satisfied the real evidence pointed thousands of miles away, to the southern Indian Ocean.

A Long Career Finally Ends

HMS Llandaff, by then BNS Umar Farooq, was finally sold for scrapping in 2016, closing out a career of sixty years that had begun with a storm-torn mooring line and two accidental collisions before she had even properly entered service, and ended with a ship built for Cold War carrier radar direction taking part in one of the twenty-first century's most extensive maritime search operations.