HMS London (D16): The Last Ship to Fire the Sea Slug Missile

Laid Down at Wallsend

HMS London was ordered on 6 February 1957 and laid down on 26 February 1960 by Swan Hunter at Wallsend, launched by Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, on 7 December 1961 and commissioned on 14 November 1963 under Captain J. C. Bartosik, the third County-class destroyer to be completed. She fired her Sea Slug for the first time that April, off Aberporth, a County-class guided missile destroyer displacing 6,200 tons standard and armed with the Sea Slug twin-arm surface-to-air missile system, two Sea Cat launchers and four 4.5-inch guns, one of the small group of ships that gave the Royal Navy its first modern guided missile capability.

It is worth understanding what that capability actually consisted of, because the missile is the reason the ship looked the way she did. Sea Slug was a beam rider, nineteen feet long and weighing two tons, with its four boost motors strapped around the outside of the body rather than behind it, and it needed a magazine to match. That magazine ran fore and aft through the hull and took up something like a third of her length. It is why a ship rated as a destroyer displaced six thousand two hundred tons.

What that meant in practice, including the occasion in 1982 when a thousand-pound bomb went straight through a County's Sea Slug magazine and failed to explode, is set out in the article on HMS Antrim (D18). London was the third of the eight, behind Devonshire and Hampshire, and by the time she fired the last rounds of it in December 1981 the system was twenty years old and the Navy had spent most of that time working out what else the ships were good for.

Confrontation and the Beira Patrol

HMS London took part in operations during Indonesia's Confrontation with Malaysia through the 1960s and, in 1967, supported the British withdrawal from Aden, before joining the Beira Patrol not long after the Royal Navy first established it that March, monitoring compliance with international sanctions against the breakaway white-minority regime in Rhodesia by patrolling the approaches to the Mozambican port of Beira, an unusual and politically sensitive assignment that saw a Royal Navy guided missile destroyer effectively acting as a maritime customs enforcer rather than fighting a conventional naval war.

Bicentennial and Jubilee Duty

HMS London represented Britain at the American Bicentennial celebrations in New York in 1976, carrying Royal Marines across the Atlantic to join Operation Sail's international naval review beneath the Statue of Liberty, a suitably prestigious assignment for one of the Royal Navy's more capable destroyers, and attended the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, marking twenty-five years of the Queen's reign in the company of the rest of the fleet.

The Last Sea Slug Firing

HMS London earned a particularly notable place in Royal Navy history as the last ship capable of firing the Mark 1 Sea Slug missile, conducting the system's final firings on 9 and 10 December 1981 and, in the same commission, firing what is believed to be the last four-gun broadside any Royal Navy ship has ever fired, a fittingly old-and-new combination for a ship signing off two different eras of naval gunnery and missilery within the same few weeks.

She served as Belize Guardship and, on 1 November 1981, supported Antigua's independence celebrations, where Princess Margaret represented the Queen, before being decommissioned that same month, closing out a Royal Navy career defined as much by this small but historically significant technological milestone as by any single combat action.

A Second Career as PNS Babur

HMS London was sold to Pakistan on 23 March 1982 and recommissioned as PNS Babur, going on to serve for a further decade under her new flag before being decommissioned in 1993 and scrapped in 1995, closing out the career of a destroyer whose final Royal Navy act, firing the last Sea Slug missiles the service would ever launch, gave her a small but permanent footnote in the story of British naval missile technology.

The name she took in Pakistani service has a longer history than a single transfer suggests. Pakistan has had three ships called Babur and all three were British-built. The first was the cruiser HMS Diadem, sold in 1957, which led the task group that bombarded Dwarka on the night of 7 and 8 September 1965 during the second war with India; her story is in the article on HMS Diadem (84).

London was the second, from 1982. The third came the year London went: HMS Amazon, sold in September 1993 and recommissioned as PNS Babur with the pennant D-182, whose own career is set out in the article on HMS Amazon (F169). A wartime cruiser, a guided missile destroyer and a Type 21 frigate, in succession, under one name and one flag, and every one of them built in a British yard.