HMS London (F95): Flagship of the Gulf War Task Force

Renamed at the Lord Mayor's Request

HMS London was ordered on 23 February 1982 under the working name HMS Bloodhound, with construction beginning at the Yarrow shipyard on 7 February 1983.

She was launched on 27 October 1984 and commissioned on 5 June 1987, a Type 22 Batch 2 frigate that received her eventual name at the specific request of the Lord Mayor of London, a nice piece of civic diplomacy that gave the capital its own warship to follow with pride.

Flagship of the Gulf War Task Force

HMS London's most significant achievement came in 1991, when she served as flagship of the Royal Navy mine countermeasures task group during the Gulf War, with Commodore Christopher Craig commanding the whole force from her deck between December 1990 and March 1991, first under the command of Iain Henderson and then Mark Stanhope, who would go on to become First Sea Lord nearly two decades later, a prestigious role that put her at the very centre of Britain's naval contribution to the campaign to liberate Kuwait.

She had a genuinely close call while escorting the American battleship USS Missouri off Kuwait on 25 February 1991, when an Iraqi Silkworm missile was launched at the battleship; the destroyer HMS Gloucester, also part of the escort, brought it down with a pair of Sea Dart missiles just seconds before impact, the first successful missile-versus-missile intercept in combat history, and a reminder of how close the whole task group, London included, came to real danger that day.

What Gloucester did that afternoon is worth reading in full, because it had never been done before and has been done once since. The whole engagement, from the first radar contact to the intercept, took eighty-nine seconds, and a good deal else was going on inside it, including an American frigate's automatic close-in gun putting 20mm rounds into Missouri after mistaking her chaff for a target. It is set out in the article on HMS Gloucester (D96).

The following August she deployed to the Barents Sea, a striking contrast in operating environment for a ship that had so recently been leading a task force through the Gulf's heat.

The Balkans and a Medical Evacuation

HMS London operated in the Adriatic Sea during the Implementation Force operations in 1996, part of the international effort to enforce the peace in the former Yugoslavia, carrying an embarked Lynx helicopter.

In March 1998, that same ship's flight carried out a medical evacuation during Exercise Strong Resolve, transferring an injured sailor to Lorient in France, exactly the kind of quiet, notably life-saving work that a frigate's embarked helicopter made possible.

That September she relieved HMS Cumberland off Albania as part of Operation Swanston, supporting British nationals during unrest in the region.

A New Life as Regina Maria

HMS London was decommissioned on 14 January 1999, and was sold to the Romanian Navy in January 2003, her weapons systems stripped before transfer, arriving in Romanian service armed with two 30mm cannons and anti-submarine torpedo launchers, later supplemented by a 76mm Oto Melara gun added by her new operators.

She commissioned into the Romanian Navy as Regina Maria on 21 April 2005, named for the popular early twentieth-century Romanian queen, though the purchase itself proved controversial back in Romania, with officials later claiming the country had paid three times too much for its two former Royal Navy frigates, a rather deflating postscript for a ship that had once led an entire Gulf War task force under the White Ensign.

The queen she was renamed for is worth knowing about, not least because of where she started. Marie Alexandra Victoria was born on 29 October 1875 at Eastwell Park, just outside Ashford in Kent, and spent much of her childhood there. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria through her father, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and a granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II through her mother. She married Ferdinand of Romania in January 1893 and became queen at the very start of the First World War, when Carol I died.

She spent that war nursing, in field hospitals and typhus wards, and made herself the most visible figure in the country. Then in 1919, when the Romanian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference walked out over a row with the French prime minister, she went to Paris herself and did the lobbying in person. Romania came out of that conference more than twice the size she went in, and the credit for a good deal of it is hers.

So a frigate built on the Clyde and named for the City of London finished her career under the flag of a country whose most famous queen was an English girl from a house in Kent, and who is remembered there rather better than she is here. It is a tidier ending than the argument about the price.