HMS Londonderry (F108): 125,500 Kilometres Across 28 Years

Constructed at Cowes

HMS Londonderry was laid down on 15 November 1956 at J. Samuel White's shipyard in Cowes, launched on 20 May 1958 by Cynthia Brooke, Viscountess Brookeborough, wife of Northern Ireland's Prime Minister, and commissioned on 20 July 1960, a Rothesay-class Type 12M frigate built for anti-submarine warfare, displacing 2,150 tons standard and capable of 29.5 knots.

A Burning Liner and Anti-Castro Suspects

HMS Londonderry deployed to the West Indies four times between 1961 and 1964, and that October, while stationed in Puerto Rico, was called south after a boiler room explosion set the Italian liner MV Bianca C ablaze off Grenada on the 22nd. Londonderry reached the scene two days later, her crew boarding the still-burning wreck to rig tow lines and cut her anchor free in an attempt to beach the liner off Point Salines before she sank; the tow parted in a squall before a second line could be made fast, and Bianca C went down anyway, a valiant near-miss of a rescue rather than the clean save the story sometimes implies.

The rest of the Bianca C story is worth having, because Londonderry is the ship in it and almost no account names her. She was a Costa Line liner of nearly six hundred feet, about to anchor off St George's on 22 October 1961 when her main boiler room exploded and the fire got away from her. Everyone aboard, six hundred and seventy-two people, was taken off, and most of that was done by Grenadian fishing boats and launches that came out to a burning ship without being asked. One crewman was killed in the explosion itself and two more died later of burns.

The reason for the tow was that nobody wanted her to sink where she was. St George's is a small harbour and a six-hundred-foot wreck across the entrance would have finished the port. That is what Londonderry's people were doing on a hull that was still alight: getting a wire on to her and dragging her out towards Point Saline. The line parted in a squall, she sheered away to starboard, and on 24 October, after two days of burning, she went down.

Both halves of it are still there. The Costa Line thanked the island with a bronze cast of Guido Galletti's Christ of the Abyss, the figure with its arms spread that stands in the sea off Genoa, and the Grenadian one stands on the Carenage at St George's looking out over the water. And Bianca C herself lies upright on her keel in a hundred and sixty-seven feet, the largest diveable wreck in the Caribbean, which is why every dive shop on the island calls her the Titanic of the Caribbean.

On 31 March 1963 she took on a rather more politically delicate task, carrying seventeen Cuban exiles, sixteen Cubans and one American, captured on Exuma Island, to Nassau to await a decision from the Governor of the Bahamas, a small but telling episode from the tense Cold War politics surrounding Cuba in the years following the missile crisis.

A Major Modernisation

HMS Londonderry underwent a major modernisation at Rosyth between 1967 and 1969 that brought her close in capability to the newer Leander-class frigates, adding a helicopter hangar and flight deck for a Westland Wasp, a Seacat missile launcher and updated radar, at the cost of removing one of her original Limbo anti-submarine mortars to make room for the new flight deck facilities.

Rescuing 148 Cuban Refugees

HMS Londonderry went on to serve in Malaysia and took part in the Beira Patrol, monitoring sanctions against Rhodesia off the Mozambican coast, before rescuing 148 Cuban refugees during a deployment to the Bahamas, handing them over to the US Coast Guard at the Miami sea buoy on 4 May 1964, a substantial humanitarian rescue that stands as one of the more significant single achievements of her career.

The refugee work is worth a line of context too. Both episodes, the seventeen exiles picked up on Exuma in March 1963 and the hundred and forty-eight people handed to the American coastguard at the Miami sea buoy the following May, belong to the same thing: the exodus out of Cuba that followed the revolution, in whatever would float, across a stretch of water that kills people every year. A Rothesay-class frigate designed to hunt Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic spent a good part of the early 1960s picking Cubans out of the Florida Straits.

She joined NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 1973, replacing HMS Yarmouth in the alliance's permanent multinational squadron.

A Weapons Trials Ship, Then a Training Ship

HMS Londonderry entered Rosyth in November 1975 to be converted into a trials ship for the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment, having her armament fully removed by October 1979 and receiving new low-cavitation propellers alongside additional training accommodation for Dartmouth midshipmen and apprentices from HMS Caledonia.

In early 1982 she accompanied HMS Fearless on a West Indies and United States sea training voyage, visiting Virgin Gorda and taking in the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans.

Saved by the Falklands, Then Sunk as a Target

HMS Londonderry was paid off into reserve on 31 March 1982, but the outbreak of the Falklands War changed her fate: rather than being scrapped, she became the Dartmouth Training Ship of the 6th Frigate Squadron, continuing in useful service a little longer. She made her final operational cruise between January and March 1984, before serving as a harbour training ship at HMS Sultan in Gosport until 1988.

HMS Londonderry was finally sunk as a target off Scotland on 25 June 1989, closing out 28 years of service during which she had steamed approximately 125,500 kilometres, crossed the Atlantic four times, and visited 50 ports in 35 countries, a particularly remarkable record of service for a frigate whose career had spanned everything from a burning Caribbean liner to weapons trials in home waters.