HMS Lowestoft (F103): Sunk by the Submarine That Sank the Belgrano

Linthouse-Built

HMS Lowestoft was laid down on 9 June 1958 by Alexander Stephen and Sons at their Linthouse shipyard in Glasgow, launched on 23 June 1960 and commissioned on 18 October 1961, joining the 5th Frigate Squadron in March 1962, a Rothesay-class anti-submarine frigate displacing 2,800 tons and capable of 30 knots on twin steam turbines.

A Search and a Collision

HMS Lowestoft took part in search operations following a 1962 helicopter crash involving government politicians, unglamorous but essential work in the aftermath of a genuine emergency.

That crash is worth setting out, because it is a good deal more particular than the sentence allows. On 16 November 1962 a helicopter from the carrier HMS Hermes was flying three passengers ashore to the Royal Naval Air Station at Brawdy: Lord Windlesham, John Cronin, the Member of Parliament for Loughborough, and Squadron Leader Stott of the Royal Air Force. Windlesham and Cronin had been spending a few days at sea under an Admiralty scheme that let members of both Houses go and see the Fleet at work.

A mile west of South Bishop, at a thousand feet, the engine failed outright. The pilot brought her down under autorotation and put her on the water more or less under control, and then the sea did the rest: she rolled straight over on hitting it and the door went under. Cronin and the two aircrew were picked up alive and unhurt by a second Hermes helicopter after about half an hour in the water. Squadron Leader Stott was recovered unconscious and died. Lord Windlesham was never found at all.

The search that Lowestoft joined was a large one, with aircraft from Hermes and from Brawdy, four warships, Duchess, Berwick, Scarborough and Lowestoft herself, and the St David's lifeboat out as well. None of it found him. It is the first thing in her record and it sets the pattern for a great deal of what followed: a frigate built to hunt submarines spending her time looking for people in the water instead.

In 1964 she suffered a rather more embarrassing incident, colliding with the cruiser HMS Lion during the opening ceremonies for the Forth Road Bridge, sustaining bow damage in front of what was presumably a rather large and well-dressed crowd gathered to celebrate the new crossing.

Modernised for Towed Array Trials

HMS Lowestoft underwent a comprehensive modernisation at Chatham running from 29 August 1967 to 29 May 1970, rather longer than first planned. One of her anti-submarine mortars was removed to make way for a flight deck and hangar for a Westland Wasp helicopter, her 40mm gun gave way to a Seacat surface-to-air missile system, the old lattice mast was replaced with a plated structure and two 20mm Oerlikon guns were added for good measure. Applied across the whole Rothesay-class, the work brought the ships broadly up to the standard of the newer Leander-class frigates then entering service.

Lowestoft re-commissioned that May, spent the summer on trials and work-up, and by September was operational again, marking the occasion with a proud return visit to her affiliated town of Lowestoft in Suffolk before heading to Portland for shakedown.

A Very Nelsonian Errand

The new decade opened with three months attached to NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic from January 1971, Lowestoft working the eastern North Atlantic and the Baltic out of Rotterdam, Lisbon, Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg and Bergen before playing host to the whole multinational force on a visit to Chatham.

A five-month deployment to the West Indies followed that June: three spells of Bahamas Patrol among a long run of exercises and port calls from Bermuda to Washington DC. It was in the American capital that she picked up her most unusual cargo, the "McCarthy Collection", one of the largest private collections of Nelson-era memorabilia in existence, gifted to the Royal Navy by its American owner Lily Lambert McCarthy and carried home to Portsmouth for a presentation ceremony in May 1972 that earned Mrs McCarthy an honorary CBE. A fitting errand for a ship named after the 1761 frigate HMS Lowestoffe, aboard which a young Lieutenant Horatio Nelson served under his early mentor Captain William Locker in 1777, capturing prizes in West Indian waters on the deployment that launched his career.

Fire, Ice and a Refit

That same deployment brought real drama. On passage from Simonstown to Durban in April 1972, Lowestoft diverted to the blazing Liberian tanker Silver Castle, in collision the day before and now afire from stem to stern with crew unaccounted for. Her fire party boarded through smoke and heat to fight the flames from the tiller flat while a hose was run across to the tanker's stern, then freed her jammed, burnt-out rudder before a tow could even be attempted. With Silver Castle drifting steadily towards the coast and a major oil spill looking likely, the tow line parted once in the dark and had to be re-run, then parted again the next day as fog rolled in and the sea rose, before the salvage tug Euroman finally took over some twenty miles out to sea, not a moment too soon.

A fortnight later Lowestoft took over the Beira Patrol from HMS Arethusa, the Royal Navy's long-running blockade of oil shipments bound for Rhodesia following its unilateral declaration of independence, reporting an entirely incident-free month on station before handing over to HMS Cleopatra.

The new year brought less dramatic but arguably more useful work: an Icelandic Fishery Protection Patrol from January 1973, squarely in the middle of the Cod Wars. Within days Lowestoft had answered distress calls from two British trawlers, sending divers across by inflatable in heavy seas to assess the Hull trawler St Amant's fouled propeller, then landing a technical team who spent eight hours re-cabling the Fleetwood trawler Ssafa's damaged winch, a job settled afterwards with a trade of fresh fish for fruit and bread that says rather a lot about priorities on the Cod Wars front line. A mechanical fault soon forced her own return to Chatham for repairs, HMS Yarmouth taking over the patrol in her place.

Patrol duty gave way to a Mediterranean spell and then a refit at Gibraltar running from April to October 1973, during which Lowestoft's ship's company paid off, reinforced that October by drafts from the crew of HMS Berwick, herself then preparing for her own refit.

Between 1976 and 1977 she served as a trials ship for towed array sonar, a particularly significant piece of Cold War anti-submarine technology development that would go on to transform how the Royal Navy tracked Soviet submarines for decades afterward.

The towed array trials are worth flagging as more important than they look. What she was streaming in 1976 was a cable a mile or more long, studded with hydrophones and towed far enough astern to be clear of her own machinery noise, listening passively at very low frequency. It became the answer to the problem that dominated the last decade of the Cold War at sea, which was that Soviet submarines had grown quiet enough for a hull-mounted set to miss them entirely. What the array did and why it mattered is set out in the article on HMS Beaver (F93), whose whole class was lengthened by fifteen metres to carry one. Lowestoft was towing the prototype ten years before that.

Ascension's Reluctant Guardship

The most famous conflict of Lowestoft's era found her a long way from the fighting. When Argentina invaded the Falklands in April 1982, she was serving as guardship at Ascension Island, the mid-Atlantic staging post that kept the Task Force supplied on its way south, and found herself running an impromptu ferry service between Ascension and St Helena after the islands' own vessel was requisitioned for duties closer to the war. It was, in its way, as close as she ever came to the conflict that would one day claim her, and not without its own scare: a serious hull fracture that November very nearly finished her off, eighteen months before the target range off the Bahamas got the chance.

Sunk by the Belgrano's Nemesis

HMS Lowestoft returned to Portsmouth on 29 March 1985 and was formally paid off two days later, before being sunk as a target off the Bahamas on 8 June 1986 by a Tigerfish torpedo fired from the submarine HMS Conqueror, a notable footnote given that Conqueror was the same submarine that had, four years earlier, sunk the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War, the only occasion a nuclear-powered submarine has sunk an enemy ship in wartime.

That a former front-line frigate should end her days as a live-fire target for one of the Royal Navy's most historically significant submarines gives HMS Lowestoft's quiet retirement a rather more notable final chapter than most. She holds one further, quieter distinction: the last Royal Navy target ship sunk still wearing her pennant number, a practice discontinued afterwards out of respect for vessels that had, in most cases, served the Fleet loyally for decades under it.