HMS Manchester (D95): From Falklands Reinforcement to the First British Warship in Havana Since 1957

Forty-Two Extra Feet

HMS Manchester was laid down on 19 May 1978 at Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering in Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 24 November 1980 and commissioned on 16 December 1982, the second Royal Navy ship to carry the name and the first of the Type 42 destroyer's Batch 3 vessels, a stretched version of the class lengthened by some 42 feet over the earlier batches specifically to improve seakeeping, a sensible piece of design foresight given how much rough water a Cold War destroyer could expect to spend her career in.

The foresight had a sequel. Manchester, Gloucester, Edinburgh and York were the four Batch 3s, and the extra length, about 15.5 metres of it inserted forward, was itself a partial undoing of a much larger economy: the Type 42 had been shortened by 47 feet during design to hold the price down, a decision whose consequences are set out in the article on HMS Coventry (D118).

Unfortunately the sums for the longer hull were wrong as well. The stretched ships turned out to be weak in longitudinal strength, which is the polite way of saying that in a heavy enough sea they might have broken their backs, and the remedy was to weld an external girder down each side at main deck level. That strake is the easiest way to tell a Batch 3 from her shorter sisters at a distance, and it is the only visible feature of the class that exists purely as an apology. The price went the same way: the Type 42 had been budgeted at something like £19 million a ship, and Edinburgh, the last of the four, came in at £130.6 million.

She picked up the affectionate nickname "Busy Bee" along the way, a nod to the worker bee stitched into Manchester's own coat of arms and worn just as proudly on the ship's crest, a rare case of a Royal Navy nickname needing no explanation at all to anyone from the North West.

Reinforcing a Fleet That Had Just Lost Two Sisters

HMS Manchester's first operational deployment came in 1983 and 1984, sailing south to reinforce the Falklands garrison in the aftermath of a war that had cost the Royal Navy two of her own Type 42 sisters, HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry, both lost to Argentine air attack in 1982.

Fittingly, and perhaps a little poignantly, some of the personnel who joined her ship's company for that deployment were survivors of those two lost ships, a truly direct thread connecting HMS Manchester's early career to the conflict that had so recently and so painfully tested the whole class.

Her next big job was a great deal more agreeable. In April 1986 Manchester sailed with Global 86, a task group built round HMS Illustrious with the frigates Amazon and HMS Beaver, a nuclear submarine and the RFAs Bayleaf and Fort Grange, sent round the world to show the flag. It took in five continents and more than twenty countries, involved some 2,500 Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary people at sea and did not get home to Portsmouth until 19 December. The high point was the Royal Australian Navy's 75th anniversary review at Sydney.

It very nearly began without its flagship. Illustrious suffered a serious gearbox fire off the Isle of Wight not long after leaving Portsmouth, bad enough that abandoning her was reportedly discussed, and she had to go back into dockyard hands while the rest of the group carried on without her under Beaver. She caught them up at Singapore. For a stretched destroyer commissioned three years earlier and built for the North Atlantic, nine months of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean was as far from her design brief as she would ever get.

A Prime Minister in the Gulf

HMS Manchester served on the Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf in 1988, sailing in company with the frigates HMS Jupiter and HMS Beaver during a year that had already turned grim: on 3 July, the American cruiser USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard, a sobering reminder of just how unforgiving those waters could be even for ships not directly involved. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew in five weeks later, on 9 August, fresh from a tour of India, and marked the visit by presenting the ship's company with a silver salver in recognition of the 486 merchant ships the Armilla Patrol had escorted up and down the Gulf that year alone.

HMS Manchester returned to the Gulf in far more concentrated fashion during the First Gulf War in 1991, part of Operation Granby, providing air defence cover through the offensive to liberate Kuwait and helping enforce the trade blockade on Iraq, and earning the battle honour Persian Gulf 1991 for her efforts.

She was back once again in 2007 and 2008 for a seven-month maritime security deployment alongside the American carrier USS Harry S Truman, ranging across the eastern Atlantic, the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa.

Sinking Her Own Kind

HMS Manchester took part in a weapons exercise on 16 June 1987 in which she sank the former frigate HMS Yarmouth, decommissioned the year before and towed out into the Atlantic purely to be shot at, a fate that awaited a great many retired Royal Navy vessels and a remarkably strange sort of tribute for a ship that had herself served the fleet faithfully for decades before ending her days on the receiving end of somebody else's live-fire practice.

Nudged by the Queen Elizabeth 2

HMS Manchester was deployed on Atlantic Patrol Tasking in February 2000, calling at New York on her way home, and there produced one of the odder footnotes of her career: the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2, manoeuvring badly along the East River, clipped Manchester and several other vessels moored alongside, a minor scrape rather than a proper collision but a properly memorable one all the same given the sheer disparity in size and prestige between a Royal Navy destroyer and one of the most famous passenger liners in the world. Nobody, mercifully, needed a bigger boat.

A rather more useful encounter with a civilian vessel came in 2002, when HMS Manchester saved all eleven people aboard the 148-foot cruiser Shiralee after it began sinking in the Caribbean, a reminder that a warship's radar and boats are just as often turned to rescue as to war-fighting.

Nineteen Million Pounds of Drugs and a Historic Havana Visit

HMS Manchester's 2009 South Atlantic patrol took her via Bermuda, the Falkland Islands, Brazil, Colombia and Cape Verde for counter-narcotics training, and produced one of the lighter footnotes of her career on the way home: two of her sailors, ashore in Valparaíso, Chile, made off with a life-sized Ronald McDonald statue and threw it in the harbour, earning themselves a Chilean court appearance, a £350 fine each and a formal apology to the restaurant. Rather less amusingly, on her return to Portsmouth that August a junior rating was alleged to have attempted to smuggle around 12 kilograms of cocaine hidden in personal quarters, a reminder that the same smuggling routes a warship patrolled against could occasionally find their way aboard the ship herself.

She returned to the Caribbean for a fresh seven-month deployment from May to December 2010, focused on maritime security and counter-narcotics work, standing ready to assist British Overseas Territories through Hurricanes Earl and Igor before delivering direct relief to St Lucia after Hurricane Tomas. In October her boarding teams intercepted a converted Colombian fishing boat attempting to dump its cargo mid-chase; that seizure, together with an earlier one, added up to some 800 kilograms of cocaine and 300 kilograms of marijuana, worth a combined £18.3 million. "HMS Manchester has had a busy seven-month deployment," said her Commanding Officer, Commander Rex Cox, "and has been involved in a wide range of tasks, from intercepting drugs bound for the United Kingdom to helping the hurricane-battered people of St Lucia in their hour of need."

The deployment closed with a moment of real historical weight: on 15 November 2010, HMS Manchester became the first British warship to visit Havana since the frigate HMS Bigbury Bay called in 1957, a fifty-three-year gap that made for a striking symbol of just how far Anglo-Cuban relations had come. Officers held talks ashore on further co-operation over counter-narcotics and disaster relief, and by the time she sailed for home her ship's company had also found time to raise £2,090 for the Broughton House naval veterans' hospice, a small but fitting note for a destroyer that had spent so much of her final year looking after other people.

A Farewell to Liverpool and the Breaker's Yard

HMS Manchester made a final farewell visit to Liverpool on 2 February 2011, a fitting civic send-off given her North West English namesake, before returning to HMNB Portsmouth for the last time on 17 February and being formally decommissioned there a week later, on 24 February 2011, after very nearly thirty years and 858,882 nautical miles of active service, most of it with a ship's company of around 260.

"The ship has served the Royal Navy for 30 years and has a fine pedigree that includes seeing active service in the Gulf during Operation Granby," Commander Rex Cox said at the time; "more recently she has been an integral part of counter-narcotics operations and hurricane relief in the Caribbean." She was towed from Portsmouth in November 2014, more than three-and-a-half years after decommissioning, to be broken up at the Leyal Ship Recycling yard in Aliağa, Turkey, alongside her sister ship HMS Liverpool, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service had carried her from the shadow of the Falklands War, through two Gulf conflicts, and finally to a quiet, historic anchorage in Havana harbour that her original Cold War designers could scarcely have imagined.