HMS Marlborough (F233): First to the Stricken USS Cole, Now Sailing On for Chile

Built at Wallsend, Skipping the Unlucky Number

HMS Marlborough was laid down at Swan Hunter's Wallsend yard on 22 October 1987, launched on 21 January 1989 and commissioned on 14 June 1991, a Duke-class Type 23 frigate and the sixth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, honouring John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough.

John Churchill is worth a paragraph, since six ships have now been named for him. He commanded the allied armies through the War of the Spanish Succession and, over ten campaigns, never lost a battle: Blenheim in 1704, Ramillies in 1706, Oudenarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709. At Blenheim he was outnumbered and looking at a strong position, so he pinned both French flanks in place and then went straight through the middle, which was the part they had left thinly held. Ramillies, two years later, was reckoned the more complete victory of the two.

A grateful Queen Anne gave him the royal manor of Woodstock and the country built Blenheim Palace on it, which is where his descendant Winston Churchill was born in 1874 and which he later repaid with a four-volume life of the man. It makes for an odd sort of lineage for a Type 23: a frigate named for a soldier, by way of a house.

Her pennant number, F233, was deliberately chosen to skip F232, a number long considered unlucky within the Royal Navy for a very specific bureaucratic reason: Form S.232 is the service's own official report for a ship running aground or colliding with something, so no one particularly fancied wearing the number on the hull. The superstition runs deeper still. A compass heading of 232 degrees is traditionally avoided at sea too, with ships steering half a degree either side of it rather than risk the number outright.

Marlborough was not the only ship to dodge it. HMS Lancaster was originally allocated pennant number F232 herself, until someone in the planning office made the connection and had it hurriedly changed to F229, a small but telling piece of naval superstition surviving well into the modern, missile-armed era.

First to the USS Cole

HMS Marlborough, under the command of Captain Anthony Rix, achieved a moment of real international significance in October 2000 when she became the first naval vessel to reach the stricken USS Cole after the American destroyer was struck by a suicide bomb attack while refuelling in Aden, Yemen, an attack that killed seventeen American sailors. She was already homeward bound after a six-month Gulf deployment, with a full medical detachment still aboard, and diverted for Aden the moment her offer of help was accepted, arguably the single most useful piece of timing in her entire career.

HMS Marlborough's rapid response to render assistance to an allied warship in genuine crisis stands as one of the defining moments of her career, a reminder of how quickly a routine deployment could turn into something far more serious.

Being first mattered rather more than the phrase suggests. The bomb had blown a forty-foot hole in Cole's side and killed seventeen of her people, and her surviving crew had spent a day and a night fighting flooding in a ship with no power, no working heads, no showers, no drinking water and nothing hot to eat. Marlborough came in the next day with fresh water, a full medical detachment and damage control teams, and put them aboard.

Cole did not sail home. On 31 October the Norwegian heavy-lift ship MV Blue Marlin settled in the water alongside her, took her onto her deck and carried her across the Atlantic like cargo. She was rebuilt over about eighteen months at Pascagoula by the yard that had built her, went back to sea in 2002 and is in commission to this day, which is a reasonable answer to the people who put the boat alongside her.

A Helicopter Lost Over the Arabian Sea

HMS Marlborough took part in Exercise Saif Sareea alongside British and Omani forces in 2001, a large combined exercise that took an alarming turn on 27 October when the frigate's Lynx helicopter, hovering low to drop a dummy torpedo, was struck from behind by an Omani vessel that sailed straight into its rotor blades and brought it down into the Arabian Sea. Both the pilot and observer escaped with only minor injuries and were picked up by the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, a genuinely lucky outcome and a sobering reminder all the same that training exercises, for all their careful planning, carry real risk.

Naval Gunfire Support Over Iraq

HMS Marlborough played a key role in the Iraq War under Captain Mark Anderson during Operation Telic from 2003 into 2005, and in the course of that deployment she took the duties of both Scene of Action Commander and Naval Gunfire Support Commander for the assault on the Al Faw peninsula, directing the fire of allied warships onto Iraqi positions ashore, a considerable responsibility buried within a much larger and more dangerous campaign.

She was relieved as Operation Telic guardship in the Persian Gulf by HMS Argyll in March 2005.

The rest of that job was less dramatic and more useful. On 20 March she sat at the mouth of the Khawr Abd Allah as Scene of Action Commander, challenging and directing thirty-five merchant ships out of a war zone in a single day, and when she intercepted an Iraqi patrol boat she shepherded it north rather than sinking it. Naval gunfire support for the Al Faw assault came to seventeen fire missions and 155 rounds of 4.5-inch and American 5-inch. The ship that actually fired the first British shots in anger since the Falklands was a few miles away: HMS Chatham (F87).

Away from the Gulf, HMS Marlborough was one of several Royal Navy ships, alongside HMS Montrose, RFA Wave Knight and RFA Argus, sent to assist the disabled Canadian submarine HMCS Chicoutimi some 120 miles off the Irish coast on 5 October 2004, after seawater flooding through open hatches in rough weather soaked poorly waterproofed electrical insulation and started a fire. Nine of her crew suffered smoke inhalation and one officer, Lieutenant (N) Chris Saunders, died during the evacuation; the submarine was eventually taken under tow and reached Faslane five days later, a rescue mission that underlined just how much of a modern frigate's real-world value lies in unglamorous assistance work as much as in combat.

Becoming Almirante Condell

HMS Marlborough was decommissioned from the Royal Navy on 8 July 2005, and in June that same year it was announced she would be sold to the Chilean Navy.

She was the last of three former Royal Navy Type 23 frigates handed over under a £134 million sales agreement signed in September 2005, following her sisters HMS Norfolk and HMS Grafton, transferred to Chile in November 2006 and March 2007 respectively. Marlborough herself was formally transferred in 2007 and officially welcomed into Chilean service as Almirante Condell at a commissioning ceremony on 28 May 2008.

Her new name honoured Carlos Condell, a Chilean naval officer who, on the same day in May 1879 that his friend Arturo Prat died gloriously aboard the corvette Esmeralda at the Battle of Iquique, was fighting his own action a few miles south at Punta Gruesa. Commanding the far smaller and more lightly built schooner Covadonga, Condell deliberately ran close along the shallow coastline, gambling that the heavier Peruvian ironclad Independencia chasing him drew too much water to follow; she ran hard aground on a reef, and Condell turned back to shell her at his leisure, a properly cunning piece of seamanship for a ship now lending her name to a rather more modern kind of frigate.

Still Sailing, Now With Sea Ceptor

HMS Marlborough, as Almirante Condell, underwent a significant modernisation between September 2020 and October 2021, receiving a new CMS 330 combat management system and 32 CAMM Sea Ceptor missiles, keeping her relevant and well armed decades after she first slipped down the ways at Wallsend.

She remains in active service with the Chilean Navy today, a striking testament to the enduring value of a well-built Type 23 hull, one that has now protected the interests of two different nations across more than three decades of service.