HMS Matapan (D43): Twenty Years in Reserve, Then Reborn as a Sonar Test Bed

Named for a Victory She Arrived Too Late to Join

HMS Matapan was built by John Brown and Company, launched on 30 April 1945 and finally completed on 5 September 1947, a Battle-class fleet destroyer of the later 1943 building programme, named to commemorate the Royal Navy's decisive 1941 victory over the Italian fleet off Cape Matapan, a battle she herself had arrived far too late to take any part in.

The real battle, fought over 27 to 29 March 1941, was rather more one-sided than the name alone suggests. Admiral Cunningham's fleet, built around the battleships Warspite, Valiant and Barham and the carrier HMS Formidable, used the Royal Navy's still-secret radar to close on an Italian squadron at night that had no idea it was even being watched, sinking the cruisers Zara, Fiume and Pola along with two destroyers and killing around 2,400 Italian sailors, for the loss of a single British aircraft and its crew.

After a fortnight of builder's and acceptance sea trials totalling some 150 hours of steaming, she arrived at Chatham on 22 September 1947.

Twenty Years Moored on the Tamar

HMS Matapan was de-stored and laid up in Gillingham Reach on the River Medway from 28 October 1947, before being towed to Devonport on 20 July 1948 and moored in the River Tamar for what turned into a notably remarkable twenty years in long-term reserve, a destroyer built for a war that had already ended, mothballed through the entire span of the early Cold War while newer, more relevant classes took her place in the active fleet.

It was not that she was obsolete. She was brand new. The Battle class had been planned big, thirty-two of them, and twenty-six were finished before most of the third group was cancelled on the reasonable grounds that the war was being won without them. Eight of the 1943 programme ships were completed for the Royal Navy: Agincourt, Aisne, Alamein, Barrosa, Corunna, Dunkirk, Jutland and Matapan.

What the Navy did not have in 1947 was people. The post-war manning crisis was at its peak, demobilisation had taken the trained men out of the fleet faster than anyone could replace them, and four of that flotilla, Alamein, Barrosa, Corunna and Matapan, were laid up because there was nobody to put aboard them. A destroyer finished in September and de-stored in October, moored up on a river for want of a crew.

Her sisters did rather more with the interval. Cadiz and Gabbard went to Pakistan in 1957 as Khaibar and Badr, and Khaibar was sunk by missile attack off Karachi in the 1971 war with India, an early and unpleasant demonstration of what the ship-launched guided missile was about to do to conventional destroyers. Sluys came out of thirteen years in the Devonport reserve in 1966 and was sold to Iran, where she served as Artemiz. Matapan stayed on the Tamar.

Rescued From Mothballs by the Soviet Submarine Threat

HMS Matapan was earmarked in 1961 for conversion to replace HMS Verulam as a sonar trials vessel, though funding delays repeatedly postponed the work.

It took the emergence of increasingly capable Soviet nuclear submarines through the 1960s to finally force the issue: in 1968 the Admiralty issued a draft Staff Requirement for a new Type 2016 hull sonar, intended to sweep away not just the widely used Type 184 but a whole clutch of older specialist sets, Types 170, 176 and 177 among them, and the urgency of that programme revived the long-dormant plan to convert HMS Matapan into a dedicated test bed.

An Almost Unrecognisable Destroyer

HMS Matapan's conversion began at Portsmouth on 5 January 1970 and amounted to one of the most radical transformations any Royal Navy destroyer had ever undergone. Enormous sonar arrays, 150 feet long and 10 feet wide, were fitted along either side of her keel, requiring a deep new skeg to accommodate them, while a bulbous sonar dome was added at the bow.

Her draught increased to 22 feet and her displacement rose to 3,835 tons; every gun and piece of armament was stripped out entirely, replaced by new deckhouses, a rebuilt bridge, a plated foremast, a second funnel, a helicopter flight deck, operations rooms and additional accommodation. It was, in effect, an entirely new ship built around an old hull, and the work was not completed until July 1972.

A Particularly Loud Job

HMS Matapan commissioned on 2 February 1973 and joined the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, where initial trials in British coastal waters revealed a properly amusing occupational hazard: her powerful new sonar array was so loud that her crew required ear defenders simply to work aboard her.

In 1976 she crossed the Atlantic to operate alongside the United States Navy in the Caribbean, including joint exercises with the American submarine USS Tullibee, a fitting final active chapter for a ship whose entire purpose by then was to help the Royal Navy stay one step ahead of exactly the kind of submarine threat that had brought her out of reserve in the first place.

Tullibee was not a randomly chosen partner, either. She was a one-off, and a deliberate one: at about 2,300 tons the smallest nuclear submarine the United States has ever built, the first nuclear boat with turbo-electric drive, designed from the keel up for the single job of hunting other submarines quietly, and by some distance the quietest thing the US Navy owned. If what you want to know is whether your new sonar can hear something that does not want to be heard, you go and borrow the hardest target available.

The Last of Her Class

HMS Matapan was decommissioned in August 1977 and laid up at Portsmouth, before being sold to H.K. Vickers on 18 May 1979 and broken up at Blyth, Northumberland.

In a quiet piece of naval trivia, she ultimately outlived every other Battle-class destroyer still in Royal Navy service; sisters like HMS Vigo had already gone to the breakers as far back as 1964, some fifteen years before Matapan finally followed them, a remarkably fitting distinction for a ship whose career had been defined, from beginning to end, by arriving late and outlasting everyone else regardless.

The set she was built to prove made it. Sonar 2016 had begun development in 1971, was first trialled aboard Matapan in 1973 and entered service in 1979, going into the Invincible-class carriers, the first of the Type 22 frigates, the three Leanders rebuilt for Sea Wolf and the last of the Type 42s, and sweeping away the Type 184 exactly as the 1968 requirement had asked. From 1982 it was progressively superseded by Sonar 2050, which used the same transducer, and that programme was still being worked through in the late 1990s.

Which puts the twenty years on the Tamar in a different light. Matapan was sold for scrap in 1979, the same year the thing she had spent her working life proving went to sea in the rest of the fleet, and the sound of it was still going into Royal Navy hulls when she had been gone twenty years. Not a bad return for a destroyer named after a battle she missed, who never fired a shot at anybody, and whose crew had to wear ear defenders. The account of the battle itself, and of the codebreakers at Bletchley who made it possible, is in the article on HMS Formidable (67).