HMS Mermaid (F76): Built as Ghana's Presidential Yacht, Sunk a Sister Ship in a NATO Exercise

Built for a President Who Never Took Delivery

HMS Mermaid was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the River Clyde, though she began life under an entirely different flag and an entirely different name. She was originally ordered to be named Black Star, intended to serve as the flagship of Ghana's navy and as the presidential yacht for President Kwame Nkrumah, a notably grand commission for a young African nation asserting its place on the world stage.

The name was not decorative either. Ghana had become independent in 1957, the first British colony in sub-Saharan Africa to manage it, and Nkrumah had put a black star at the centre of the new flag as a tribute to Marcus Garvey, whose Black Star Line of 1919 had been founded to link Black communities across the Atlantic and was named as a deliberate answer to the White Star Line. Nkrumah gave Ghana's own state shipping company the same name. A warship called Black Star was that whole argument rendered in steel on the Clyde.

That plan collapsed when a military coup in February 1966 toppled Nkrumah's government, and Ghana's new administration cancelled the order over its roughly £5 million cost. Yarrow, left with a half-finished warship and no buyer, completed her as a private venture, launching her without ceremony in December 1966.

Nkrumah was not in the country when it happened, which is the part that tends to get left out. On 24 February 1966 the army and the police mounted a coup under the codename Operation Cold Chop while he was in Beijing, on his way to Hanoi, attempting to mediate an end to the Vietnam war. He was told about it by Zhou Enlai. He did not believe it at first.

He never went home. He flew to Conakry instead, arriving on 2 March, where Sekou Toure made him honorary co-president of Guinea, and he died of cancer in a hospital in Bucharest on 27 April 1972. Meanwhile a half-built frigate sat on the Clyde with nobody to buy her, and went on to outlast his presidency by sixty years, most of them under a Malaysian flag. She is a museum today, and he was eventually brought home to Ghana and lies in a memorial park in Accra.

A Ship Nobody Wanted, Then a Government Subsidy

HMS Mermaid was completed in June 1968 but remained unsold for years afterward, a truly awkward situation for a modern frigate with nowhere to go.

It took until 1971 for Britain's Conservative government to step in and purchase her outright, effectively as an indirect subsidy to keep Yarrow's shipbuilding business afloat, a solution that said as much about British industrial policy as it did about naval requirements.

After refitting at Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards, she was finally commissioned into the Royal Navy on 16 May 1973 as HMS Mermaid, pennant number F76, based on the Type 41 and Type 61 frigate designs and displacing 2,300 tons, armed with dual-purpose 4-inch guns, 40mm Bofors guns and a Squid anti-submarine mortar.

Defence Diplomacy and the Third Cod War

HMS Mermaid served primarily in the Far East out of Singapore, undertaking what was described as defence diplomacy work, showing the flag and building relationships across the region.

She also found herself embroiled in the Third Cod War between 1975 and 1976, the last and most serious of Britain's fishing disputes with Iceland, suffering collision damage during clashes with Icelandic patrol boats defending their exclusive fishing zone.

The Loss of HMS Fittleton

HMS Mermaid's Royal Navy career came to an abrupt and tragic end following an incident on 20 September 1976, during a NATO exercise in the North Sea, when she and the coastal minesweeper HMS Fittleton steamed just 40 feet apart to carry out a routine mail transfer by heaving line. Mermaid's hull generated a hydrodynamic suction effect that dragged the far smaller Fittleton into collision despite everything her crew tried to counter it, and she capsized and sank in 174 feet of water, an oddly mundane cause for such a devastating outcome.

Two details give the scale of it. She capsized in under a minute, which is not enough time to do anything except be somewhere already, and thirty-two people were pulled out of the water. Mermaid was a one-off in the Royal Navy, the only ship of her kind in the fleet, and it was her particular underwater form that generated the suction. Nothing else afloat was quite that shape, which is a large part of why nobody saw it coming.

It changed something, at least. The loss brought the Reserve's mine countermeasures squadron under direct Royal Navy staff command, which is the sort of institutional consequence that reads as dry paperwork and is in fact eleven volunteers and one regular. A memorial service is still held every year at Fittleton in Wiltshire, the village the ship was named after; fourteen survivors came to the fortieth in 2016.

Twelve men died, eleven of them volunteers from the Sussex Division of the Royal Naval Reserve manning Fittleton and one from the Royal Navy, the worst peacetime loss the RNR has ever suffered. Fittleton herself was salvaged, made watertight and towed into Chatham on 11 October 1976; memorial plaques honouring the dead were later placed at three separate locations. "When I first saw Fittleton alongside in the basin I was shocked and quite taken aback," one Chatham Dockyard volunteer who witnessed her arrival later recalled, "a feeling that has stayed with me." It was a sobering reminder that training exercises, however routine, could turn fatal in an instant, and the collision brought HMS Mermaid's own British service to a close in early 1977, after barely five years in Royal Navy hands.

A Long Second Life as KD Hang Tuah

HMS Mermaid transferred to the Royal Malaysian Navy in April 1977, commissioned at Southampton on 22 July that year and renamed KD Hang Tuah, after a legendary fifteenth-century Malaccan warrior-admiral, replacing the earlier former Royal Navy frigate HMS Loch Insh in Malaysian service. She went on to serve as flagship of the Royal Malaysian Navy alongside KD Rahmat, before shifting to training duties in 1992.

A major refit between 1995 and 1997 replaced her obsolete 4-inch guns with a modern Bofors 57mm gun, fitted new, more powerful diesel engines, and removed her anti-submarine systems entirely, reflecting her transition from front-line combatant to training vessel.

From Presidential Yacht to Museum Ship

HMS Mermaid, as KD Hang Tuah, celebrated her fortieth anniversary at the Armada 2017 event at Lumut Naval Base in April 2017, before finally being retired in 2018 and converted into a naval museum ship, where she remains on display today, a genuinely remarkable end for a vessel that began life as a cancelled presidential commission, spent years unwanted on a Scottish slipway, and ultimately found two full careers under two different flags.