HMS Murray (F91): A Submarine Hunter That Moonlighted in a Norman Wisdom Comedy

The Build: Govan

HMS Murray was laid down at Alexander Stephen and Sons' Govan shipyard on 30 November 1953, launched on 22 February 1955 and completed on 5 June 1956, a Blackwood-class Type 14 anti-submarine frigate, one of twelve built for the Royal Navy through the 1950s specifically to counter the growing threat of fast, quiet Soviet submarines, displacing 1,180 tons standard and capable of 27 knots on her English Electric geared steam turbines.

There is a grandeur to the naming that sits oddly with the ships themselves. The twelve Blackwoods were named after admirals of the sailing navy: Blackwood, Duncan, Dundas, Exmouth, Grafton, Hardy, Keppel, Malcolm, Murray, Palliser, Pellew and Russell. Three of them, Blackwood, Hardy and Murray, had served with Nelson, and Blackwood commanded the Euryalus at Trafalgar. Small, cheap, single-shafted anti-submarine frigates with three Bofors guns apiece, carrying the names of the men who fought the wars of sail. The design and the economics that produced it are set out in the articles on HMS Blackwood (F78) and HMS Duncan (F80).

Built to Hunt, Not to Fight

HMS Murray was armed relatively lightly for her size, carrying three 40mm Bofors guns alongside two triple-barrelled Limbo Mark 10 anti-submarine mortars and a suite of advanced sonar equipment, reflecting the Blackwood class's singular focus on submarine detection and destruction over conventional surface gunnery, a deliberate design trade-off that made these Type 14 frigates highly specialised, if somewhat limited, escorts.

Her own namesake is worth knowing about, because his is one of the quietly sad stories of the Trafalgar campaign. George Murray was appointed Nelson's captain of the fleet in the Mediterranean in April 1803. He turned it down at first, on the grounds that being Nelson's chief of staff would ruin a friendship he valued more, and only accepted after Nelson talked him round.

In August 1805 Victory came home, and Murray went ashore to act as executor of his father-in-law's estate. Which is why he was in Chichester rather than in the Atlantic on 21 October. Nelson would not have anyone else in the post; his position was that none but Murray would do, and he sailed for Trafalgar with the job simply left vacant.

The consequence is the part that stays with you. Had a will not needed settling that autumn, it is very likely that it would have been Murray, and not Hardy, kneeling on the orlop deck of the Victory when Nelson died. Instead his name went, a century and a half later, onto a 1,180-ton submarine hunter that spent her most famous afternoon leading a flotilla out of Portland for a Norman Wisdom film. Another of the twelve carried the name of Sir Pulteney Malcolm, whose own remarkable career is set out in the article on HMS Malcolm (F88).

A Star Turn Alongside Norman Wisdom

HMS Murray found a notably unusual claim to fame in 1960, leading a flotilla of Type 14 Blackwood-class frigates out of Portland harbour in an early sequence of the British comedy film The Bulldog Breed, starring Norman Wisdom as a hapless grocer's assistant who joins the Navy after a spectacularly unsuccessful suicide attempt and ends up training, somewhat improbably, to fly Britain's first rocket to the Moon.

The film's small print is arguably more interesting than its plot. It features an uncredited Michael Caine as a sailor and an equally uncredited Oliver Reed as a teddy boy, sharing a few seconds together in a cinema lobby scene that remains, to this day, the only time the two future stars ever appeared together on screen.

She also appeared in Coastal Command submarine-hunting training films during the 1950s, doing double duty as both an operational warship and, evidently, something of a screen presence.

A Visit to Kiel

HMS Murray visited Kiel, Germany, in 1967, a routine but useful piece of NATO-era naval diplomacy, showing the flag in the waters of an ally whose own navy had, only a couple of decades earlier, been the very submarine threat the Blackwood class had originally been designed to counter.

The End of a Specialised Class

HMS Murray was sold and broken up in 1970, alongside sister ships in the Blackwood class that were, as a rule, retired and scrapped through the 1960s and into the 1970s, their highly specialised anti-submarine role increasingly superseded by more versatile general-purpose frigate designs, closing out the career of a small, purpose-built submarine hunter who had, along the way, enjoyed an unexpected moment in the cinematic spotlight, briefly upstaged by a future Alfie and a future Gladiator sharing a cinema lobby joke just out of shot.