HMS Norfolk (D21): The Royal Navy's First Exocet Warship, Later Chile's Flagship

The Last of the County Class

HMS Norfolk was laid down by Swan Hunter on 15 March 1966, launched by Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, on 16 November 1967 and commissioned on 7 March 1970, a Group 2 County-class destroyer and, notably, the very last of the entire County-class ever built, displacing 6,200 tons standard and originally armed with twin 4.5-inch guns and the Sea Slug surface-to-air missile system. She was also the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry the name Norfolk.

The First Royal Navy Ship With Exocet

HMS Norfolk underwent a significant modernisation between 1972 and 1974, emerging from the refit as the first Royal Navy warship ever armed with the Exocet anti-ship missile system, a significant technological milestone for the fleet, and one that would prove enormously consequential just a few years later when Exocet missiles, fired by an entirely different navy, would go on to sink HMS Sheffield and MV Atlantic Conveyor during the Falklands War.

The loop is tighter than that makes it sound. Exocet was a French weapon, and Norfolk was the ship that introduced it to the Royal Navy and demonstrated on a live hull off Gibraltar exactly what it could do to a frigate. Argentina bought the air-launched version from the same manufacturer, and had only a handful of them when the war began, because France stopped further deliveries once the fighting started. A handful was enough. The Royal Navy's first Exocet ship helped establish the reputation of the weapon that, seven and a half years after her own trial shot, cost the Royal Navy two ships and made every warship in the world rethink what it kept above its waterline.

The new capability was proved for real in November 1974, when Norfolk fired the first live Exocet ever launched from a British warship, striking the forecastle of the decommissioned frigate ex-HMS Undaunted during trials off Gibraltar. The hit was serious enough that Undaunted had to be towed into Gibraltar for damage assessment and repair, a blunt early demonstration of exactly what the missile could do to a warship's hull, seven and a half years before an Argentine Exocet would drive the same lesson home against HMS Sheffield.

Ex-HMS Undaunted was called back for one last engagement in November 1978, this time as a target for all three of Norfolk's missile systems in turn, Exocet, Sea Slug and Sea Cat, before the submarine HMS Swiftsure finished her off with a torpedo. It was a fitting, if thoroughly one-sided, send-off for the very combination of weapons that had made Norfolk such a novelty on commissioning.

A Court Martial in Fremantle

HMS Norfolk deployed widely across the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and the South Pacific during her Royal Navy career, flying the Queen's Colour during a visit to Sweden in September 1976. The following year her service with NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic was filmed for a NATO Information Service documentary shot aboard her alongside the frigate HMS Brighton, the West German destroyer Köln and the Royal Danish Navy's Peder Skram, a print of which now survives in the Imperial War Museum's own collection. Then, in 1979, a visit to Fremantle, Australia, timed to coincide with Western Australia's sesquicentenary celebrations, produced a rather more unusual occasion: the first court martial held aboard a Royal Navy warship in over a decade, a remarkably rare event that placed HMS Norfolk briefly, and somewhat awkwardly, in the naval history books for reasons entirely unrelated to combat or diplomacy.

It is worth explaining what a court martial afloat involves, because it is one of the more theatrical survivals in the service and it is all done in public. On the morning the court assembles, a gun is fired at Colours, so that everybody within earshot knows. A Union Flag goes up at the peak and stays there for as long as the court is sitting, which means that any ship in the harbour can see at a glance that somebody aboard is being tried.

And if the accused is an officer, his sword is taken from him at the start and laid on the table in front of the court. When he is brought back in for the verdict he knows it before anybody says a word, because the sword tells him: hilt towards him and he is acquitted and may take up his honour and his duty again, point towards him and he is not. Three hundred years of naval justice, decided in a room, and delivered without speaking.

What the Fremantle case was actually about does not seem to survive in any accessible account; the records of Admiralty courts martial are at the National Archives and that is where the answer would be. All that is generally recorded is that it happened, in a Western Australian harbour, during a party for the state's hundred and fiftieth birthday, with the flag up at the peak the whole time.

From Dartmouth Training Ship to Chilean Flagship

HMS Norfolk decommissioned from front-line Royal Navy service in 1981 to serve as the Dartmouth Training Ship, before being sold to Chile on 6 April 1982, in the immediate run-up to the Falklands War, and renamed Capitán Prat.

The new name carried real weight. Arturo Prat was the young captain of the wooden corvette Esmeralda at the Battle of Iquique on 21 May 1879, who held off the far more powerful Peruvian ironclad Huáscar until it had rammed his sinking ship three times, then led a near-suicidal boarding attempt onto the enemy vessel and was killed there. His sacrifice made him Chile's foremost national hero, commemorated on banknotes, in a national holiday and in a long line of Chilean warships carrying his name, of which the former HMS Norfolk became only the latest.

She went on to serve the Chilean Navy for a further quarter of a century, receiving Barak surface-to-air missile upgrades in 1996 and new helicopter facilities in 2001, a striking testament to just how much useful service remained in a well-built County-class hull long after her original owners had moved on.

Scrapped in Mexico

HMS Norfolk, as Capitán Prat, was finally decommissioned from Chilean service on 11 August 2006 and sailed to Mexico for scrapping in September 2008, closing out a career spanning nearly four decades across two navies, from a pioneering British missile trial ship to a long-serving South American flagship.