HMS Norfolk (F230): The First Type 23 Frigate Ever Built

The Lead Ship of a New Generation

HMS Norfolk was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders, laid down in 1985, launched on the Clyde by Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, in July 1987 and commissioned on 1 June 1990, the very first ship of the entire Type 23 Duke-class frigate, a design that would go on to serve as the backbone of the Royal Navy's frigate fleet for decades. She was also the sixth Royal Navy ship to carry the name Norfolk.

As the class leader, she represented a remarkably new approach to frigate design, built specifically around the principle of lean manning, requiring a smaller crew than earlier frigate classes while retaining full operational capability. She then spent her first year in commission on trials as class leader, culminating in Basic Operational Sea Training (BOST) in November and December 1991. Her Latin motto, Serviens Servo, roughly "by serving I preserve", proved a fitting choice for a ship whose service went on to preserve not one but two genuine Royal Navy firsts.

Lean manning is worth a number. A Type 23 commissioned with a ship's company of 173, against something over 250 in the Leanders and the earlier frigates she was replacing. That is not a trim, it is most of a ship's company, and since people are the most expensive thing in a navy over thirty years it is a large part of why the class was affordable enough to build in quantity.

There is an irony in the rest of it. The Type 23 began as an attempt to produce a cheap, austere escort that could be turned out quickly in a war, an ambition described in the article on HMS Grafton (F80), and she was not expected to have a long life. Norfolk commissioned in 1990 and is still at sea today under a Chilean flag, and her sisters are being nursed along in British service until their replacements arrive. The cheap disposable frigate turned into the ship the Royal Navy could not manage without, which is very often what happens to the cheap disposable option.

Two Genuine Naval Firsts

HMS Norfolk achieved two significant technological milestones during her career: she was the first ship in the world armed with the vertical launch Seawolf missile system, a considerable advance over earlier trainable launcher designs, and later became the first Royal Navy warship re-armed with the new 4.5-inch Mod 1 gun system, cementing her reputation as something of a technical trailblazer even among a class already renowned for its capability.

The vertical launcher is worth explaining, because of what it fixed. A trainable launcher is an arm on a mounting: before it can fire it has to slew round and elevate, which takes time, and there are bearings it cannot reach at all because its own ship is in the way. Against an aircraft at ten miles that is a nuisance. Against a sea-skimming missile arriving from an unhelpful direction at the speed of sound it is fatal.

Put the rounds in a silo instead, pointing straight up, thirty-two cells of them in Norfolk's case, and the problem disappears. The missile goes vertically up out of the ship and then turns over onto the target, whatever bearing the target is on, so there are no blind arcs and nothing has to be trained anywhere first. The rounds sit in sealed containers, so they never have to be struck down into a magazine in harbour and hoisted back up in action, and the whole outfit can be put into the air in quick succession if that is what the situation demands.

The Royal Navy had spent the whole of the 1980s working out what to do about exactly that threat, for reasons it had learned in the South Atlantic at some cost, and Norfolk was the first ship anywhere in the world to go to sea with the answer. About the only thing the old trainable launcher still did better was the very close-in shot, where an arm already pointing the right way can be a fraction quicker off the mark. Everything else about it was worse.

The First Visit to South Africa in Twenty Years

HMS Norfolk deployed with HMS Invincible on the Orient 92 tour between May and November 1992, visiting the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Far East and Middle East, and in 1994 became the first Royal Navy warship to visit South Africa in over twenty years, a significant piece of naval diplomacy marking the country's return to the international fold following the end of apartheid.

Sierra Leone and the Standing Naval Force

HMS Norfolk deployed to the United States in 2000 and also took part in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone that same year. A chance encounter with a local bottlenose dolphin during exercises that year proved memorable enough that the dolphin was named Norfolk in her honour, and sightings of "Norfolk" the dolphin around the South West coast continued to be reported for years afterwards.

The following year, in 2001, she became the trials platform for the Royal Navy's new 4.5-inch Mod 1 gun, an electrically driven update to her original mounting that extended its surface range from 22 to 27 kilometres, adding yet another technical first to a ship already well used to them.

She went on to serve with Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 2002 alongside ships from Portugal, Norway, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United States during Exercise Strong Resolve, a multinational deployment that included hosting the Princess Royal during a visit to Malta.

That same winter, her ship's company took their turn behind the wheel of a Green Goddess fire engine as part of Operation Fresco, the armed forces' nationwide emergency cover during the firefighters' strike of 2002 and 2003, before Norfolk deployed to the Gulf on Operation Telic in 2003 in support of the invasion of Iraq and marked the centenary of the Entente Cordiale alongside French warships in 2004.

Becoming Almirante Cochrane

HMS Norfolk was decommissioned at Devonport on 15 April 2005 and transferred to the Chilean Navy the following year, renamed Almirante Cochrane after the celebrated British-born naval officer who went on to lead Chile's own navy to independence in the nineteenth century, a particularly fitting new name for a ship moving on to serve that country.

Thomas Cochrane earned the nickname "le loup des mers", the sea wolf, for his audacious frigate actions against Napoleon's navy before a stock exchange scandal ended his Royal Navy career. Chile hired him anyway, and between 1817 and 1822 he used deception as readily as gunfire to break Spanish sea power in the Pacific, most famously cutting out the Spanish frigate Esmeralda from under the guns of Callao in a night action. He later did much the same for Brazil's own war of independence. His exploits were the acknowledged inspiration for both C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey, the character played by Russell Crowe in the film Master and Commander, so in a roundabout way, the former HMS Norfolk now sails under the name of a real-life Hollywood hero.

She underwent a comprehensive modernisation between March 2018 and November 2019, receiving updated combat systems and 32 CAMM Sea Ceptor missiles, ensuring that the very first Type 23 frigate ever built remains a notably capable, modern warship to this day, sailing under a different flag but carrying forward the legacy of the class she once led.