HMS Nottingham (D91): Torn Open on a Rock 370 Miles From Australia, Lifted Home on a Ship's Deck

Built at Woolston

HMS Nottingham was ordered on 1 March 1977 and built by Vosper Thorneycroft at the Woolston yard, laid down on 6 February 1978 and launched on 18 February 1980, sponsored by Lady Leach, wife of the then First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Henry Leach, a Type 42 Batch 2 destroyer. She was commissioned on 14 April 1983 under the command of Commander Nigel Essenhigh, who would himself go on to become First Sea Lord decades later.

Tragedy on an Early Cruise

HMS Nottingham's early career was marked by tragedy during her first cruise to Portugal and Gibraltar, when two sailors were lost in a drowning incident while visiting a beach in Oporto on shore leave, a genuinely sobering reminder that danger to a ship's company did not always come from combat or accident at sea.

Torn Open on Wolf Rock

HMS Nottingham's defining moment came on 7 July 2002, when she ran aground on Wolf Rock near Lord Howe Island, some 370 miles off the Australian coast, during poor weather conditions. The ship's captain was ashore at the time, with Lieutenant Commander John Lea in command when she struck. The impact tore a genuinely alarming 160-foot hole down the side of the vessel, running from bow to bridge, flooding five of her compartments and causing an estimated £26 million in damage, a near-catastrophic result for a modern destroyer and a genuinely close call for her entire crew.

Rescued by New Zealand, Carried Home by Ship

HMS Nottingham received crew relief support from the New Zealand naval vessels HMNZS Te Mana and HMNZS Endeavour over the following two to three weeks, before being towed stern-first to Newcastle, Australia. From there, in a genuinely striking piece of maritime engineering, the badly damaged destroyer was lifted bodily aboard the heavy lift vessel MV Swan on 15 October 2002 for transport all the way back to the United Kingdom, arriving at Portsmouth on 9 December that year for repairs that ultimately totalled some £39 million, considerably more than the original damage estimate.

Back at Sea Within Two Years

HMS Nottingham was refloated on 7 July 2003, precisely one year to the day after her grounding, and returned to full service in July 2004, a genuinely impressive recovery for a ship that had come so close to being lost entirely off a remote Pacific island. In August that year she took part in a commemorative meeting with the South African frigate SAS Mendi at the wreck site of the original SS Mendi, a troopship lost during the First World War with heavy loss of South African life, a quietly moving piece of shared naval remembrance.

Decommissioned After Twenty-Seven Years

HMS Nottingham entered extended readiness status by April 2008 and was formally decommissioned on 11 February 2010 after 27 years of service, sold for scrap to Leyal Ship Recycling and towed from Portsmouth on 19 October 2011 bound for Turkey, closing out the career of a destroyer whose survival of the Lord Howe Island grounding remains one of the more remarkable damage-control stories in recent Royal Navy history.