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

The Build: 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. She was also the sixth Royal Navy ship to carry the name Nottingham.

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 properly 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, Commander Richard Farrington, was ashore at the time, having just finished dinner with the island's marine services manager, thanking him for his help earlier that evening in getting a seriously ill crewman airlifted ashore. Lieutenant Commander John Lea, the executive officer, was in command when she struck at around 10.03pm, doing 12 knots on a single gas turbine. Wolf Rock was well charted, but a report dating back to 1990 had suggested its true position lay slightly further northwest than shown, a decade-old discrepancy that never quite made it into the passage plan.

The impact tore a remarkably 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 truly close call for her entire crew.

Among the flooded spaces were the main engine room, the computer room and the magazine for her Sea Dart missiles, along with several living spaces, and by one crew member's own account the ship came within six minutes of sinking at the height of the crisis. Her Standing Sea Emergency Party fought the flooding compartment by compartment, shoring hatches and running salvage eductor pumps against the water pouring into the engine room, while Royal Australian Navy divers later welded steel patches over the worst of the underwater damage to make her fit for the long tow ahead.

Every one of the 259 people aboard survived, and the ship's company's damage control and evacuation efforts were recognised with a Queen's Commendation for Bravery, a fitting tribute to a crew who had, by any reasonable measure, saved their own ship.

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.

She was later moved on to Sydney to be de-ammunitioned before, in a striking piece of maritime engineering, the badly damaged destroyer was lifted bodily aboard the Dutch 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, her bow damage plainly visible to onlookers as she was carried stern-first into the harbour, 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.

Four Officers, One Court Martial

That September, four of her officers faced a court martial over the grounding. Commander Farrington was reprimanded after pleading guilty to failing to ensure a sufficient navigational plan was in place before delegating command; Lieutenant Commander Lea and the officer of the watch, Lieutenant James Denney, both pleaded guilty to negligence and were dismissed from their ships; and the ship's navigator, Lieutenant Andrew Ingham, received a severe reprimand on the same charge. It was, by any measure, a heavy price for a single night's misjudgement, however costly that misjudgement had proven.

She returned to full service in July 2004, an 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.

The Mendi deserves considerably more than a clause, because in South Africa she is not a footnote to anything. On 21 February 1917 she was carrying about eight hundred men of the South African Native Labour Corps to France when, in thick pre-dawn fog some twelve miles south of St Catherine's Point on the Isle of Wight, the much larger mail steamer SS Darro came out of the murk at full speed and cut into her. Mendi went down in roughly twenty-five minutes. Six hundred and forty-six men died, the great majority of them black South Africans who had volunteered to serve a country that would not let them carry a rifle.

What is remembered is what happened on the deck while she sank. The account that has come down is of the chaplain, the Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, calling the men together and telling them to be quiet and calm, that what was happening now was what they had come for, and that they were drilling the death drill; that he was a Zulu and they were his brothers, Xhosas, Swazis, Pondos, Basotho and the rest, and that they would die like warriors. The men are said to have stamped it out together on the tilting deck.

Most of them have no grave but the sea. Their names are on the Hollybrook Memorial at Southampton, a few miles from the Woolston slipway Nottingham herself was launched from, which makes the meeting over the wreck in 2004 rather less of a coincidence than it appears. A destroyer built on one side of Southampton Water went out to stand over a ship whose dead are commemorated on the other.

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.