HMS Nubian (F131): Guarding an Air Race, Then Cleaning Up France's Worst Oil Spill

Built at Portsmouth

HMS Nubian was built by Portsmouth Dockyard at a cost of £4,360,000, laid down on 7 September 1959, launched on 6 September 1960 by Lady Holland-Martin and commissioned on 9 October 1962, a Tribal-class frigate displacing 2,300 tons standard and capable of 27 knots on her combined steam and gas propulsion system. She was named, as with the rest of her class, after a fighting people of the British Empire and Commonwealth, in her case the Nubians of Egypt and Sudan.

Enforcing the Rhodesian Blockade

HMS Nubian suffered minor collision damage in 1964, before joining the Beira Patrol off Mozambique in 1967 to help enforce the oil blockade against the breakaway Rhodesian regime, the long-running operation that occupied so many Royal Navy frigates through the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Across its full run from 1966 to 1971, the patrol intercepted 47 tankers approaching Beira, with all but five allowed to proceed once their cargo and destination had been established as innocent, a fairly leaky blockade by any measure, but one that nonetheless tied down a significant slice of the fleet for years.

Radar Coverage for an Air Race

HMS Nubian took on a truly unusual task in 1969, providing the escort and radar coverage for the Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race, a widely publicised event that saw competitors race across the Atlantic by any means of transport they chose, a curious but useful piece of maritime safety infrastructure for a purely civilian sporting spectacle.

The race itself, run that May under the RAF's own codename Operation Blue Nylon, produced one of British aviation's most enduring stunts: Royal Air Force pilot Tom Lecky-Thompson won the westbound leg flying a Hawker Siddeley Harrier jump jet, taking off vertically from a coal yard beside St Pancras station in central London and landing, just as vertically, on a pier beside the Hudson River in Manhattan. Nubian's own part was rather less glamorous but no less essential, providing radar coverage for the Fleet Air Arm's own entries, Phantom fighters of 892 Naval Air Squadron flying the eastbound leg, as they rendezvoused with Royal Air Force Victor tankers for mid-Atlantic refuelling.

Reinforcing Belize

HMS Nubian appeared at Portsmouth Navy Days in 1971, and in 1975 was deployed to reinforce the British garrison in Belize amid rising threats from neighbouring Guatemala, which maintained a long-standing territorial claim over the colony, a notably tense piece of gunboat diplomacy that helped ensure Belize's security in the years before its eventual independence.

That deployment had a date and a cause. In November 1975 Guatemala moved troops up to the border, and Britain, which had spent years trying to work out how to leave Belize altogether, discovered that it could not afford to be wrong about whether the threat was serious. The garrison went up from 598 men to 1,238, six Harriers of No. 1 Squadron were flown out to Ladyville and kept there for six months, and Nubian was the naval end of the same reinforcement.

There is a neat echo in that, given what she had been doing six years earlier. In 1969 she was providing radar cover for an air race won by a Harrier that took off vertically from a coal yard behind St Pancras. In 1975 the same aeroplane was being parked in a field in Central America to make a point to a neighbouring government. It made it: Guatemala threatened again in July 1977 and got the same answer. Belize became independent in 1981 and British forces stayed on anyway, which they still do.

Cleaning Up the Amoco Cadiz

HMS Nubian took part in the Spithead Fleet Review marking Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee in 1977, serving with the 5th Frigate Squadron, and in 1978 assisted with the cleanup following the grounding of the supertanker Amoco Cadiz off Brittany, one of the largest oil spills in history at the time, an unglamorous but environmentally vital piece of disaster response work for a frigate more accustomed to conventional naval duties.

The scale of the disaster explains why. Amoco Cadiz lost her steering in heavy seas and ran hard onto the Portsall Rocks on 16 March 1978, eventually breaking up and releasing her entire cargo, some 223,000 tonnes of crude oil along with 4,000 tonnes of bunker fuel, into the Channel, still one of the largest single oil spills in history. The response matched the scale of the problem: within days, the Under-Secretary of State for Trade, Clinton Davis, told the House of Commons that "the Royal Navy will participate to the full," and Nubian was one of the ships that made good on that promise.

The cleanup was the short part. Amoco Cadiz put oil along about a hundred and eighty miles of the Brittany coast, in the middle of one of the most important fishing and tourist regions in France, and the physical work of dealing with it ran for more than six months. What followed ran for rather longer.

Because Amoco was an American company, the French state, the departments of Cotes du Nord and Finistere, dozens of communes and a very long list of hoteliers, fishermen and businesses took the case to court in Chicago. France claimed 1.9 billion francs. The judgments were not issued until July 1990, and Amoco finally settled at around two hundred million dollars in 1992, fourteen years after the ship went onto the rocks. It is one of the longest-running pieces of environmental litigation of the twentieth century, and a large part of the reason that the modern rules on tanker construction, liability and compensation look the way they do.

Cannibalised for Indonesia, Then Sunk as a Target

HMS Nubian entered reserve and the Standby Squadron in 1979, was placed on the disposal list in 1981, and subsequently served as a training ship, with many of her components cannibalised to help support three of her sister Tribal-class frigates, HMS Tartar, HMS Zulu and HMS Gurkha, sold on to Indonesia in 1984 and refitted by Vosper Thornycroft before entering Indonesian Navy service as KRI Hasanuddin, KRI Martha Kristina Tiyahahu and KRI Wilhelmus Zakarias Yohannes respectively.

She was finally sunk as a target on 27 May 1987, closing out the career of a frigate whose varied service had taken in oil blockades, air races, colonial defence and environmental disaster response in equal measure.