HMS Palliser (F94): The Frigate That Stood Between a Trawler and a Gunboat

Built to Hunt, Not to Fight

HMS Palliser was one of the Royal Navy's Blackwood-class frigates, a design conceived in the early 1950s with a single, narrow purpose: finding and killing submarines as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

Where a full-sized general-purpose frigate carried guns for surface actions and air defence, the Blackwoods, sometimes called Type 14s or, less flatteringly, second-rate frigates, were stripped down to little more than a hull, an engine and a formidable anti-submarine outfit.

At 310 feet long and displacing under 1,500 tons, they were compact, fast for their size at 27 knots, and built around a pair of Limbo anti-submarine mortars and a sonar suite good enough to have been borrowed from the larger Whitby-class frigates. Guns were almost an afterthought: three 40mm Bofors was the sum total of Palliser's ability to shoot back at anything on the surface.

She was laid down at Alexander Stephen and Sons' yard at Linthouse on the Clyde on 15 March 1955, launched on 10 May 1956, and finally completed in December 1957, the gap between launch and completion reflecting how much specialist sonar and weapons fitting-out a submarine hunter of her era required.

Like several of her sister ships, she carried the name of a distinguished naval officer from an earlier age, in her case very probably Admiral Sir Hugh Palliser, the eighteenth-century officer perhaps best remembered today as the patron who spotted James Cook's talent and helped set him on the road to the Pacific voyages that made him famous. As Comptroller of the Navy, Palliser personally picked the collier that became HMS Endeavour and championed the publication of Cook's Newfoundland charts to the Admiralty; Cook returned the compliment by naming Cape Palliser and the Palliser Isles after him and giving his own third son the name Hugh.

There is a second Palliser story, and it is a good deal less comfortable than the one about Cook. In July 1778 he commanded the rear division of Admiral Keppel's Channel Fleet at the battle of Ushant, an inconclusive affair against the French. Keppel signalled to wear and renew the action; Palliser's division did not conform, and the French went home. Three months of rumour and pamphleteering later, Palliser did something almost unheard of: he laid formal charges against his own commander-in-chief.

Keppel was court-martialled at Portsmouth in January 1779 and acquitted after twenty-seven days, the court finding that the charges had been brought with malicious intent and were entirely unfounded. London celebrated by rioting. The Admiralty gates were torn down, official windows were broken, Palliser's house in Pall Mall was gutted and his effigy was burned in the street. He demanded a court martial of his own, got one and was acquitted too, and then had to resign his offices and his seat in Parliament anyway.

None of it was really about seamanship. Keppel was a Whig and Palliser a Tory, the quarrel was fought out in Parliament and the press as much as at Portsmouth, and it split the officer corps along party lines for years afterwards. Which makes the Blackwood class's naming committee either admirably even-handed or very quietly mischievous, because of the twelve ships in the class one was called Palliser and another was called HMS Keppel (F85), and the two of them were in commission at the same time.

Guarding the Grimsby Trawlers

Palliser's working life turned out to have very little to do with submarines and a great deal to do with fish. On commissioning she joined the Fishery Protection Squadron, where she remained until April 1967, a full decade spent shepherding British trawlers around contested and often hostile waters rather than stalking anything beneath them.

It was unglamorous work by the standards of a Cold War navy obsessed with the Soviet submarine threat, but it mattered enormously to the fishing communities of Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood, whose livelihoods depended on it.

The job could turn sharp very quickly. On 10 July 1960, during the first of what would become known as the Cod Wars, the Icelandic coastguard gunboat Odinn opened fire on the British trawler Grimsby Town, putting shots into her funnel in an attempt to force her to stop and be arrested for fishing inside Iceland's newly extended limits.

Palliser intervened, placing herself between the trawler and the Icelandic vessel and seeing Grimsby Town safely away, precisely the kind of unscripted, nerve-testing confrontation that fishery protection duty could produce with no warning at all.

It was gunboat diplomacy in its most literal form, played out not between great powers but between a small frigate, a smaller gunboat, and a trawler simply trying to make a living.

Incidents like this one were what the Cod Wars, three separate disputes fought out between Britain and Iceland between 1958 and 1976 over the extent of Icelandic fishing limits, actually looked like in practice: not pitched battles, but a long, tense sequence of close-quarters shadowing, net-cutting, the odd deliberate collision, and the occasional warning shot, all conducted between friendly NATO allies who had rather more reason to cooperate than to fight.

Not every argument on the fishing grounds put Palliser squarely on the trawlermen's side. In July 1963 the House of Commons debated an incident between Palliser and the steam trawler Milwood after the Labour MP Charles Loughlin accused her captain of an error of judgment and pressed for a formal inquiry. The Civil Lord of the Admiralty, John Hay, refused him flat: "No, Sir." Pushed further, Hay maintained the captain's handling of the encounter would have prevented serious injury or worse rather than caused it, a very British way of closing down an argument, not with a court martial, but with two words across the despatch box.

Palliser's presence on the fishing grounds throughout the late 1950s and 1960s put her at the sharp end of that low-level confrontation more often than most of her sister ships, whose careers tended to be spent on the rather less newsworthy business of exercising against imaginary Soviet submarines in home waters.

A Second Commission, and a Quiet Decline

After a decade on fishery duties Palliser eventually paid off, only to be recommissioned on 22 January 1971 and assigned to the 2nd Frigate Squadron based at Portland, a return to more conventional frigate duties in home waters as the Royal Navy's anti-submarine forces continued to train and exercise against the ever-present backdrop of the Cold War. This second commission proved to be her last.

She paid off for good in May 1973 and was laid up pending disposal, one of a generation of increasingly dated Type 14s being quietly retired as newer, more capable frigate classes entered service. She then sat largely idle at Portsmouth for the best part of a decade, still recognisably every inch a frigate, but going nowhere and doing nothing while the Admiralty worked out what, if anything, to do with her.

The Scrapyard Voyage That Refused to Go Smoothly

If Palliser's active career had been steady and dutiful rather than dramatic, her final voyage made up for it in style. Sold for breaking to S. Dean and Sons of Briton Ferry, she was taken under tow from Portsmouth in 1983 for what should have been a routine, faintly melancholy final journey to South Wales.

Instead, the passage turned into something of a farce. Fog delayed the start of the tow, the towing tug Alnwick then collided with her, forcing both vessels into Plymouth for repairs before they had even properly got under way, and further fog off the Welsh coast later caused the tow to miss its tide in Swansea Bay, adding another week's delay before she finally ran aground near Neath on the last approach to the breaker's yard.

It took rather longer than anyone had planned, but on 27 March 1983 HMS Palliser was at last broken up, bringing to a close a career that, ironically, saw her come closer to disaster on her way to be scrapped than she ever did on active service.

A Frigate Remembered for the Right Reasons

HMS Palliser never sank a submarine, and by the look of her sonar-heavy, gun-light design she was never really expected to have to. What she did do was stand up, more than once, for the ordinary trawlermen the Royal Navy was there to protect, at a time when a small warship's willingness to place itself between a British fishing boat and an Icelandic gunboat's gunsights could make all the difference.

It is a quieter kind of naval heroism than a battle honour, but no less real for it, and it is arguably the best return anyone could have asked for from a frigate that, on paper, was built to do something else entirely.