HMS Phoebe (F42): The Frigate That Became a Television Star

A Leander for a Changing Navy

HMS Phoebe was a Leander-class frigate built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse on the Clyde, laid down on 25 July 1963, launched in December 1964, and commissioned on 15 May 1966.

She joined the fleet at a moment when the Royal Navy was still adjusting to a shrinking empire and a changing set of responsibilities, and over the next twenty-five years she would end up involved in an unusually wide range of them, from oil embargoes to a space mission to a television drama.

She took her name from a cruiser still in living memory: the previous HMS Phoebe (43) had been torpedoed twice, once off Tobruk and once off West Africa, and had only gone to the breakers ten years before this one was laid down. The frigate's career would be a great deal less violent and a good deal stranger.

Aden, Rhodesia and a Splashing Astronaut

Phoebe's early career read like a tour of Britain's retreat from empire and its Cold War-era commitments. In 1967 she assisted with the British withdrawal from Aden, one of the last and messiest of the decolonisation exits.

In 1970 she spent ten months on deployment that included the Beira Patrol, the long-running Royal Navy operation to enforce the oil embargo against Ian Smith's breakaway Rhodesian government by intercepting tankers bound for the port of Beira in Mozambique, a slow, unglamorous blockade duty that nonetheless mattered enormously to British foreign policy at the time.

That same deployment brought a rather more unexpected task: in April 1970 she joined the secondary recovery task force in the Indian Ocean standing by for the splashdown of Apollo 13, the American mission that famously never got to land on the Moon after an oxygen tank explosion crippled the spacecraft en route.

It is not every frigate that can claim a supporting role, however minor, in one of the most famous survival stories of the Space Age.

It is worth being precise about the minor part, because it explains why a British frigate was sitting in the Indian Ocean at all. Apollo 13 was always meant to come down in the Pacific, and she did, on 17 April 1970, to be picked up by the USS Iwo Jima. But a spacecraft coming home on a damaged trajectory can arrive almost anywhere on a band round the earth, and the Americans therefore had contingency recovery forces standing by in oceans the capsule would never see if things went normally. Phoebe was insurance against a version of the story in which everything went even more wrong than it did.

Guard Ship, Cod War Veteran, Television Star

The 1970s kept Phoebe busy closer to more conventional naval business. In 1971 she served as guard ship during talks between Prime Minister Edward Heath and President Richard Nixon, picked up minor damage in a collision with HMS Berwick at Portsmouth, and deployed to the West Indies.

In 1973 she took part in the Second Cod War, the latest round of the long-running fishing dispute with Iceland that kept so many Royal Navy frigates busy in unglamorous but tense confrontations through the decade.

That same period brought Phoebe her most unusual claim to fame: between 1973 and 1977 she featured in the BBC television drama series Warship as the fictional HMS Hero, filmed with the full cooperation of the real Royal Navy, making Phoebe, for a few years at least, a familiar face to British television audiences who had never set foot near a warship in their lives.

Phoebe was not the only actor playing Hero, however. Six sister Leanders, HMS Danae, Dido, Diomede, Hermione, Juno and Jupiter, all took turns standing in for her, and every one of them was repainted with Phoebe's own pennant number, F42, so that no viewer would ever spot the join. When the production travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore for location filming in 1976, even the Royal Australian Navy got in on the act, with the destroyer escort HMAS Derwent pressed into service as Hero for the occasion, alongside sequences shot around Gibraltar closer to home.

The series had a secret weapon behind the scenes as well as six frigates in front of the camera. Warship's co-creator was a serving Royal Naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Ian Mackintosh, seconded to the BBC as writer and technical adviser, which is why the scripts sound like a job rather than an idea of one. He went on to create The Sandbaggers and then to disappear over the Gulf of Alaska in a light aircraft in 1979, leaving no wreckage and no bodies. His story is told properly in the article on HMS Danae (F47), one of the sisters who took a turn as Hero.

Missiles, Helicopters and the Falklands

Between 1974 and 1977 Phoebe underwent a substantial modernisation, losing her forward 4.5-inch gun turret in favour of Exocet anti-ship missiles, part of a fleet-wide effort to keep the ageing Leander design relevant against increasingly capable adversaries.

She was one of two frigates sent south with a task force to the Falkland Islands over the winter of 1977 and 1978, years before the islands became a household name for very different reasons, and that same period saw her become the first Leander-class frigate to operate the Westland Lynx attack helicopter, a significant boost to any frigate's anti-submarine and anti-ship capability.

Operation Journeyman: The Falklands Task Force Nobody Was Told About

That 1977 deployment had a name, and it is worth using. In 1976 Argentina had put about fifty men, described as scientists, ashore on Southern Thule in the South Sandwich Islands and built them a base. By the autumn of 1977 the Foreign Office had persuaded itself that something larger was coming, and in November James Callaghan ordered a task force south.

It was led by the nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought (S101), with Phoebe and HMS Alacrity (F174) as the surface escort and the auxiliaries Resource and Olwen in support, and an exclusion zone was drawn round the islands. Only the officers were told the rules of engagement, which are worth quoting because they capture the whole posture of the thing: commanding officers were to respond to any aggression with tactful firmness and to show a determination to meet any escalation, though not to exceed what the other side had already done, with all use of force governed by the principle of using only the minimum necessary.

The point of it was to be known about by exactly one audience. The government wanted Buenos Aires to understand that a nuclear submarine was in the South Atlantic, and wanted the British public and Parliament to understand nothing at all, so the operation was run in total secrecy and the files were not released until 2005. Whether the Argentine junta ever picked up the signal is still argued about. What is not in dispute is that in 1982 nobody sent anything south until after the invasion had already happened, and that the ships and the reasoning in 1977 were very nearly the ones used five years later, only in time.

She also joined NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic and undertook Caribbean patrol duties, keeping up a punishing pace of deployment through the decade's end.

Back to the South Atlantic, and a Different Kind of Rescue

In February 1981 Phoebe was refitted with towed array sonar, improving her anti-submarine detection considerably, and in September 1982 she returned to the South Atlantic in the aftermath of the Falklands War, helping maintain the British military presence the conflict had made necessary.

Her final major moment of note came in 1988, when she took part in the rescue operations following the Piper Alpha disaster, the catastrophic explosion and fire aboard a North Sea oil platform that killed 167 men and remains one of the worst offshore disasters in history.

It was a grim, difficult task and a world away from television cameras or Cold War patrols, but exactly the kind of emergency response a frigate on station could be called upon to provide at a moment's notice.

The NATO detachment mentioned in the Commons the following day was the force Phoebe was serving with. The Secretary of State told the House that 229 men had been on the platform and that 65 had survived, with Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and coastguard helicopters and surface vessels in the area, including that NATO detachment, committed to the search. The final toll of 167 includes two men from a fast rescue craft that went in close to the burning platform and did not come back. Piper Alpha remains the deadliest offshore oil disaster there has ever been, and a frigate that had spent the 1970s pretending to be a fictional ship for the BBC spent one night in 1988 looking for real men in a burning sea.

A Career That Rarely Stayed Quiet

HMS Phoebe was decommissioned in 1991 and sold for scrap the following year, bringing to a close a career that had, almost uniquely among her sister ships, brushed up against nearly every major thread of British and even international history across a quarter of a century: decolonisation, the Cod Wars, the Falklands, the space race, and finally one of the defining industrial disasters of the era.

Few Leanders can claim to have done quite so much, or to have been watched doing it by a television audience along the way.