HMS Rhyl (F129): From Evacuating Zanzibar to Standing Guard Over Ascension Island

Launched by the Prime Minister's Wife

HMS Rhyl was a Rothesay-class frigate built at Portsmouth Dockyard with machinery from English Electric of Rugby, laid down in January 1958 and launched in April 1959 by Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a remarkably high-profile send-off for a ship that would go on to see rather more excitement than most of her contemporaries.

She commissioned in October 1960 and quickly settled into the demanding rhythm of Cold War global deployment, serving across the Far East, the Mediterranean and East Africa.

The class is worth a word, because it explains a good deal about what she was for. The Rothesays were Type 12M frigates, the M standing for modified: a repeat and improved version of the Whitby-class Type 12, which had itself been designed out of the hard experience of the Atlantic in the previous war. They were fast in a seaway, quiet, and built round a single job, which was to find and kill a submarine. Nine were built, and a good many of them are here, including the name ship, HMS Rothesay (F107), and the one everybody remembers, HMS Plymouth (F126), who took the Argentine surrender of South Georgia and is still afloat.

Standing By Off Goa

Rhyl's early service included deployment to stand by off Goa during India's 1961 invasion of the Portuguese colonial enclave, one of the many flashpoints of decolonisation where a Royal Navy presence offered a watching brief on events Britain had no direct part in but every interest in monitoring closely.

Evacuating Zanzibar During Revolution

In January 1964, Rhyl found herself at the centre of a genuine crisis, responding to the Zanzibar Revolution that overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah's government and threw the island into violent upheaval. The survey ship Owen got there first, on the evening of 12 January, with Rhyl and the stores ship Hebe joining her three days later, bringing along a company of the 1st Battalion, the Staffordshire Regiment, embarked on the strength of an intelligence report warning of a "serious situation" due to break out that same day, a report that turned out to be wrong, though the troops proved useful all the same once ashore. Between them the ships completed a partial evacuation of British civilians by 17 January.

The revolution she was sent into was a serious business. On 12 January 1964 an armed force largely drawn from the island's African majority overthrew the Sultan and the newly independent government in a matter of hours, ending an Omani dynasty that had ruled Zanzibar for the better part of two centuries. What followed was a period of killings and reprisals directed mainly at the Arab and South Asian population, and estimates of the dead run from several hundred into the thousands with no serious prospect of ever being settled. The Sultan left on the royal yacht and never came back.

The survey ship that got there first has an account of her own here: HMS Owen (K640), which is the sort of ship that turns up in a crisis because she happens to be the nearest thing with a White Ensign on it. And the story did not stop when the evacuation did. On 26 April 1964, three months later, Zanzibar merged with Tanganyika, and the new country took its name from both halves: Tanzania.

She followed this almost immediately by supporting Royal Marines landings from the carrier HMS Centaur during the subsequent Tanganyikan Army mutiny, a rapid, demanding sequence of crisis response operations across East Africa within the space of a few months.

The Tanganyikan mutiny deserves more than a clause, because it was not a disturbance in a barracks, it was an entire national army going over. On the night of 19 and 20 January 1964, days after Rhyl finished at Zanzibar, the 1st Battalion of the Tanganyika Rifles mutinied at Colito Barracks outside Dar es Salaam. The grievances were pay and the fact that the officers were still overwhelmingly British nearly three years after independence. Within a day the 2nd Battalion at Tabora and a company at Nachingwea had joined them, which meant the whole of the country's armed forces was in revolt at once. The same thing happened in Uganda and in Kenya inside the same fortnight.

President Julius Nyerere, who had gone into hiding, asked Britain for help, which was a politically excruciating request for a leader three years out from colonial rule to have to make. HMS Centaur came down from Aden with the destroyer Cambrian and 45 Commando embarked under Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Stevens, and on 25 January a company went in by helicopter, assaulted Colito Barracks and had the 1st Battalion in hand very quickly indeed. The Royal Marines stayed about three months and were then relieved by Nigerian troops, which was the point: the intervention had to stop looking British as fast as possible.

Leading the First Beira Patrol

Rhyl went on to serve as Captain D of the 23rd Escort Squadron alongside HMS Lowestoft, Dainty and Defender, and took part in the very first Beira Patrol, joining Lowestoft on station within days of the blockade's opening on 1 March 1966, its search backed by aircraft flown off HMS Ark Royal sweeping the Mozambique Channel, part of the long-running Royal Navy operation to enforce oil sanctions against Rhodesia following its unilateral declaration of independence, a patrol that would occupy various Royal Navy ships for years afterward but which Rhyl had the distinction of helping establish from the outset.

It proved a leaky sort of blockade in the end: over its first five years the patrol stopped and checked forty-seven tankers bound for Beira, and waved forty-two of them straight through, a faintly absurd hit rate for an operation that tied down two frigates or destroyers at a time for the best part of a decade.

The other two ships in that first Beira sweep are here as well: HMS Lowestoft (F103), another Rothesay, who was on station with her, and HMS Ark Royal (R09), whose aircraft were doing the searching across a channel four hundred miles wide. The patrol ran on until 1975, nine years of frigates and destroyers going round in circles off Mozambique, and it became one of the longest continuous operations the Royal Navy has ever mounted.

Somewhere in this period Rhyl was rebuilt, and it changed what she was. Every ship of the class was modernised between 1966 and 1972, starting with Rothesay herself. The after superstructure came off, one of the two Limbo anti-submarine mortars came out, and the well where it had been was plated over to make a small flight deck. A hangar went up in front of that with a Seacat missile launcher and its director sitting on the roof. Into the hangar went a Westland Wasp, a spidery little helicopter carrying two homing torpedoes.

That last item is the whole point of the exercise. A Limbo mortar throws a pattern of charges about a thousand yards ahead of the ship, which is fine if the submarine is obliging enough to be there. A helicopter with homing torpedoes can be dropped on a contact twenty miles away inside a few minutes, and a submarine that knows this has to behave very differently. A frigate designed in the early 1950s came out of that refit able to fight a submarine at ten or twenty times the range she had been built for, which is a remarkable return on cutting a hole in the back of a ship. None of the earlier Whitby-class Type 12s got the treatment, and it is the main reason the Rothesays outlasted them.

Ordered South, But Never to War

When the Falklands conflict broke out in 1982, Rhyl was ordered south as part of the huge Task Force assembled for Operation Corporate, only for mechanical failure to prevent her actually reaching the South Atlantic war zone.

Instead she served as guardship at Ascension Island, the crucial staging post between Britain and the Falklands, until July 1982. It was a less dramatic but still genuinely useful role: with no proper harbour to speak of and only a single jetty, Ascension depended on ship-to-shore helicopter runs and cross-decking to keep the Task Force supplied, while Wideawake airfield became, for a few frantic months, one of the busiest runways in the world, and a guardship's job of watching over that fragile, overstretched lifeline mattered rather more than its lack of headlines might suggest.

The defect that stopped her is not recorded in any detail, and it will have been a bitter thing for a ship's company that had been told they were going to war. What she got instead was Ascension, and Ascension in 1982 was not a backwater. The island had one runway, Wideawake, and for a few months it was handling more aircraft movements than anywhere else on earth. It had no harbour worth the name and one jetty, so everything going south had to be flown or lifted from ship to ship at anchor in the open roadstead. That whole arrangement sat eight degrees south of the equator with no defences to speak of, and the possibility of an Argentine submarine or a special forces party turning up was taken entirely seriously. Somebody had to sit on it with a gun, and for three months that was Rhyl.

A Wreck Claimed by the Weather, Not the Torpedo

Hull deterioration discovered during a dry docking in April 1983 sealed Rhyl's fate, and she was paid off and earmarked to be sunk as a target during torpedo trials in the summer of 1985.

In the event, severe weather forced her intentional scuttling on 27 July 1985 before the planned trials could take place, sending her to a resting place more than 600 metres down off Land's End, close to 49°18'N, 11°18'W, a quieter end than the torpedo trials would have provided, but a fitting final act for a ship whose career had so often been shaped by circumstances rather than plan.

There is a small symmetry in the ending. Rhyl was condemned by her own hull and marked down to be shot at, and the weather took her before the torpedoes could. Her sister Lowestoft went the same way and did not get the reprieve: she was expended as a target and the boat that sank her was Conqueror, the submarine that had sunk the Belgrano. Between the pair of them, the two frigates that opened the Beira Patrol in March 1966 both finished up on the seabed at the Royal Navy's own hand, which is what usually happens to a class once the last of them is too tired to be worth a refit.