HMS Rothesay (F107): The Frigate That Briefly Wore Pennant Number 007

Lead Ship of Her Class

HMS Rothesay was laid down at Yarrow's Scotstoun dockyard on 6 November 1956, launched on 9 December 1957 and commissioned on 23 April 1960, taking her place as the lead ship of the Rothesay-class, or Type 12M, anti-submarine frigates, an improved development of the earlier Whitby class that would go on to form a substantial part of the Cold War Royal Navy's frigate strength.

On Watch Near Cuba

In the spring and summer of 1961, Rothesay was diverted to Bermuda to remain ready to protect British interests in Cuba, a deployment that placed her close to the epicentre of Cold War tension just as the crisis surrounding the island was building toward the following year's confrontation between the superpowers.

In March 1962 she was involved in a rather more mundane mishap, accidentally colliding with the Turkish submarine TCG Gur during the NATO exercise Dawn Breeze off Gibraltar, the kind of accident that peacetime exercises occasionally, if rarely, produce. That year also saw a change of command: Captain Basil Place took over as her captain, a very different kind of submarine experience for a man who had won the Victoria Cross in 1943 piloting a midget X-craft submarine into a Norwegian fjord to lay explosive charges beneath the German battleship Tirpitz. A crewman who served under him at the time remembered him simply as a 'fair, no-nonsense man.'

What Her Captain Had Done Nineteen Years Earlier

That clause about a midget submarine and a Norwegian fjord is carrying a great deal of weight. On 22 September 1943 six X-craft, each about fifty feet long and crewed by four men, were towed across the North Sea by full-sized submarines and slipped into the fjords of northern Norway to attack the German heavy ships sheltering there. The wider operation, and what it was like to do the towing, is described in the article on HMS Sceptre (P215), who had X-10 on the end of her wire that night. Two of the six got through to the Tirpitz in Kaafjord.

Donald Cameron took X6 through the anti-submarine net by slipping into the wake of a coaster as the gate opened, with his periscope and gyro compass both failing. He ran aground on an uncharted rock, was seen when he briefly broke surface, got under the battleship anyway, laid his charges, scuttled his craft and surrendered. Basil Place took X7 in, laid his charges under the ship, and then could not get out: X7 fouled the anti-torpedo nets and was still stuck in them at twelve minutes past eight when the charges went off underneath the Tirpitz and the explosion blew the little submarine clear of the net.

Place and his surviving crew were picked up and taken aboard the ship they had just tried to sink, where they found Cameron and his men already prisoners. The damage was severe enough to put Tirpitz out of action for months and she never operated properly again. Both Place and Cameron were awarded the Victoria Cross and both spent the rest of the war in German prison camps. Place learned to fly afterwards, commanded a naval air squadron, and rose to Rear-Admiral.

So in 1962 the ship's company of a brand new anti-submarine frigate found themselves being commanded by a man who had spent the war on the other side of the problem, in the smallest submarine anybody has ever taken into action, and who had a Victoria Cross for doing it. That crewman describes him as a fair, no-nonsense man, which is exactly the sort of description you would expect from somebody who almost certainly had no idea, at the time, what his captain had done.

A Cameo as Pennant 007

Rothesay's most memorable moment for the wider public came during an extended West Indies deployment, when she was filmed for three days at Nassau in 1965 for barely thirty seconds of screen time in the James Bond picture Thunderball, a sheet of canvas bearing a large '0' pinned over the 'F1' of her pennant to fake the 007 she never actually wore, with Sean Connery and Claudine Auger visiting aboard during filming, a properly delightful piece of naval trivia for a frigate whose day job otherwise involved rather less glamorous anti-submarine patrol work.

Rescuing Refugees at Sea

Rothesay's career included moments of real humanitarian consequence too. On the night of 14 and 15 January 1966, she rescued 134 Haitian refugees attempting the dangerous crossing to the Bahamas, a rescue that speaks to the kind of unplanned, life-saving work that naval vessels are regularly called upon to perform far from any combat role.

In March 1969 she took part in Operation Sheepskin, landing troops of 2 Para from Gemini assault craft at Anguilla to help restore order during the small Caribbean island's rebellion against the government of neighbouring St Kitts, a deliberately low-key show of force meant to soften the political optics of what was, in effect, a British invasion. In the event the paratroopers waded ashore to find not gunfire but the flashbulbs of the world's press, and the operation passed off peacefully enough that 2 Para were later awarded the Wilkinson Sword of Peace for acts of humanity and kindness overseas.

The following year brought a rather less earthbound emergency. In April 1970, while serving on the Beira Patrol enforcing sanctions against Rhodesia off the coast of Mozambique, Rothesay was diverted south to stand by off Brazil as part of the contingency recovery force for the Moon mission Apollo 13, which had just suffered a near-catastrophic oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon. Her own communications gear was barely up to coordinating with Mission Control in Houston, so recovery instructions reportedly had to be relayed via Halifax, Nova Scotia and morsed on to the ship, a suitably old-fashioned way for a 1960s anti-submarine frigate to find herself, however briefly, caught up in the Space Race.

A word on why she was there at all, since a frigate off Brazil is a long way from a spacecraft. Apollo 13 lost an oxygen tank on 13 April 1970 on the way to the Moon, and for the first day or so nobody was sure how the crew were going to get home or where they would come down. The abort options included trajectories that would have put the capsule into the Atlantic rather than the Pacific, so ships were positioned in both oceans while the flight dynamics people worked it out. In the event she was not needed: the spacecraft came round the Moon and splashed down in the South Pacific on 17 April. But for about three days a Cold War anti-submarine frigate on sanctions patrol off Mozambique was part of the recovery plan for three astronauts, which is not a sentence anybody wrote in her original operational requirement.

Cod Wars and a Long Modernised Life

Rothesay undertook fishery protection patrols during the Cod Wars of 1973, screening British trawlers from Icelandic gunboats in the dispute that finally ended that September, when Britain conceded to Iceland's expanded fishing limits.

Between 1966 and 1968 she also underwent a major modernisation at Rosyth, swapping her aft 40mm Bofors gun for a Seacat missile system and, at the cost of one of her two Limbo anti-submarine mortars, gaining a hangar and flight deck for a Westland Wasp helicopter armed with homing torpedoes. The Navy dubbed the idea MATCH, short for Medium-range Anti-submarine Torpedo Carrying Helicopter, and it let Rothesay engage submarines well beyond the mortars' own range, keeping her useful for a further two decades of service.

That modernisation was not unique to her. Every ship of the class went through it between 1966 and 1972, beginning with Rothesay herself, and what it bought and why is set out in the article on HMS Rhyl (F129). Being first meant being the one everybody else's lessons were learned on, which is a distinction the lead ship of a class collects whether she wants it or not.

She attended the Queen's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead on 28 June 1977, one of the last great set-piece gatherings of the Cold War fleet, before settling back into the kind of unglamorous, worldwide rotations that made up most of a frigate's real career.

During the 1982 Falklands conflict she remained stationed in the Caribbean rather than heading south, and the following year found her much further afield still, entering harbour at Fremantle, Western Australia, on 1 November 1983 during an overseas deployment. A further 1985 refit then prepared her for a final role with the Dartmouth Training Squadron.

Eight Hundred Thousand Miles, and a Spanish Scrapyard

Rothesay was paid off on 13 March 1988 having accumulated over 800,000 miles of service across nearly three decades, an extraordinary total for any single warship.

She was sold to Spain and broken up at Santander later that year, closing out the career of a lead ship whose name gave an entire class of Cold War frigates its identity, and whose own service ranged from Cold War tension near Cuba to a truly memorable turn on the silver screen.

Eight hundred thousand miles is worth converting. It is more than thirty times round the world, or about three and a half times the distance to the Moon, accumulated ten or fifteen knots at a time by a ship that spent most of her life doing things nobody photographed. Set against that, three days off Nassau with a canvas nought pinned over her pennant number is the smallest thing she ever did and very nearly the only one anybody remembers, which she would probably have found funny.