HMS Russell (F97): The Frigate That Threatened to Sink an Icelandic Gunboat

A Specialist Anti-Submarine Frigate

HMS Russell, named after Admiral Edward Russell, 1st Earl of Orford, who commanded the Anglo-Dutch fleet to victory over the French at the Battle of Barfleur in 1692, was laid down by Swan Hunter on the Tyne on 11 November 1953, launched on 10 December 1954 and commissioned on 7 February 1957, a Blackwood-class Type 14 frigate, a class of fast, purpose-built anti-submarine vessels designed to counter the growing Soviet submarine threat of the early Cold War.

The Type 14s were deliberately built as a cheaper, simpler complement to the pricier Type 12 frigates, yet the trade-off wasn't as one-sided as it sounds. With crews who did little else but train for anti-submarine work, Russell and her eleven sisters were often reckoned among the Royal Navy's most effective submarine hunters right through into the mid-1960s, budget ship or not.

It is worth being specific about how cheap, because it changes how you read what happened off Iceland. A Type 14 had one shaft and one propeller, driven by half the machinery of a Type 12, which made her fast enough at about twenty-seven knots and gave her no redundancy whatever: lose the engine and you have a large motionless target. She carried two Limbo anti-submarine mortars, which were excellent, and beyond that a couple of 40mm Bofors guns and effectively nothing else. No main armament. No missiles. No meaningful ability to fight another warship on the surface at all. She was, quite deliberately, the least ship that could still find and kill a submarine, and everything not required for that had been left out.

Nine of her eleven sisters have accounts here, including the one who gave the class its name, HMS Blackwood (F78), and several who ended up doing the same fishery work: HMS Palliser (F94), HMS Duncan (F80) and HMS Malcolm (F88), who spent twenty years at it.

She joined the Second Training Squadron at Portland Harbour on commissioning, work that fitted her original design purpose closely, before her career took a rather more confrontational turn than most of her sister ships would experience.

Into the Fishery Protection Squadron

From 1958 to 1963, Russell served with the Fishery Protection Squadron, a role that placed her directly in the middle of the first Cod War, the escalating dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights in the waters around Iceland that repeatedly brought Royal Navy frigates into direct, tense confrontation with Icelandic coastguard vessels defending an expanded exclusion zone.

A Collision in Defence of a British Trawler

On 4 September 1960, Russell intervened when the Icelandic patrol vessel AEgir attempted to seize a British trawler, an intervention that resulted in a collision between the two ships, one of numerous close and occasionally dangerous encounters that characterised the Cod War's peculiar brand of low-intensity maritime confrontation between two NATO allies. Aegir had already made a habit of ramming trawlers that refused to stop, and would go on to try the same tactic against Russell herself on more than one later occasion, backing off only when threatened with retaliation.

Standing Between a Trawler and a Gunboat

Russell's most striking moment came on 12 November 1960. The Icelandic gunboat Thor had already fired two blank shots and one live round across Hackness's bow trying to force the trawler to stop when Russell arrived, and her captain ordered Thor's own commanding officer, Eirikur Kristofersson, a 68-year-old veteran with 53 years at sea, to leave the trawler alone since she was fishing outside the four-mile limit Britain itself recognised. Kristofersson refused outright and ordered his gun crew to close in regardless, at which point Russell threatened to sink Thor if she fired so much as a single shot more. Reinforcements arrived soon after and the confrontation ended without a shot fired, a truly remarkable escalation for what remained, officially, a fisheries dispute rather than a shooting war.

The absurdity of it was not lost on the people involved, and one exchange from the first Cod War has survived because somebody wrote it down. A British commodore, Anderson, finding himself in yet another stand-off with Kristofersson, gave up on procedure and simply called across to him: Kris, Kris, this is bloody daft, I am coming over to talk to you. That is two NATO navies, allied against the same enemy, manoeuvring guns at each other over haddock, and both sides knew it perfectly well. It did not stop either of them doing it.

And the arithmetic of Russell's threat is worth appreciating. Thor was an armed gunboat. Russell had two 40mm Bofors and a pair of mortars designed to throw depth charges at things underneath her. Threatening to sink another ship with that is less a statement of capability than a statement of intent, delivered by a captain who was almost certainly aware that the Admiralty would have had a great deal to say about it afterwards had anybody actually opened fire.

The episode captures just how seriously the Royal Navy took its duty to protect British fishing vessels during the Cod Wars, even at the risk of a direct clash with the coastguard of a fellow NATO member.

Britain Won the Confrontations and Lost the Argument

What usually goes unsaid is how it came out, and it is the most interesting part. Iceland had extended her fishery limit from four miles to twelve on 1 September 1958. Britain refused to recognise it and sent the Navy, and for two and a half years frigates like Russell stood between British trawlers and Icelandic gunboats and did it well. Then, in early 1961, Britain agreed to the twelve-mile limit. The Royal Navy had not lost a single confrontation and the country had lost the dispute outright.

It happened twice more. Iceland went to fifty miles in 1972 and two hundred in 1975; Britain contested both and conceded both. The reason had nothing to do with seamanship. Iceland had one industry and one bargaining chip, and the chip was that she sat astride the gap the Soviet Northern Fleet had to pass through to reach the Atlantic, with an American air base at Keflavik on her soil, and she was entirely prepared to break off diplomatic relations and raise the question of leaving NATO. Set against that, a British fishing fleet was a manageable loss for everybody except the men in it, and the Humber ports have never really recovered.

Several of the later Cod War ships are here, and they are a rougher read than Russell's: HMS Falmouth (F113), HMS Andromeda (F57), HMS Gurkha (F122) and HMS Lincoln (F99), who went north with lengths of railway line welded along her side because ramming had become normal.

A Quieter Later Career

Following a refit at Rosyth, Russell joined the 20th Frigate Squadron at Londonderry Port, returning to more conventional anti-submarine training duties, and she appeared at Portsmouth Navy Days in 1966, a public-facing role rather different from her tense encounters off Iceland just a few years earlier. She was still very much in active service the best part of a decade after her Cod War days, photographed leaving Portsmouth on 26 June 1973.

Russell was eventually broken up in 1985, considerably outlasting the fisheries dispute that had briefly made her famous and closing out a career that had run from Cold War submarine hunting to a stand-off with an Icelandic gunboat and finally to the quieter routine of training duties back home.

A Small Frigate in a Very Real Dispute

HMS Russell's career is a useful reminder that the Cold War Royal Navy's confrontations were not confined to distant hunts for Soviet submarines. Her willingness to stand between an Icelandic gunboat and a British trawler, and to say so plainly, gives her a remarkably memorable place in the story of a dispute that, while rarely violent, tested the nerve of the ships and crews caught in the middle of it.

One last thing about her. Russell was a specialist submarine hunter built for one job, and the thing she is remembered for is a job nobody designed her for: standing between a fishing boat and a gunboat and refusing to move. She was never asked to hunt a Soviet submarine in anger. She was asked to protect Hull and Grimsby trawlermen from an ally, and she did it with two Bofors guns and a good deal of front. There are worse ways for a cheap ship to earn her place.