HMS Salisbury (F32): The First Royal Navy Warship on Lake Erie Since 1812

Diesel Power for a Distinctive Frigate

HMS Salisbury was laid down at Devonport Dockyard in January 1952, launched in June 1953 and completed in February 1957, the lead ship of the Salisbury class and a Type 61 aircraft direction frigate, built to carry the advanced radar equipment needed to guide carrier and shore-based aircraft.

She shared a common hull design with the Leopard-class frigates but stood apart in her propulsion, powered by eight Admiralty Standard Range diesel engines driving two shafts for a combined 14,400 shaft horsepower, giving her a top speed of 24 knots without relying on the steam machinery more typical of her contemporaries.

The diesels were not an affectation. They came out of a wartime idea for one cheap common hull that could be finished either as an anti-aircraft ship or as an aircraft direction ship, and when the Admiralty settled the machinery question in the late 1940s it did so for two thoroughly unglamorous reasons. Diesels burned less fuel, which mattered enormously on distant stations where the nearest tanker might be a week away, and they needed far fewer highly trained specialists to run than a steam plant did, which mattered even more to a post-war navy desperately short of money and of engine room artificers alike. The result gave Salisbury roughly 7,500 nautical miles at 16 knots, comfortably the longest legs of any British frigate of her generation, bought at the price of a top speed that would have embarrassed a destroyer.

What paid for the radar was a gun turret. The Leopards carried two twin 4.5-inch mountings; Salisbury carried one, forward, and gave up the after turret altogether to make room for the aircraft direction offices, the plotting rooms and the aerials that were the entire point of her. Four ships were completed out of seven planned, the other three falling away in the defence economies of the later 1950s, and because every one of the four took the name of a cathedral city the class picked up an unofficial second title that stuck: the Cathedrals. Her sisters were HMS Chichester (F59), HMS Llandaff (F61) and HMS Lincoln (F99), and the class as a whole is set out in the Salisbury class guide.

Airlifts to Jordan

Salisbury's early service included a role in Operation Fortitude in July 1958, part of the British response after the monarchy in neighbouring Iraq was overthrown on 14 July that year and a nervous King Hussein of Jordan asked London for support. The carrier HMS Eagle, freshly on station off Cyprus, flew some 500 sorties over five days guarding the air corridor down to Amman, while Salisbury formed part of the naval element supporting the operation, a reminder of just how frequently Cold War-era frigates found themselves well beyond conventional naval warfare.

A Historic First on the Great Lakes

In 1959, Salisbury achieved a notably unusual historical distinction, becoming the first Royal Navy warship to sail on Lake Erie since the War of 1812, a striking symbol of just how far Anglo-American relations had travelled in the century and a half since British and American warships had fought each other on those very waters.

The visit took her into the port of Cleveland, Ohio, a considerably more welcoming reception than the last time a British warship had shown up on Lake Erie uninvited, and a small diplomatic curiosity that says rather a lot about how completely the old Anglo-American rivalry had been laid to rest by the late 1950s.

The uninvited visit in question was on 10 September 1813 and it did not go well. Robert Heriot Barclay took six vessels out against Oliver Hazard Perry's nine off Put-in-Bay: the flagship Detroit of nineteen guns, Queen Charlotte of seventeen, Lady Prevost of thirteen, Hunter of ten, and two small craft mounting four guns between them. Every one of them was taken. It was the first occasion in the Royal Navy's history on which an entire squadron, however modest, had been made to strike together, and Perry reported it in a line that American schoolchildren still learn by heart: we have met the enemy and they are ours. Losing the lake cost Britain the supply route to Detroit, and with it the whole western campaign.

Getting a frigate onto Lake Erie in 1959 was itself brand new. The St Lawrence Seaway had opened to deep-draught shipping only that spring, a chain of locks that at last let ocean-going ships climb from tidewater to a lake surface some 570 feet above it, and the locks will take a vessel of 740 feet by 78. Salisbury, 340 feet long and 40 in the beam, went up in considerable comfort. The Queen and President Eisenhower opened the Seaway formally that June and travelled it aboard HMY Britannia, which carried on as far as Chicago. Salisbury turned off for Cleveland and collected a distinction nobody had been in a position to claim for a century and a half.

A New Mast for a Bigger Radar

In August 1961 Salisbury went into Devonport and did not come out again until October 1962, and what she got there was the thing she had been built around, only larger. The Type 960 aerial came down and a Type 965 long-range air search set went up in its place, carried aft on a mack, a combined mast and funnel casing, plated in to take the weight of a four-ton antenna. The Type 293 target indication radar moved forward onto a new foremast, and her electronic support equipment was improved at the same time. For a ship whose sole reason for existing was to see an air attack coming before the fleet she was screening did, this was less a refit than a new pair of eyes, and it gave her the tall, top-heavy, faintly agricultural profile she wore for the rest of her life.

Ferrying Gurkhas Through Bornean Rivers

By 1963, Salisbury was engaged in rather more dangerous work, taking part in operations during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation over Borneo, ferrying Gurkha troops and patrolling rivers in a theatre that demanded close, careful cooperation between naval and land forces in truly difficult jungle terrain.

She suffered a collision with HMS Diamond in June 1964, the two ships steaming in company off the Nab Tower on the approaches to Spithead when Diamond was ordered to overtake at around 26 knots to take her place astern of the squadron leader. As both frigates crossed a patch of shallower water, the pressure and suction waves running along their hulls interacted in a way nobody had accounted for, drawing the two ships together slowly but quite unstoppably despite their correct stationing distance. Salisbury came away with a gash some 25 to 30 feet long above the waterline; her commanding officer was court-martialled and acquitted, though the affair was serious enough to prompt a written question in the House of Commons the following year.

In 1967, Salisbury deployed to the West Indies during civil unrest in Anguilla, ordered to ferry police reinforcements across from St Kitts. When the police in question failed to turn up, rather than sail away empty-handed she landed her own sailors as an improvised internal security party to help restore order, part of the same broader island crisis that would prompt Britain's rather more theatrical parachute-and-Royal-Marines landing two years later.

Finishing Off What a Nuclear Submarine Could Not

In the third week of June 1967 the German chemical tanker Essberger Chemist broke in half south of the Azores. The floating section declined to do the decent thing and sink, drifting across the shipping lanes with something like 600 tons of acetone and alcohol still aboard, and somebody in Whitehall decided the tidiest answer was a torpedo. The job went first to HMS Dreadnought (S101), Britain's first nuclear submarine, who was sitting in dock at Gibraltar with her reactor cold and got herself to sea inside twelve hours, then ran a thousand miles at speed to reach the wreck on 24 June. She dived, closed to a mile and fired a full salvo of four. One missed. Three detonated. The wreck stayed where it was.

Which is where Salisbury came in. Invited on 25 June to finish what the atomic age had started, she opened up with her single twin 4.5-inch mounting and shelled the hulk methodically until the cargo caught, at which point the whole thing went up in the column of black smoke that survives in the newsreel footage. There is a certain poetry to it. The most advanced warship the Royal Navy had ever built could not put down half a tanker, and the ship that could was a ten-year-old diesel frigate with one gun turret, a very large radar and a good deal of patience. It was very nearly her last act before a refit that would keep her out of the fleet for two and a half years.

Sea Cat, and One Last Look at the Far East

That refit ran from July 1967 to February 1970, thirty-one months in Devonport hands, and it cost her the twin 40mm Bofors aft. In its place went a Sea Cat launcher, the Royal Navy's first shipborne short-range guided missile, optically aimed, never much loved, and still a great deal more use against a jet than the STAAG mounting it replaced had ever been. The STAAG was a stabilised, radar-laid Bofors of legendary complexity and equally legendary unreliability, and few ships mourned it. Only Salisbury and Lincoln of the four Cathedrals got Sea Cat at all; Chichester and Llandaff made do with plain Bofors mounts.

She rejoined the Western Fleet in February 1970 and was heading east again by October, serving with the 1st Far East Destroyer Squadron until August 1971. That was very nearly the end of an era. The Far East Fleet was wound up that same year as Britain withdrew from East of Suez, so Salisbury was among the last aircraft direction frigates to do the work in the waters the type had been drawn up for. Home again, she spent the following decade in the 7th Frigate Squadron and then the 1st, with another long Devonport refit from 1973 sitting in the middle of it.

Between more conventional commitments, Salisbury also did her stint on the Beira Patrol, the Royal Navy's long and largely thankless blockade of the Mozambique Channel intended to choke off oil deliveries reaching landlocked Rhodesia by sea after its unilateral declaration of independence. It was one of the odder jobs handed to the Cold War navy, years of monotonous, fuel-hungry station-keeping with little glory and even less to show for it, since oil kept reaching Rhodesia by other routes regardless. Fittingly, it was Salisbury who was still on station when the whole operation was finally wound up on 25 June 1975, the same day Mozambique itself became independent and the patrol's entire reason for existing quietly evaporated.

Twice Struck During the Cod Wars

Salisbury's later career brought her into the thick of the Cod Wars, the long-running fishing rights dispute with Iceland, under the command of Hugo White, a former submariner whose first surface command spent its days bumping into Icelandic gunboats and whose later career took in commanding the frigate HMS Avenger during the Falklands War, promotion to Admiral, and finally the governorship of Gibraltar.

During patrols in 1976, she was slightly damaged in a collision with the Icelandic gunboat Týr on 1 April, and then involved in two separate collisions with the gunboat Ægir on 20 May that same year, a punishing few weeks that captures just how physically confrontational these fisheries patrols had become by the mid-1970s.

She was in good company. The Third Cod War began when Iceland pushed her fishery limit out to 200 miles in the autumn of 1975 and Britain sent frigates to shield the trawlers still working inside it, and until an agreement was reached the following June the two navies fought a campaign conducted almost entirely by steel on steel, decided by warp cutters and helm orders rather than guns. Týr caught HMS Tartar (F133) on the very same day she caught Salisbury. HMS Falmouth (F113) hit Týr at 22 knots and came close to rolling her over. HMS Diomede (F16) managed four collisions and HMS Andromeda (F57) three. Salisbury's own sister Lincoln had gone through the previous round with lengths of railway track welded along her sides, which tells you all you need to know about how the Navy expected these patrols to go.

The Egyptian Deal That Got as Far as Gibraltar

Salisbury came within an ace of ending her career under an Egyptian ensign. Cairo had expelled its Soviet advisers in 1972 and closed the Red Fleet's port facilities in 1976, and spent the rest of the decade shopping in the West for a navy. In 1978 the deal on the table was a four-ship package: Salisbury and her sister Lincoln, with the guided missile destroyer HMS Devonshire (D02) and the submarine HMS Cachalot (S06) to follow.

Salisbury actually sailed. She had got as far as Gibraltar when Cairo had second thoughts and cancelled the whole transaction on the grounds that the ships were too old, which was, in fairness, an entirely defensible position. Salisbury was twenty-one and had been designed in the 1940s; Devonshire was a Seaslug ship from the start of the missile age; Cachalot was a conventional boat of much the same vintage. Egypt sent her back and went looking for something built in the decade it was actually living in, and Salisbury turned round and came home to a navy that no longer had a job for her either.

A Training Ship, Then a Target

Rather than scrap a perfectly serviceable hull, the Navy found her a second career from 1979 as a static training ship for submarine engineers, her Admiralty Standard Range diesels being close enough to the machinery fitted in the Oberon-class boats to make her a useful, if landlocked, classroom.

She then spent her final years, from 1980 to 1985, as a harbour training ship at Devonport, before being towed out and sunk as a target on 30 September 1985, a fittingly practical end for a ship whose long and varied career had already covered so much unusual ground, from the Great Lakes to the rivers of Borneo.

A Class Leader With a Remarkably Global Résumé

HMS Salisbury's career reads almost like a tour of Cold War flashpoints and diplomatic curiosities in equal measure, a lead ship whose distinctive diesel propulsion and radar-guidance role took her everywhere from historic American waters to the Mozambique Channel and contested Icelandic fishing grounds, doing exactly the kind of varied, demanding work that defined naval service through the middle decades of the twentieth century, and apparently making her too useful to actually let go when Egypt came calling.