HMS Scarborough (F63): The Frigate That Watched Britain's Hydrogen Bomb Tests

Launched by a Countess

HMS Scarborough was laid down at Vickers Armstrong's Newcastle-upon-Tyne yard in September 1953, launched in April 1955 by the Countess of Scarborough, and commissioned in May 1957, a Whitby-class Type 12 anti-submarine frigate that would go on to serve her adopted home town with a genuine sense of connection throughout her career, safeguarding the town's historic Freedom of Scarborough casket, dating back to 1779, on visits home in 1962, 1971 and 1972.

The class deserves a sentence of its own, because it is the most consequential thing she belonged to. The six Whitbys were the first anti-submarine frigates Britain designed from scratch after the war, built round a single question: could a surface ship catch a fast submarine. The answer was a fine, sharply raked hull good for 30 knots, a twin 4.5-inch mounting forward, two Limbo mortars aft to throw a pattern of charges ahead of the ship, and twelve torpedo tubes, on 2,150 tons. It worked so well that the Admiralty kept building the same hull for twenty years: the Rothesays came from it, and then the Leanders, and by the end of that line there were more than fifty ships of the family. HMS Whitby (F36) gave the class its name, and the other four, Torquay, Tenby, Blackpool and Eastbourne, all have accounts here as well.

Present at the Hydrogen Bomb Tests

In 1958, Scarborough took part in Grapple Z, the largest and final series of tests in Operation Grapple, Britain's hydrogen bomb testing programme conducted at Christmas Island in the Pacific and one of the most consequential and controversial episodes in British military history. Her own job in this history-making moment was rather less explosive than it sounds: stationed as a weather picket alongside the New Zealand frigate HMNZS Pukaki, she spent the four-bomb series watching the sky rather than the mushroom clouds, since good weather was essential to a safe detonation, while also keeping half an eye out for Soviet or American submarines that might have been sniffing around to observe the tests for themselves.

She was photographed at Sydney's Garden Island during the deployment, a rare and striking glimpse of a frigate operating so far from home in support of such historically significant work.

The Last Bombs Britain Ever Set Off in the Open Air

Grapple Z was the end of it. Four shots went off between August and September 1958 and Britain has never detonated a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere since. They were not repeats of what had gone before: two of the four were slung beneath barrage balloons rather than dropped, one was released by a Valiant aiming on radar through cloud rather than by eye, and one used an unusual three-stage design. What the programme was chasing by 1958 was smaller and lighter warheads, and warheads that would not be set off or wrecked by another one going off nearby, which is the problem you work on when you are about to start putting them into aircraft and, before long, into submarines.

A weather picket is not a spectator. Everything about a test depends on the wind: whether the shot can go at all, where the cloud will drift, which way the fallout will travel and how far, and whether the aircraft flying through it afterwards to take samples can be got home. That was decided from readings taken by ships stationed a long way out, and Scarborough was one of them, working with the New Zealand frigate Pukaki. Sitting a hundred miles upwind logging wind speed and cloud base is about as far from the photographs as it is possible to be, and the photographs would not have happened without it.

The other half of that story is the people. Something like 22,000 British servicemen took part in the nuclear test programme between 1952 and 1967, and they then spent the better part of sixty years asking to be recognised for it before a Nuclear Test Medal was finally announced in 2022. Roughly the same number are thought to be eligible. The campaign, and what the men who were much closer to the blasts than Scarborough went through, is set out in HMS Diana (D126), who was deliberately sailed through a fallout cloud to find out what happened, and in HMS Cook (K638).

Leading a Squadron Around the World

Scarborough went on to lead the 5th Frigate Squadron on an around-the-world commission in 1960 and 1961, visiting numerous countries during a genuine circumnavigation, the kind of extended, high-profile deployment that showcased British naval reach during the Cold War era, before taking on Cod War patrol duties in Icelandic waters as tensions over fishing rights escalated.

The man leading that squadron from Scarborough's bridge, Captain Jozef Bartosik, had a remarkable story of his own. Having fought the war in Polish destroyers under British command, he was one of only three Polish officers accepted into the Royal Navy in 1948 out of several hundred who applied, a transfer that cost him his wartime rank of lieutenant commander; he had to start again as a lieutenant. By 1960 he had worked his way back up to command a frigate squadron on a round-the-world cruise, and he would go on to retire as a rear admiral, a rather satisfying second act for a man who had given up his rank once already for the chance to keep serving.

What Bartosik gave up is worth spelling out, because the arithmetic of it is brutal. The Polish Navy fought the whole war under British operational control, out of British bases, in a mixture of its own ships and British ones lent for the purpose, and it fought well: Polish destroyers were at Narvik, at Dunkirk, in the Bismarck chase and on the Malta convoys. Then in 1945 the country they had been fighting for came under a government most of them would not serve, and several thousand Polish sailors had to choose between going home to it and starting their lives again from nothing in a Britain that had just stopped needing them. One of the ships Britain lent them is described in HMS Garland (H37).

Three of several hundred applicants were taken into the Royal Navy in 1948, and Bartosik was one of them, at the price of his rank. He made rear admiral in the end, and one of the ships he later commanded, the guided missile destroyer HMS London (D16), has an account here too. It is worth remembering that the officer taking a British frigate squadron round the world in 1960, flying his broad pennant in a ship named after a Yorkshire seaside town, had been a junior officer in a navy that no longer had a country to go back to.