HMS Scylla (F71): The Last Leander, Now Europe's First Artificial Reef

The Final Ship of a Storied Class

HMS Scylla was built at Devonport Royal Dockyard, laid down in May 1967, launched in August 1968 and commissioned in February 1970, the very last Leander-class frigate built for the Royal Navy, ordered in early 1966 at a cost of £6.6 million and closing out production of one of the most numerous and successful frigate classes in Royal Navy history.

It is worth saying what she was the last of. Twenty-six Leanders were built for the Royal Navy between 1959 and 1970, and more were built for or by Australia, New Zealand, India and Chile, which makes the design the most successful British frigate of the post-war era by a distance. They came from the Whitby and Rothesay hulls before them and they stayed in service so long that the last of them was still flying a White Ensign in the early 1990s. HMS Leander (F109) started the line and Scylla ended it, and between the two of them lie sixteen years of British frigate design, which is set out in the Leander class guide.

She commissioned carrying a quadruple Seacat launcher, twin 4.5-inch guns, a Limbo Mk 10 anti-submarine mortar and a Wasp helicopter, and had the added distinction of being the very last frigate Devonport Dockyard would ever build, a quiet full stop on centuries of Plymouth-built warships.

A Long Way From Home Before Any of the Trouble Started

Scylla's maiden major deployment took her about as far from Devonport as the Royal Navy could send her: in 1971 she joined the Far East Fleet, calling at Australia, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong before taking up Beira Patrol duty off East Africa, the long-running blockade meant to choke off oil supplies reaching Rhodesia's breakaway white-minority government, and did not see Plymouth again until February 1972.

A Ferry Collision and the Second Cod War

Scylla's early service included a collision with the Torpoint ferry during sea trials in 1973, an inauspicious start swiftly followed by rather more serious duty in the Second Cod War against Iceland that same year, part of the ongoing fisheries dispute that repeatedly drew Royal Navy frigates into tense confrontation with Icelandic patrol vessels.

Confrontation duly arrived: in June 1973 the Icelandic gunboat Aegir collided with Scylla, a clash serious enough to badly injure an Icelandic sailor, and one that is often confused with the single death the whole dispute produced, which came later and involved a different British ship. Britain's Ministry of Defence maintained the gunboat had rammed Scylla deliberately; Iceland's own coastguard countered that Scylla had been shadowing and harassing Aegir at the time, a dispute over who rammed whom that, like most Cod War incidents, was never conclusively settled by either side.

Two things are worth separating out, because they get run together. The collision happened on 7 June 1973, and Aegir was not on fishery duty when it did: she was up off the Westfjords, near the edge of the Greenland ice, reconnoitring for icebergs. That is a reminder of what an Icelandic Coast Guard vessel actually spends her life doing when there is no dispute on, which is everything, for a country with more coast than people.

The other is the death. The Cod Wars produced exactly one fatality across all three rounds, and it was not this incident. On 29 August 1973, nearly three months later, Aegir was in collision with HMS Apollo (F70), and an engineer named Halldor Hallfredsson was killed while welding a repair to the damage, electrocuted by his own gear when sea water came into the compartment he was working in. It is a horrible death and it belongs to Apollo, not to Scylla, and the two collisions have been muddled together often enough that it is worth stating plainly. Other frigates who took their turn against the same gunboats have their own accounts here: HMS Andromeda (F57) and HMS Charybdis (F75) among them.

Escorting Royalty and the Silver Jubilee

In May 1976, Scylla escorted the royal yacht Britannia during Queen Elizabeth II's state visit to Finland, the first time a reigning British monarch had ever set foot in the country, hosted by President Urho Kekkonen. The following year she was back at Spithead for the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review of 28 June 1977, marking the Queen's twenty-five years on the throne, drawn up in the review order between HMS Berwick and her own sister ship HMS Euryalus.

The royal yacht she escorted to Finland and the two ships she lay between at Spithead are all here as well: HMY Britannia, and at the review HMS Berwick (F115) on one side and her sister HMS Euryalus (F15) on the other. Berwick, as her own article records, was saved from the scrapyard by the Falklands and then sunk by a torpedo anyway. Scylla went to the bottom on purpose instead, which is a considerably better arrangement.

West Indies Guard Ship, and a Novelist's Last Voyage

Later in the decade Scylla took up West Indies Guard Ship duties, a posting that put her in Castries in February 1979 for Saint Lucia's independence celebrations, where Princess Alexandra represented the Queen at the handover ceremony. That same year Scylla was given a rather more sombre duty back in home waters: scattering the ashes of Nicholas Monsarrat, the Liverpool-born wartime corvette officer whose novel The Cruel Sea remains one of the most acclaimed things ever written about the Battle of the Atlantic, at sea in the Channel following his death in August 1979.

Monsarrat is worth more than a subordinate clause, because the man whose ashes went over Scylla's side had spent his own war in ships a fraction of her size. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and served as first lieutenant of the Flower-class corvette HMS Campanula from 1940 to the end of 1941, then as first lieutenant of the corvette Guillemot, and finally in command of her sister Shearwater. Out of those three ships came the three books collected as Three Corvettes, written while it was happening, and out of all of it came The Cruel Sea, which more than any other book decided what the Battle of the Atlantic looks like in the British imagination. He died on 8 August 1979, and a Leander-class frigate took what was left of him back out into the Channel.

The following August, Scylla swapped ceremonial duty for disaster relief, working alongside the RFA tanker Green Rover off the Cayman Islands from 7 to 12 August 1980 to help Cayman Brac recover from Hurricane Allen, a storm whose 190mph sustained winds still rank among the strongest ever recorded anywhere in the Atlantic.

A Four-Year, £80 Million Rebuild

Between 1980 and 1984, Scylla underwent an extensive modernisation costing £79,692,000, more than ten times her original build cost, adding Exocet missiles, a Sea Wolf missile system and updated sonar, a thorough rebuild that kept her notably combat-capable for another decade of Cold War service.

Work at Plymouth's dockyard began in November 1980 and was meant to take rather less than four years; the Falklands War intervened in 1982, and equipment already earmarked for Scylla was reportedly diverted to patch up battle-damaged ships limping home from the South Atlantic, pushing her own completion back to December 1984. She emerged rearmed with four Exocet missiles, two sextuple Sea Wolf launchers, six anti-submarine torpedo tubes and a Lynx helicopter in place of the Seacat launcher, Limbo mortar and Wasp she had commissioned with, one of only five Leanders, alongside Jupiter, Andromeda, Hermione and Charybdis, converted to this heavily-armed Batch 3A standard.

The four other ships that went through the same conversion all have accounts here, and between them they are a fair picture of what happened to the class: HMS Jupiter (F60), HMS Hermione (F58), Andromeda and Charybdis. Spending nearly eighty million pounds on a ship that cost six and a half to build is not as absurd as it sounds: the hull and the machinery were sound, the weapons and sensors were what had gone out of date, and rebuilding a proven frigate round Exocet and Sea Wolf was quicker and cheaper than designing a new one. It is also, precisely, why the class lasted as long as it did.

Gulf Patrol and a Freedom of the City

Scylla served on Armilla Patrol in the Persian Gulf between 1986 and 1987, escorting Britannia through the Strait of Hormuz at the height of the Iran-Iraq War's Tanker War phase.

Her single most dramatic day in the Gulf came on Christmas Day 1987, when an Iranian speedboat fired rocket-propelled grenades into the South Korean tanker Hyundai No. 7 near Abu Musa. The American frigate USS Elrod, patrolling nearby, launched a Seahawk helicopter that lifted eleven of Hyundai No. 7's twenty crew from the water and flew them straight to Scylla; her own Lynx then went back out for the remaining nine, delivering all twenty survivors safely between two allied warships built on opposite sides of the Atlantic that neither had expected to be working alongside that morning.

Known as Aberdeen's own frigate, Scylla was granted the Freedom of the City on 8 June 1992, before a final deployment to the South Atlantic ahead of her decommissioning that December, closing out twenty-three years of active service.

Sunk to Give Life to the Sea

Rather than being scrapped, Scylla was purchased by the National Marine Aquarium for £200,000 and, on 27 March 2004, was deliberately sunk off Whitsand Bay in Cornwall to form the first artificial reef of its kind in Europe, settling on a sandy seabed roughly 500 metres from the wreck of the Liberty ship James Eagan Layne. The idea began with two local divers, Nick Murns and John Busby, and took the National Marine Aquarium the best part of five years to see through; on the day itself, fifty explosive charges packed around her hull were finally triggered jointly by television naturalist David Bellamy and a twelve-year-old local schoolboy.

The neighbour she was sunk beside is worth knowing. The James Eagan Layne was an American Liberty ship, torpedoed by U-1195 off Rame Head in March 1945 in the last weeks of the war in Europe and beached in Whitsand Bay, where she has been ever since; she is one of the most dived wrecks in Britain and has spent eighty years doing, by accident, exactly what Scylla was sunk to do on purpose. Putting the two of them five hundred metres apart put the new reef where the divers already were, on a piece of seabed whose older wreck had spent eight decades demonstrating what a sunken hull does for the marine life around it.

The transformation was remarkably swift: within three months the wreck was already hosting sea anemones, mussels and scallops, and within six months sea urchins and starfish had colonised her hull.

By 2021, some 250 species had been recorded living on or around the wreck, a striking demonstration of how quickly marine life can reclaim a deliberately sunk warship.

A Site of Real Beauty and Real Risk

Scylla's second life has not been without danger.

Silt carried down from the Tamar estuary has created hazardous diving conditions inside the wreck, and following a 2014 survey the National Marine Aquarium advised against diving into her interior after four documented diver deaths, in 2007 and 2021, a sobering reminder that even a wreck created for entirely benign environmental purposes demands real caution and respect from those who visit it.

The 2021 tragedy claimed Mark Gallant and Andrew Harman after the pair became separated from a third diver, Adam Dent, deep inside the wreck's silted engine-room level. Dent has since described the visibility dropping to zero within minutes of the silt being disturbed, and surfacing with barely a dozen breaths of air left in his cylinder after squeezing out through a gap never meant as an exit. It is exactly the kind of account that explains why the National Marine Aquarium's advice against entering the wreck's interior is not merely cautious but categorical.

A Warship's Final Purpose

HMS Scylla's transformation from the last of her class to Europe's first artificial reef gives her a unique legacy among Royal Navy frigates, a ship built to hunt submarines that now spends her retirement doing rather less warlike work, sheltering sea urchins, scallops and the occasional over-ambitious diver's cautionary tale: twenty-three years defending British interests at sea, followed by more than two decades and counting of quietly holding up an entire reef ecosystem off the Cornish coast.