HMS Sirius (F40): A Wilkinson Sword of Peace for Recovering the Dead

Portsmouth-Built

HMS Sirius was built at HM Dockyard Portsmouth, laid down on 9 August 1963, launched on 22 September 1964 and commissioned on 15 June 1966, a Leander-class frigate that would go on to combine long stretches of routine flag-showing duty with one remarkably significant humanitarian moment.

Being built at Portsmouth is worth a moment, because there was not much of it left to do. The Royal Dockyard had been turning out warships since the reign of Henry VII and had launched the Mary Rose in 1511, and by the time Sirius went down the slip in 1964 it was within three years of stopping altogether. The very last was HMS Andromeda (F57), launched in May 1967, and after that a yard that had been building ships for four and a half centuries only repaired them. Sirius is one of the last handful, which is a thing worth knowing about a ship whose home port was a mile from where she was made.

East to Singapore, and a Royal Coronation

After joining the 24th Escort Squadron and appearing at Portsmouth Navy Day in 1966, Sirius deployed to the Far East that November to join the Singapore-based 2nd Destroyer Squadron. She broke off from that passage in January 1967 for a spell on the Beira Patrol, the Royal Navy's long-running operation in the Mozambique Channel to enforce United Nations sanctions against Ian Smith's breakaway Rhodesian regime by intercepting tankers before their oil ever reached the landlocked colony.

From there she resumed her passage east for a round of flag-showing visits across Asia, the grandest of which was the coronation of King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV of Tonga on 4 July 1967, the island kingdom's first coronation since that of his mother, Queen Sālote, back in 1918. The Duke and Duchess of Kent represented the Royal Family among the assembled dignitaries, a rare gathering of Pacific pomp for one small British frigate to have a grandstand seat at.

Recovering the Dead off St Kitts

Sirius had been serving as West Indies guard ship since that April when, on the afternoon of Saturday 1 August 1970, the region's Emancipation Day holiday weekend, the inter-island ferry Christena capsized and sank in the Narrows between St Kitts and Nevis. Licensed to carry 155 passengers, she had something closer to 320 aboard that afternoon; when she turned hard for shore in rough water she went down within minutes, in what remains the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster the Eastern Caribbean has ever known, claiming 233 lives.

What Happened to the Christena

The Christena deserves more than two clauses. She was a 160-foot government ferry working the twelve miles between Basseterre and Charlestown, which is not a sea crossing so much as a bus route, and on the Saturday of the August Monday holiday she was taking people home to Nevis from the Emancipation celebrations on St Kitts. She was carrying roughly twice the number she was licensed for, and that was not unusual: everybody knew it, everybody had done it, and the ferry had been overloaded on holiday weekends for years without consequence. The accounts of why she went down so fast centre on her watertight doors, which had been left open after work on the propeller shaft and were never checked before she sailed.

She sank at about four in the afternoon in the Narrows, in sight of both islands, in water people swim in. That is the detail that makes it unbearable. There was no radio call, because there was no radio worth the name; the alarm was raised by another vessel, and the first boat to reach the scene was a fishing boat, the Sea Hunter 1. Ninety-one people came out of the water alive. Two hundred and thirty-three did not, among them the master, Captain Ponteen, who could not swim. In a federation whose entire population at the time was somewhere around fifty thousand, there was almost nobody who had not lost somebody.

Sirius herself located the wreck and spent the days that followed working the disaster scene alongside American Coast Guard units, her Westland Wasp helicopter and Gemini inflatables recovering bodies from the water while her ratings hauled aboard flotsam from the sunken ferry. A memorial service, conducted by the ship's own naval padre, was held on board for those who had been lost. Even the running tally kept aboard told its own story of a rescue slowly turning into a recovery: at one point during the search it stood at 90 survivors, 110 still missing and 46 bodies already recovered from the sea.

Two of the doctors who worked on the survivors as they were brought ashore were Kennedy Simmonds and Cuthbert Sebastian. Simmonds would go on to lead St Kitts and Nevis to independence and be made a National Hero; Sebastian would end up as the country's Governor-General. That is the scale of the place. The men treating the injured on the beach that afternoon were not officials sent from anywhere, they were the local doctors, and they happened to be the men who would run the country. Sirius, arriving from the sea with a helicopter and boats and a diving capability nobody on either island had, was doing something genuinely useful precisely because there was nothing else within reach that could do it.

For that work, Sirius's crew were awarded the Wilkinson Sword of Peace, an honour instituted by the cutlery firm Wilkinson Sword in 1966 and presented each year to a single Royal Navy unit judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to community relations, a fitting recognition of a ship's humanity as much as her seamanship.

The Sword is a harder thing to win than it sounds, because it is awarded once a year across the whole Navy and it is not given for courage under fire. It is given for the other job, the one that fills most of a warship's life: turning up somewhere that has had a very bad week and being useful. Five other winners are worth listing and the pattern is clear enough from the list: HMS Fife (D20) for hurricane relief, HMS Soberton (M1200) out of the Torrey Canyon oil spill, and HMS Kirkliston (M1157), HMS Rothesay (F107) and HMS Sheffield (F96) besides. Not one of those citations is about a battle.

What the Christena did to St Kitts and Nevis outlasted everyone aboard Sirius. The great majority of the dead were Nevisians, killed on a ferry run by a government seated on the other island, and the resentment that followed was immediate and permanent. Within two months of the sinking, Nevisians had organised a new political party, and the demand for a say in their own affairs that had been a grumble beforehand became the central fact of the island's politics and stayed that way. Nevis has its own legislature today, and its own periodic arguments about leaving the federation altogether, and a straight line runs back from that to a Saturday afternoon in the Narrows. A memorial was finally put up on the Charlestown waterfront on 1 August 2011, forty-one years to the day.

Missiles, NATO, and the Falklands

In 1974, Sirius joined NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic, the alliance's first-ever standing multinational squadron, formed in 1968, exercising and showing the flag alongside allied warships in a rather different kind of diplomacy from the coronations and sanctions patrols of her early career. A modernisation refit running from 1975 to October 1977 then saw her forward 4.5-inch guns landed in favour of Exocet anti-ship missiles, sharpening her teeth considerably before she went on to lead the 6th Frigate Squadron from 1978.

Following the Falklands War, Sirius deployed south in September 1982 to help patrol the islands against the lingering threat of Argentine revanchism, watchful escort and surveillance work in the tense months after the fighting itself had already stopped.

Two Centuries of Sirius in Sydney

In 1988, Sirius sailed as part of a task group built around the carrier HMS Ark Royal and the frigate HMS Edinburgh for Exercise Outback 88, leaving Portsmouth that June and calling at Malta, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong, Thailand and Papua New Guinea en route to the deployment's real purpose: the Bicentennial Naval Salute in Sydney Harbour that October, when more than fifty warships from sixteen nations gathered to mark two hundred years since the First Fleet's arrival. There was a neat irony to a ship called Sirius steaming into that particular anniversary, since the very first HMS Sirius had led the First Fleet there herself back in 1788, only to be wrecked on a reef off Norfolk Island in 1790 trying to keep the fledgling colony from starving. Her modern namesake, at least, made it home again in one piece.

The first Sirius is worth the detour, because she is a better story than the one sentence allows. She was not built as a warship at all: she was laid down at Rotherhithe on the Thames around 1780 as a Baltic trader called Berwick, bought unfinished by the Navy Board, fitted as an armed storeship, and renamed in 1787 after the brightest star in the sky, which for a ship being sent to the far side of the world was either poetry or wishful thinking. Under Captain John Hunter she led the First Fleet into Port Jackson in January 1788.

What she did next is the part that gets forgotten. The colony was starving inside its first year, so in October 1788 Sirius was sent for food, and rather than beat westward against the wind she went the other way: south of New Zealand, east across the Pacific, round Cape Horn, up to the Cape of Good Hope for grain, and then on eastward again, arriving back at Port Jackson on 9 May 1789 having sailed all the way round the world to fetch flour. Ten months later, on 19 March 1790, she was landing stores at Norfolk Island when she drove onto the reef and was wrecked. Hunter got every single man off her.

Two of her anchors came back up. One was recovered around 1905 and stands in Macquarie Place in Sydney, both palms broken off; a third was raised in 1985 and went to the Australian National Maritime Museum, and the wreck site itself was given National Heritage listing in 2011. So when the frigate Sirius came into Sydney Harbour in October 1988 for the Bicentennial Naval Salute, the anchor of the ship whose name she was carrying was sitting in a small park about a mile from her mooring. Very few ships get to keep an appointment two hundred years old.

Sunk as a Target

Sirius was paid off on 17 February 1992 and formally stricken on 28 February 1993, then towed to Pembroke Dockyard to await disposal. Environmentalist objections held that up for years, and it was not until 18 September 1998 that she was finally sunk as a target in the Atlantic by the submarine HMS Spartan and the frigate HMS Monmouth, an unceremonious end for a ship whose crew had once been decorated for one of the more moving humanitarian actions in the Royal Navy's postwar history.