HMS Southampton (D90): A Ten-Metre Hole in the Persian Gulf, and 3.5 Tonnes of Cocaine

The Sixth Ship to Carry the Name

HMS Southampton was a Batch Two Type 42 destroyer built by Vosper Thornycroft in Southampton, ordered in March 1976, laid down that October, launched on 29 January 1979 and commissioned on 31 October 1981, the sixth Royal Navy vessel to carry the name, and destined for a career that would prove considerably more eventful than most of her Type 42 sisters.

The fifth of the name is worth knowing about, because she is the reason the sixth exists. HMS Southampton was the lead ship of the Town-class cruisers of the 1930s, one of the handsomest classes the Royal Navy ever put to sea, and she lasted five years. On 11 January 1941, covering a convoy to Malta during Operation Excess, she was caught by German dive bombers in the central Mediterranean, set on fire beyond saving and sunk by torpedoes from her own side. The name then sat unused for forty years. It came back in 1981 on a ship built at Woolston, in Southampton itself, which is a tidier piece of naming than the Admiralty usually manages.

A Rough Start Before the Falklands

While preparing for deployment as a Falkland Islands guard ship in 1984, Southampton ran over one of the Shambles buoys off Portland during exercises, an embarrassing mishap that required dry dock repairs before she could finally head south to take up her guard ship duties in the South Atlantic.

Collision in the Gulf

The most serious incident of Southampton's career came on 3 September 1988, while she was escorting merchant shipping through the Strait of Hormuz as part of the Armilla Patrol, the standing Royal Navy presence protecting Gulf shipping in the shaky aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War's ceasefire that same August.

At around 8.50pm, manoeuvring to take up station off the container ship MV Tor Bay, Southampton collided with her in position 25°35'N 56°48'E. Aboard Tor Bay, First Officer George Wilson watched from the bridge wing as her own captain, Don Worsnop, realised what was coming and called out a warning; what followed, in Wilson's own words, was "an almighty bang" and a loud hissing from the bow as a dislodged man-overboard marker set off orange smoke across the forecastle. The collision tore a ten-metre hole in Southampton's hull, severed power and communications along her port passageway and injured three of her crew.

How Two Ships Came to Be in the Same Place

The collision is documented in unusual detail, because the Admiralty held a Board of Inquiry and because the officers of the Tor Bay wrote down what they saw. It was not a sudden thing. At ten to eight that evening Southampton had two radar contacts about nineteen miles off, and assumed one of them was the ship she had been sent to escort. She altered towards the contact on her port bow. It was the wrong one. The ships came into sight at eight miles and the mistake was still not spotted; the real Tor Bay was not positively identified until twenty-five to nine, by which time she was six miles away and the geometry of the meeting had gone from routine to awkward. Fifteen minutes later they hit.

From the merchant ship it looked survivable until it very obviously was not. Tor Bay's master, Don Worsnop, watched the warship coming up his starboard side and told his people what was about to happen, which was that she would run past and then drop back into station on the quarter. Then he changed his mind and said something like: they are going to hit us. What followed, in the words of one of his officers, was an almighty bang, and then the forecastle filling with orange smoke and the noise of escaping high pressure air, because the impact had set off a man overboard marker. Worsnop got on the radio to Southampton's captain with one of the great understatements of the Armilla Patrol: master Tor Bay here, do not want to worry you, but I think I have just cut HMS Southampton in two.

The Board of Inquiry did not spread the blame around gently. The Officer of the Watch, it found, "made errors of judgement in assessing the situation and was negligent in not properly calling the Commanding Officer". The Navigating Officer also made an error of judgement. And then, in a sentence that anybody who has ever stood a watch will recognise: "The Commanding Officer's unjustifiable trust in the Officer of the Watch was an error of judgement." A warship was very nearly lost, in peacetime, on a clear night, because a young officer identified the wrong contact and did not want to wake the captain.

The damage tells you how close it was. The hole was in her port side forward. Her main radio station was destroyed outright, so a modern air defence destroyer in the Strait of Hormuz was reduced to handheld radios, and her people spent the next hours boundary cooling around the Sea Dart launcher, which is to say hosing down the bulkheads next to a magazine full of missiles. Tor Bay came off comparatively lightly with her bulbous bow stove in and a tear in the forecastle plating, and was back trading inside a fortnight. HMS Boxer (F92) took over the escort task.

Both ships made it to port under their own power, Southampton to Fujairah and Tor Bay to Dubai, where fourteen days of repairs restored her to full seaworthiness. Southampton's own damage was rather more serious: she was eventually brought home to Britain aboard a heavy lift ship for a rebuild by Swan Hunter that took nearly three years, only rejoining the fleet in 1991, an unusually long convalescence that this seven-year-old destroyer more than repaid by going on to serve a further eighteen years before she was finally decommissioned.

The way she got home is worth a paragraph of its own. She did not steam back. A ship with a ten-metre hole forward and eight thousand miles to cover is a bad insurance risk, so she was floated onto the submerged deck of a semi-submersible heavy-lift ship, which then pumped out and rose underneath her, and she came back to the Tyne as cargo. The Type 42s did this twice. HMS Nottingham (D91) went the same way in 2002 after opening her bottom on a charted rock off Lord Howe Island, in an accident with an uncomfortably similar shape to it: a warship, a known hazard, and nobody on the bridge putting the two together in time.

A Major Caribbean Drug Bust

Southampton's later career brought a happier kind of drama: on 3 February 2006 she took part in the seizure of 3.5 tonnes of cocaine in the Caribbean, a substantial contribution to the Royal Navy's long-running counter-narcotics work in the region and a fitting late highlight for a ship whose career had already seen more than its share of incident, on either side of which she was still a familiar, hard-working sight around the fleet.

That Caribbean seizure was part of a standing commitment the Royal Navy has kept up for decades and which almost nobody in Britain notices. Atlantic Patrol Tasking (North) puts a warship in the Caribbean more or less permanently, nominally for hurricane relief and British Overseas Territory support, and in practice for a great deal of drug interdiction alongside the United States Coast Guard, whose detachments embark in British ships because a Royal Navy warship cannot make an American arrest. Three and a half tonnes in one go is a large haul by any standard, and the collection has several more: HMS Iron Duke (F234) made a speciality of it, HMS Dragon (D35) took eighteen tonnes in a single deployment, and HMS Manchester (D95) was another Type 42 on the same beat.

Decommissioned After Twenty-Eight Years

HMS Southampton entered extended readiness on 31 July 2008 and was formally decommissioned on 12 February 2009, having served for twenty-eight years. She was sold at auction on 28 March 2011 and towed from Portsmouth that October to Leyal Ship Recycling's yard at Aliağa in Turkey, closing out a career defined as much by hard knocks as by hard-won successes.