HMS Tenby (F65): The Frigate That Staged James Bond's Fake Funeral

A Purpose-Built Submarine Hunter

HMS Tenby was a Whitby-class, or Type 12, anti-submarine frigate, one of a class of specialist warships designed specifically to counter the new generation of fast diesel-electric submarines entering Soviet service.

At 370 feet long and capable of 29 knots, she carried a twin 4.5-inch gun forward, a twin 40mm Bofors mount aft, and two Limbo anti-submarine mortars, backed by some of the most advanced radar and sonar systems the Royal Navy had at the time.

The Whitby class matters more than six ships usually would, because of what the design became. The Type 12 hull was drawn around one requirement, which was to keep going fast in a head sea: a very high sharp bow, an enormous amount of flare forward and a sharply rising sheer, so that the ship could hold twenty-five knots in weather that would have forced an earlier frigate down to ten. It worked so well that the Admiralty simply kept building it. The Whitbys became the Rothesay class, the Rothesays became the twenty-six Leanders, and the Leanders were then built under licence or bought outright by the Indian, Chilean, Dutch, Australian and New Zealand navies. A hull first drawn in the early 1950s was still going to sea in the 2010s. HMS Eastbourne (F73) and HMS Blackpool (F77) are two of her five sisters.

Training the Next Generation

By the early 1970s, Tenby had settled into a valuable role as one of three frigates forming the Dartmouth Training Squadron, giving Royal Navy officer cadets their first hands-on experience of life at sea aboard a genuine front-line warship, unglamorous but essential work in shaping the fleet's future leadership.

That last role deserves saying properly, because it is what these ships were mostly for by then. The Dartmouth Training Squadron took Britannia Royal Naval College cadets to sea in real warships rather than in a purpose-built training vessel, on the sound principle that you cannot teach somebody to run a ship in anything other than a ship. Three frigates, kept in commission and manned partly by instructors, spent their years crossing and recrossing the Atlantic with a succession of nineteen-year-olds learning navigation, seamanship and how not to be seasick. A very large proportion of the Royal Navy's officers of the 1980s and 1990s, including most of those who took ships to the Falklands, first went to sea in one of them.

A Starring Role in You Only Live Twice

In a notably memorable footnote to her career, HMS Tenby appeared in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, where she was used to film the fake military funeral scene, in which Bond's own supposed death is staged aboard a Royal Navy ship.

Filmed in winter 1966 near Gibraltar but presented on screen as taking place in Hong Kong, the scene gave Tenby a small but enduring place in cinema history alongside her more conventional naval service.

How the Funeral Was Actually Filmed

The sequence is a better piece of film-making than the article lets on, and almost none of it happened where it appears to. The scene on screen is Hong Kong harbour: a Royal Navy frigate, a burial party, a weighted canvas bag going over the side with full honours. What was actually filmed was Tenby, lying at anchor in Gibraltar harbour in December 1966, with her ship's company turned out in tropical white uniform to suggest somewhere considerably warmer than the Strait of Gibraltar in midwinter. Anyone who has stood on a quarterdeck at Gibraltar in December in whites will have views about that.

The moment the bag hits the water the film cuts to the other side of the Atlantic. The underwater footage of the body sinking, and of the two frogmen who intercept it, was shot in the Bahamas by the underwater cameraman Lamar Boren, who did the diving sequences for four Bond pictures. And the submarine that takes the body aboard is not a set either: she is HMS Aeneas (P427), a real Amphion-class boat of the Royal Navy, with her pennant number painted out and replaced with M1 for the camera.

So a single continuous sequence lasting a couple of minutes is made from a frigate in Gibraltar, a stunt double in the Bahamas and a submarine borrowed from the Third Submarine Squadron, and both of the Royal Navy ships involved are covered in their own right. There is a pleasing symmetry in the fact that the ship staging a fake funeral for a fictional officer was, four years later, teaching real officer cadets their trade.

Decommissioned and Broken Up

HMS Tenby was decommissioned on 8 December 1972, with her final crew departing that following February. After four years in reserve at Devonport, she was sold to Thos. W. Ward for breaking up at Briton Ferry, closing out the career of a solidly capable frigate whose brush with Hollywood remains one of her most distinctive claims to fame.