HMS Torquay (F43): Twenty-Nine Years From Suez to the Silver Jubilee

The First of Her Class

HMS Torquay was laid down at Harland and Wolff's Belfast shipyard on 11 March 1953, launched the following July and completed on 10 May 1956, becoming the first Whitby-class, or Type 12, frigate to be finished.

Her innovative V-form hull allowed her to operate in heavy seas without the slamming problems that plagued more conventional destroyer designs, making her a properly capable anti-submarine warship for her era.

Being first of the class is worth more than a line, because the Type 12 hull she introduced turned out to be one of the most successful pieces of naval design Britain has ever produced. What it solved was slamming: the tendency of a fine-bowed ship driven hard into a head sea to lift her forefoot clear and then bring it down with a crash that shakes the whole hull and eventually breaks things. The answer was an unusually high, sharply flared bow with a great deal of sheer, which lets the ship keep going fast in weather that would have forced an earlier frigate to slow to a crawl. From this hull came the Rothesays, then the twenty-six Leanders, then licence-built versions in half a dozen other navies, and the last of them left service in the 2010s. What that meant in practice is set out in HMS Tenby (F65).

Straight Into the Suez Crisis

Torquay joined the 5th Frigate Squadron at Portsmouth on commissioning, becoming squadron leader that August, and within months found herself heading for the Mediterranean, taking part in the Suez operation in November 1956 and conducting Cyprus patrols that December, a remarkably eventful introduction to active service for a brand new frigate.

Supporting the Airlift to Jordan

In July 1958, Torquay took part in Operation Fortitude, supporting the British troop airlift to Jordan during a period of regional instability, before settling into a long and varied career that included seven years with the Dartmouth Training Squadron from 1963 and over a decade as a navigation training ship from 1972.

Operation Fortitude deserves its context, because the fortnight it belongs to is one of the tensest of the Cold War in the Middle East and it has been almost entirely forgotten. On 14 July 1958 a military coup in Baghdad overthrew and killed the Iraqi royal family, ending the Hashemite monarchy there. Within forty-eight hours the Americans had landed marines in Lebanon at the request of its president, and Britain had begun flying a parachute brigade into Amman at the request of King Hussein of Jordan, the murdered Iraqi king's cousin, who had good reason to think he was next. The airlift went in over Israeli airspace with permission granted hours beforehand, into an airfield nobody could guarantee would still be friendly when the aircraft arrived. Torquay's part was the naval end of it, which is unglamorous and consists mostly of being present in the eastern Mediterranean so that the aircraft have somewhere to be supported from.

The Royal Navy's Oldest Frigate

Torquay took her place at the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, and continued serving right through to 23 March 1985, by which point she had become the longest-serving and oldest frigate in the entire fleet, a truly remarkable span of service for a ship originally built in the mid-1950s.

The Frigate That Tested the Computer

The last thirteen years of her career are described as navigation training, and that undersells them considerably. In 1971 she was rebuilt for the role, with a solid mainmast and a large navigation training room built into the space where her forward Limbo mortar had been. Then, in 1974, she was refitted again and given something rather more important: CAAIS, the Computer Assisted Action Information System, the Royal Navy's first serious attempt to put a computer at the centre of a warship's operations room.

It is difficult now to appreciate what a change that was. Until then an operations room worked on a plot: a table with a chart on it, and a rating with a chinagraph pencil marking contacts by hand from what the radar operators called out, while an officer looked at the result and worked out in his head what everything was doing. It was slow, it degraded fast under pressure, and it could not cope with more than a handful of tracks at once. CAAIS took the radar data, held the tracks, calculated courses and speeds and presented the tactical picture on a display. Everything in every warship operations room since is a descendant of it.

Somebody had to prove it worked at sea, and that somebody was a 1956 frigate with her armament taken out. She spent a decade doing it, and then paid off in March 1985 as the oldest frigate in the fleet, handed the navigation training job to a Leander and went to Barcelona. It is not a bad way for a first-of-class to finish: she introduced the hull the Navy used for forty years, and then she introduced the system it has used ever since.

Scrapped in Barcelona

HMS Torquay was sold for scrap in 1987 and left Portsmouth on 1 July that year bound for Barcelona, where she was broken up, closing out an exceptional twenty-nine-year career that had begun with the Suez Crisis and ended nearly three decades later as one of the last survivors of her generation still in front-line service.