HMS Vidal: The Survey Ship That Claimed a Rock in the Atlantic for Britain

Named for a Pioneering Surveyor

HMS Vidal was named after the nineteenth-century Royal Navy surveyor Alexander Thomas Emeric Vidal, who had mapped much of Africa's coastline and surveyed the remote North Atlantic islet of Rockall long before his namesake ship would make that same rock famous.

Built at Chatham Dockyard, laid down on 5 July 1950, launched on 31 July 1951 and completed on 29 March 1954 at a cost of £1,345,000, Vidal holds the distinction of being the last surface vessel ever built at Chatham, and was the first survey ship specifically designed to carry a helicopter.

Why the Helicopter Mattered

The first survey ship designed round a helicopter is the detail that explains everything else in her record, and it is worth a moment. Hydrographic survey before the 1950s was done from boats. A survey ship anchored offshore and sent a whaler in with a leadsman and a theodolite party, which is slow, dangerous in a sea, and simply impossible on a coast with no landing. Establishing a shore station on a rock or a reef, which is what you need in order to fix your soundings to anything, could take days or never happen at all.

A helicopter changes all of that. It can put three men and a theodolite on a headland in ten minutes, lift them off before the weather closes in, run photographic sorties along a coastline, and reach places a boat cannot approach. Vidal was designed from the keel up around that idea, with a flight deck aft and a hangar, and she was the first survey ship in the world built that way. It is also precisely why she, rather than any other ship, was given the Rockall job three years after she commissioned: nobody else could have got anybody onto it. The generation of survey ships that followed her, and what the job turned into, is described in HMS Owen (K640) and HMS Hecla (A133).

Annexing Rockall

Vidal's most memorable achievement came in September 1955, when she carried out the formal annexation of Rockall, a tiny and famously inhospitable islet in the North Atlantic.

Why Anybody Wanted Rockall

Rockall is worth quantifying. It is a granite plug about twenty-five metres high and thirty across, the eroded core of an extinct volcano, standing alone in the Atlantic some two hundred and thirty miles west of the Hebrides. There is no beach, no shelter, no fresh water and no flat ground. Waves break clean over the top of it in a gale, and it has been occupied for more than a few hours on only a handful of occasions in its entire recorded history.

Nobody wanted it for itself. What Britain wanted in 1955 was to stop anybody else having it, and the reason was a missile.

The Royal Artillery had a guided weapons range at South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, and Britain was preparing to test-fire the Corporal, its first guided missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, out over the North Atlantic, with the flight tracked from a station on St Kilda. Somebody in the Ministry of Defence looked at the chart, noticed that there was an uninhabited and entirely unclaimed rock sitting out in that direction, and worked out that a Soviet trawler could put a man and a radio on it quite legally and watch the whole programme. In April 1955 the Admiralty was asked to take it.

On 18 September, Lieutenant-Commander Desmond Scott, a party of Royal Marines and the naturalist James Fisher were helicoptered onto the rock to plant a brass plaque and hoist the Union Flag, officially claiming the territory for Britain in a mission that remains one of the more unusual episodes in postwar naval history.

The Queen authorised the annexation on 14 September. Vidal reached the rock on the 15th and then spent three days being blown about by gales that made a landing impossible. On the morning of 18 September the helicopter got in, and at sixteen minutes past ten Lieutenant-Commander Desmond Scott of the Royal Navy, Sergeant Brian Peel and Corporal A A Fraser of the Royal Marines and the naturalist James Fisher, himself a former Royal Marine, stood on the top of it, cemented a brass plaque to the rock and hoisted the flag. The Admiralty announced it on the 21st.

That fifteen-minute ceremony, performed by four men on a wet rock in the middle of the Atlantic to stop the Russians watching a rocket, is the last territorial expansion of the British Empire. Everything that has happened to the Empire since has been a subtraction.

Diplomacy and Distant Islands

Beyond her survey work, Vidal supported wider diplomatic and scientific efforts, carrying the Chief Hydrographer to Leningrad in 1964 for talks with Soviet counterparts, and transporting scientific personnel to the remote Aldabra Atoll and Diego Garcia in 1967, part of the quiet but notably important work British survey ships carried out across the globe throughout the Cold War.

Aldabra and Diego Garcia, 1967

The 1967 voyage described here as carrying scientific personnel was part of something a great deal larger and considerably more contentious, and it is worth setting out plainly.

In 1965 Britain detached the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and Aldabra, Farquhar and Desroches from the Seychelles to create the British Indian Ocean Territory. In 1966 it signed an agreement with the United States covering defence installations and staging posts on those islands. Two things were planned: a major American base on Diego Garcia, and a long-range staging airfield on Aldabra. Surveying both required ships, and survey ships were what the Royal Navy had.

The Aldabra half of it did not happen, and the reason is one of the earliest successful pieces of international conservation politics. Aldabra is a raised coral atoll with the largest population of giant tortoises on earth and a flightless bird found nowhere else, and it had barely been studied. The Royal Society arranged for two scientists, David Stoddart of Cambridge and Chris Wright of the Natural History Museum, to go out with the military survey teams and report on what was there. On the strength of what they found, the Society came out publicly against the airfield in February 1967. The plan was dropped. Aldabra went back to the Seychelles at independence in 1976 and is now a World Heritage Site.

The Diego Garcia half did happen. The base was built, and between 1968 and 1973 the entire population of the Chagos Islands, something over a thousand people, was removed from their homes to make way for it. They have been trying to go back ever since, and the argument is still running in the courts. Vidal was a survey ship doing survey work and had no part in any of that, but the charts she and her sisters produced are the ones the base was built from, and it is more honest to say so than to leave 1967 as a line about transporting scientific personnel.

A Plaque That Outlasted the Ship

The brass plaque Vidal's landing party left on Rockall in 1955 was reportedly still in place as late as 1997, before being found missing after the rock was visited by Greenpeace protesters, a strange little postscript to an already unusual mission.

The plaque's disappearance has a context too. In June 1997 Greenpeace landed activists on Rockall, occupied it for forty-two days, and declared it the global state of Waveland in protest against Atlantic oil exploration. The brass plaque Vidal's party had cemented there in 1955 was not seen again afterwards. Nobody has ever established what happened to it, and the Atlantic is a perfectly sufficient explanation on its own.

HMS Vidal herself was broken up at Bruges in June 1976, having spent two decades quietly mapping the world's coastlines after making her one unforgettable claim on a barely habitable Atlantic rock.