HMS Whitby (F36): The Frigate That Gave Her Name to a Whole Class

The Build: Birkenhead

HMS Whitby was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 30 September 1952, launched on 2 July 1954 and commissioned on 10 July 1956, the lead ship of the Whitby-class Type 12 frigates, a specialised design built specifically to counter the new generation of fast diesel-electric submarines with speeds exceeding 27 knots.

The Price of Being First

Four years between laying down and launching, and another two before she commissioned, is an extraordinary length of time to spend building a two-thousand-ton frigate, and it is the whole story of what being lead ship means.

The design was still being argued about while she was on the slipway. The Admiralty had approved a sketch design in February 1950 for a ship of about eighteen hundred tons; what eventually went to sea in 1956 was two and a half thousand tons full load, because every time somebody thought of something the ship had to grow to carry it. Budget restrictions did the rest. Her sisters, and then the nine Rothesays that followed, were built far more quickly, because by then somebody had found out the hard way what worked.

Two of the things that did not work are visible in photographs. The funnel she was designed with was intended to survive a nuclear blast, and it down-draughted so badly that hot exhaust gas rolled back over her own upper deck; it was replaced before completion with the heightened, raked, domed funnel that then went into the whole family. And her bridge front is vertical. Every other ship in the class, and every British escort afterwards, got bridge windows raked back at an angle, because a vertical pane of glass reflects the inside of your own bridge at you in the half-light of dawn and dusk, which is exactly when you most want to see out. Whitby is the only one with the flat face, and it is how you tell her apart at a glance.

What the class was actually solving, and how the Cod Wars then defined the type in the public mind, is set out in HMS Rothesay (F107) and HMS Eastbourne (F73).

A Purpose-Built Submarine Hunter

As the Type 12 design, Whitby displaced 2,150 tons standard and up to 2,560 tons at full load, could make 30 knots, and carried a twin 4.5-inch gun mount along with two Limbo anti-submarine mortars capable of straddling a target both above and below to create a convergent, more assured kill.

Her sonar suite of Type 174 search, Type 162 classification and Type 170 targeting sets represented the most advanced anti-submarine detection available to the Royal Navy when she entered service.

Whitby, Which Is Where the Explorers Came From

The name is better chosen than it looks. Whitby is a small harbour town on the North Yorkshire coast, best known now for an abbey on a cliff, a fishing fleet and a considerable quantity of Dracula. It was also, in the eighteenth century, one of the great shipbuilding towns of England, and it built a very particular kind of vessel: the cat-built bark, a broad, flat-bottomed, immensely strong collier designed to carry coal down to London and to take the ground safely on a tidal beach without breaking her back.

When James Cook, who had learned his seamanship in exactly those colliers out of Whitby, was given the Pacific, he refused the sleek naval sloops he was offered and insisted on a Whitby cat. HMS Endeavour was the Whitby collier Earl of Pembroke. Resolution was the Whitby collier Marquis of Granby. Adventure and Discovery came from the same town and the same yards. The reason was simple: a ship that can be run up a beach and repaired without a dockyard is the only kind you want when the nearest dockyard is twelve thousand miles behind you, which is precisely what saved the expedition when Endeavour tore her bottom open on the Great Barrier Reef.

So a frigate named Whitby, designed to keep the sea in heavy weather for weeks at a time a long way from help, is carrying the name of the town that supplied every ship Cook took to the Pacific. Nobody at the Admiralty in 1950 was thinking about that. It is still true.

Training at Londonderry

Upon completion, Whitby joined the 3rd Training Squadron at Londonderry, helping to prepare crews for the wider fleet of frigates that would follow her design, with Captain Desmond Cassidi taking command in 1960 as she continued her role shaping the Royal Navy's anti-submarine expertise.

Why Londonderry

The 3rd Training Squadron at Londonderry sounds like a quiet appointment and was nothing of the kind. Londonderry was where the Royal Navy taught anti-submarine warfare, and it was there for a reason that is pure geography.

The city sits on the Foyle, and out beyond the lough is the North Atlantic, deep water within a few hours of the berth. It had been the western terminus of the Battle of the Atlantic, the place the escort groups came home to, and after the war the Joint Anti-Submarine School was established there so that ships and submarines could exercise together in the same water the war had been fought in. Every frigate captain, sonar operator and anti-submarine officer in the fleet went through it.

Putting the newest and most advanced anti-submarine frigate in the navy into the training squadron was therefore not a waste of her. It was the fastest way to get the whole fleet familiar with what a Type 12 could do, and it meant that when the other five, and then the Rothesays, and then the Leanders, came into service, there were already people who knew how to fight them.

The Man Who Had Her

Captain Desmond Cassidi deserves rather more than his surname, because his career is a tour of the second half of the twentieth century at sea.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1938, at thirteen. He spent the war in HMS Cumberland and in the destroyer HMS Hardy, on the Iceland patrols and the Russian convoys, and he was off the Normandy beaches. He then went into the Fleet Air Arm and commanded 820 Naval Air Squadron. He had Whitby from 1959 to 1961.

After that he had HMS Undaunted in 1967 and the carrier HMS Ark Royal in 1972, became Flag Officer Aircraft Carriers and Amphibious Ships in 1974, Second Sea Lord in 1979 and Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command in 1982, and retired as Admiral Sir Desmond Cassidi in 1985. So the man who ran the Royal Navy's people through the Falklands era had learned the frigate trade on the Foyle, in this ship.

Between 1962 and 1964 she was in the 25th Escort Squadron, alongside her own successor design Rothesay, the elderly destroyer Cavendish, Brighton and Llandaff.

From the Mediterranean to Greenland

Whitby saw service in the Mediterranean and Atlantic through 1966, and in 1968 carried out fishery protection duties off Greenland, before taking part in Navy Days at Portsmouth Dockyard that same year, giving the public a rare close look at the ship that had defined an entire generation of frigate design.

A Cancelled Sale to Pakistan

HMS Whitby was decommissioned in 1974 after some eighteen years of service, and was laid up for a time awaiting a potential sale to Pakistan that was ultimately cancelled, before she was finally sold for scrapping in 1979, bringing to a close the career of the ship whose name would be remembered for decades through the wider Whitby class she had led into service.

What She Actually Left Behind

Gave her name to a class undersells it considerably, because the family tree that starts with this hull is the most successful thing British warship design produced after 1945.

Six Whitbys were built for the Royal Navy. Then nine Rothesays, which were the same ship improved, and which later got a helicopter hangar. Then twenty-six Leanders, which were the same hull again with a beam increase, and which the Royal Navy operated into the 1990s and which are still remembered as the best-looking warships Britain ever built. And then the exports, all off the same drawing: two for India, three for South Africa, four for Australia, ships for New Zealand and Chile and elsewhere. Something over fifty ships, in six navies, across four decades, from one 1950 sketch design.

The Leander is described in HMS Leander (F109), and it is worth noting what she has in common with this ship: a hull form nobody could improve on, which is why they kept building it.

Whitby herself got none of the reward. The Rothesays were rebuilt to Leander standard with hangars and Seacat; the Whitbys were not, beyond having corroded hull plating renewed, because there is only so much money and they were the oldest. She paid off in 1974 at eighteen, sat waiting for a sale to Pakistan that never happened, and went to the breakers in 1979 while ships built to her design were still coming out of yards on three continents.