HMS York (D98): From Escorting the Royal Yacht to Shadowing a Russian Carrier

The Last of Her Class

HMS York was built at Wallsend on Tyne and Wear, launched on 20 June 1982 and sponsored by Lady Gosling, a Batch III Type 42 guided missile destroyer and, notably, the very last Type 42 ever ordered for the Royal Navy, closing out a class that had already seen hard service in the Falklands War the same year she was launched.

What Batch III Actually Means

Batch III is the most consequential thing on her specification sheet, and it usually goes past as a label, so here is what it means: she was one of the four Type 42s built at something like the length the designers had asked for in the first place.

The Type 42 was designed in the late 1960s to carry the Sea Dart missile and to replace the enormous, expensive County class. What the designers wanted was a ship of about four hundred and seventy feet. What the Treasury would pay for was about four hundred and ten. So the hull was cut down, and the consequences ran for the next forty years: the ships were cramped, they were wet forward, they pitched hard in a seaway, there was no room to grow, and the structure was working harder than anybody would have liked.

The last four, York among them, were stretched back out. At a hundred and forty-one metres she is about sixteen metres longer and a little broader than a Batch I, at around five thousand two hundred tonnes full load, and the extra length went into a finer entry forward and a better ride. It also made her faster. York could do thirty-four knots, which made her the fastest destroyer in the Royal Navy.

Whether the stretch was worth having is not an academic question, because two of the short ones were sunk within weeks of her launch. HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry were both Batch I, and both were lost in the Falklands in 1982 while York was still fitting out on the Tyne. What Sea Dart could and could not do, and how the class was fixed afterwards, is set out in HMS Gloucester (D96) and HMS Edinburgh (D97).

She was also carrying a name with a very recent scar on it. The previous HMS York was a heavy cruiser blown up at anchor in Crete in March 1941 by two Italian explosive speedboats, aground for eight weeks as a gun battery and then abandoned. There were men alive in 1982 who had been aboard her.

Escorting the Royal Yacht to China

In 1986, York took part in the Armilla Patrol before escorting HMY Britannia during Queen Elizabeth II's state visit to China alongside the Duke of Edinburgh, a prestigious ceremonial role for a warship built primarily for air defence.

Armilla, and What Guardship Duty Is

The Armilla Patrol turns up twice in her record without being explained, and it accounts for a great deal of what the Royal Navy actually did between 1980 and the 2000s.

It began in October 1980, two weeks after Iraq invaded Iran, when British merchant shipping in the Gulf found itself trying to pass through a war. Armilla was the standing British naval presence set up to accompany it: two or three ships, permanently on station, escorting British-flagged merchantmen through the Strait of Hormuz and up and down the Gulf. It ran without a break for over twenty years and it is one of the longest continuous naval commitments in modern British history.

What that meant for a ship's company was months of forty-degree heat, no shore leave worth the name, a permanent air threat from two air forces neither of which particularly wanted to be careful, and mines. It was not a war and it was not peace, and it wore ships and people out.

The China trip is worth a footnote of its own. The Queen's state visit in October 1986 was the first ever made by a British monarch to China, it took place two years after the Sino-British agreement on the future of Hong Kong had been signed, and the Royal Yacht carried her from Peking down the coast to Shanghai and on to Hong Kong. York escorted HMY Britannia for it. A Sea Dart destroyer is an odd choice of escort for a state visit until you remember that the yacht had no armament of any kind and that this was the middle of the Cold War.

On War Footing in the Gulf

During the summer of 1990, while patrolling the Persian Gulf as part of the Armilla Patrol, York remained on station for a further three months following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, operating under continuous Defence Watches on a genuine war footing as the crisis that would become the Gulf War unfolded around her.

In August 1990 the situation stopped being ambiguous. Iraq invaded Kuwait while York was on station, and she simply stayed, on Defence Watches, which means the ship is closed up in two watches with the crew sleeping at their stations rather than in their bunks, for three months. It is a state a ship can only hold for so long, and holding it in a Gulf summer is a particular kind of endurance.

Protecting Ark Royal Over Iraq

York deployed to the Middle East and Mediterranean in 2002 in response to the September 11 attacks, relieving HMS Southampton, before providing air cover protecting HMS Ark Royal during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one of the most operationally significant deployments of her career.

Evacuations From Beirut and Libya

In 2006, York assisted in evacuating British citizens from Beirut during the Israel-Lebanon conflict, and after a 2010 to 2011 deployment to the Falkland Islands amid renewed UK-Argentina tensions, she later helped evacuate British nationals from Libya during the civil unrest there.

Into Benghazi

Helped evacuate British nationals from Libya deserves the specifics, because it is the sort of operation the Royal Navy is called on for far more often than it fights.

By the end of February 2011 eastern Libya had risen against Gaddafi, the regime was shelling its own cities, and there were several thousand foreign nationals, oil workers, engineers, teachers and their families, scattered across a country whose airports had stopped functioning. Britain sent ships. HMS Cumberland, who was on her way home to be scrapped, was turned round and sent in.

York went into Benghazi harbour on Wednesday 2 March 2011. She was carrying medical supplies donated by the Swedish government, which she landed, and she came out with eleven British nationals and thirty-two other Europeans and took them to Malta. Forty-three people is not a large number and it is the entire point: somebody has to go and get them, into a port in a city in the middle of an armed uprising, and a warship can do it because she can look after herself if the situation changes while she is alongside.

Shadowing a Russian Carrier

In December 2011, York spent a week shadowing the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov northeast of Orkney, a striking piece of Cold War-style vigilance carried out well into the twenty-first century, before finally entering Portsmouth Harbour for the last time on 20 September 2012 and decommissioning that 27 September, ending a career that had touched nearly every major British naval operation of her thirty years in service. She was scrapped in Turkey in 2015.

A Week Behind the Kuznetsov

The last operational thing she did is the most old-fashioned, and it is still going on today.

In December 2011 the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, with her escorts, came round the top of Scotland on her way to the Mediterranean and stopped in the Moray Firth approaches to shelter from the weather, which caused a certain amount of comment. York was sent to sit with her, and did so for a week.

Shadowing is a curiously formal business. The British ship stays in visual and radar contact, matches course and speed, photographs everything, listens to everything, notes what aircraft fly and when, and makes no attempt whatever to conceal that she is doing it. The Russian ship does the same in reverse. Neither is being unfriendly; both are collecting, and both are demonstrating that the other has been noticed. It is a ritual with about seventy years of unbroken practice behind it, and it did not stop when the Soviet Union did. The same carrier was escorted through the Channel again in 2016 by HMS Duncan (D37), a Type 45 doing exactly the job a Type 42 had done five years before.

She came into Portsmouth for the last time on 20 September 2012 and paid off a week later, thirty years old, having been in the Gulf twice, the Adriatic, the South Atlantic, the eastern Mediterranean, Beirut and Benghazi. She lay in the harbour for nearly three years, and on 19 August 2015 she was towed out for the last time, bound for the breakers at Aliaga near Izmir, where she arrived on 9 September. That is the same yard, and very nearly the same berth, that has taken most of the modern Royal Navy's retired ships since.