HMS Zest (R02): The Only Z-Class Destroyer Rebuilt as a Frigate

A Postwar Training Role

HMS Zest was a Z-class destroyer commissioned on 12 July 1944, and following a refit at Leith between September and November 1945, went on to serve with the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet before turning to torpedo training duties at Portsmouth in early 1948.

Why Her and Not the Others

A rare honour among her sister ships is a generous way of putting it. Being chosen for a Type 15 conversion was not an honour at all. It was a survey result.

The Type 15 programme took wartime emergency destroyers, cut them down to the upper deck and built an entirely new ship on top: a full-length enclosed superstructure, a low bridge set well aft, one twin 4-inch mounting right at the stern, and everything else given over to sonar, an operations room and two Limbo mortars in the quarterdeck. It cost about half the price of a new frigate and it produced a better submarine hunter than the money would otherwise have bought. Roughly forty ships went through it. The programme, and the ship they proved it on, are in HMS Wrangler (F157) and HMS Rapid (F138).

The catch is that it is only worth doing to a sound hull. Spending two years and a great deal of money rebuilding a ship whose frames are wasted is money thrown away, so every candidate was surveyed first, and the emergency-programme ships were, by design, not built to last. Some passed and some did not.

Her sister HMS Zebra (R81) is the direct comparison. Zebra was earmarked for the same conversion, the plan was cancelled in 1955 on the state of the ship, and she was later offered to West Germany and turned down after their inspectors looked at her. She went to the breakers in 1959. Zest, built at the same time to the same drawings, passed, was rebuilt, and got another fourteen years. That is the whole difference, and it comes down to how a particular hull happened to be welded and how it had been looked after.

What she got out of it was a genuinely different ship. She went into Chatham in 1954 as a 1944 gun destroyer and came out in 1956 as a Cold War anti-submarine frigate, and she then led the 3rd Training Squadron at Londonderry, which was where the Royal Navy taught the whole fleet to hunt submarines, and which is described in HMS Whitby (F36).

The Only One of Her Class Rebuilt

After a period in reserve at Chatham Dockyard, Zest underwent conversion into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate between 1954 and 1956, emerging with the new pennant number F102. She holds the genuine distinction of being the only Z-class destroyer ever converted into a Type 15 frigate, a rare honour among her sister ships.

Rescuing 45 People in a Typhoon

Zest led the 3rd Training Squadron before joining the 4th Frigate Squadron, and after a Malta refit deployed to the Far East in 1964, where she conducted patrols during the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation.

With a South China Sea typhoon closing in, after Bombay Shoal claimed the grounded merchant ship Pompadour and the tug Salvonia sent to help her also became stranded, Zest rescued the 45 people aboard both vessels, a particularly dramatic and dangerous rescue operation that stands as one of the finest moments of her later career.

Forty-Five People Off a Reef

The Bombay Shoal rescue is the best thing in her record and it needs its geography, because the location is most of the difficulty.

Bombay Shoal is a reef in the Spratly Islands, in the middle of the South China Sea. It is not near anywhere. The nearest useful port is several hundred miles off, it lies in the middle of the typhoon belt, and in 1964 it was uncharted enough, and disputed enough, that ships stayed away from it if they had any sense.

In November 1964 the merchant ship Pompadour put herself on it. The salvage tug Salvonia was sent to pull her off and got herself stranded too, which is the classic sequence and the reason salvage is a specialist trade. That left forty-five people sitting on a coral reef in the open sea, on two ships that were not going anywhere, with a typhoon coming.

Zest was the ship on hand. Taking people off a stranded vessel on a reef means putting your own boats into broken water over coral, in a rising sea, repeatedly, because a frigate cannot go anywhere near the shoal herself without joining them. It has to be done by boat, one load at a time, and every trip takes longer as the weather builds. She got all forty-five, and then had to be clear herself before the storm arrived.

What she was doing out there in the first place was the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, an undeclared war fought between 1963 and 1966 mostly in the jungles of Borneo and mostly with very small numbers of men, in which the Royal Navy's job was to stop Indonesian infiltrators crossing by sea. That campaign is described in HMS Albion (R07) and HMS Brighton (F106).

Breaking Free on the Way to the Scrapyard

After paying off in December 1965 and a further deployment to the West Indies in 1967, Zest was decommissioned in July 1968 and sold for scrap in 1969.

In a small final flourish of defiance, she broke free while under tow to the breakers behind the tug Bustler, though she was recovered and finally arrived at the Dalmuir yard on 18 July 1970, bringing to a close the career of the one Z-class destroyer that had earned herself an entirely new life as a frigate.

The Ship That Would Not Be Towed

Breaking free under tow is a good last line and it is worth knowing what she broke free from, because Bustler was not a harbour launch.

The Bustler class were Admiralty rescue tugs, built during the war for one of the least survivable jobs at sea: going out into the Atlantic in any weather to find torpedoed merchant ships that were still afloat and bring them home. They were powerful, immensely strong, and designed to hold on to something very large in something very unpleasant. Getting away from one is not easy.

She managed it anyway, somewhere on the passage north in 1970, was rounded up, and was delivered to Dalmuir on the Clyde on 18 July. Dalmuir is worth a note of its own. It had been Beardmore's great shipyard, which built battleships and the airship R34, and after the yard closed in 1930 the site became a shipbreaking basin that spent the next forty years taking apart the ships that Clydeside had spent the previous forty putting together.

So she was built for a war she reached with a year to spare, spent four years as a torpedo school and a reserve hull, was rebuilt into something entirely different, taught half the fleet to hunt submarines, took forty-five strangers off a coral reef ahead of a typhoon, and had to be caught twice on the way to the breakers. Of the eight Z-class destroyers, she is the one who got the most out of being one.