HMS Zulu (F124): The Frigate That Fired the Royal Navy's Last Full Broadside

Built on the Clyde

HMS Zulu was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Govan on the Clyde, her keel laid down on 13 December 1960, launched on 3 July 1962 and commissioned into service on 17 April 1964 at a cost of some £5,100,000, a Type 81 Tribal-class frigate that joined the 9th Frigate Squadron operating east of Suez.

The Odd Ship Out

The Type 81 Tribals were unlike anything else in the fleet, and understanding what they were built for explains most of what Zulu spent her life doing.

By the late 1950s the Royal Navy had two kinds of frigate, both designed to fight in the North Atlantic: anti-submarine ships and air defence ships, optimised for a short, violent war against the Soviet Union in cold water. What it did not have was anything for the other job, which in practice took up far more of its time: sitting off a colony or a protectorate somewhere hot, for months, on its own, a very long way from a dockyard, prepared to do a bit of everything.

So seven ships were built to do that instead, and almost every feature follows from it. A gun forward and a gun aft, so that she could shoot at something in any direction without manoeuvring. A helicopter, and a hangar, which no frigate of her size had carried before. Air conditioning throughout, which sounds trivial and is not, because it is the difference between a crew that can work in the Gulf and one that cannot. Enormous endurance. And a combined steam and gas turbine plant, the first in a British warship, so that she could sit on one boiler for economy and light the gas turbine when she needed to move, which is described in HMS Ashanti (F117).

They were, in other words, the last ships the Royal Navy built for an empire, delivered just as it was being given away. All seven were in commission by 1964. Britain announced the withdrawal from east of Suez in January 1968.

A Rescue in the Mediterranean

In 1965, Zulu took part in the rescue of the crew of the Greek merchant ship Thrasyvoulos, a reminder that a frigate's working life is rarely confined to exercises and patrols, and that a ship on station can find herself called upon for entirely unscripted emergencies.

Enforcing the Beira Patrol

Between 1966 and 1967, Zulu served on the Beira Patrol, the Royal Navy's long and often tedious operation to enforce oil sanctions against Ian Smith's illegal regime in Rhodesia by intercepting tankers attempting to supply the landlocked country via the Mozambican port of Beira.

Zulu spent over 120 days on patrol in 1967 alone, intercepting four ships suspected of running the blockade, unglamorous but important work in support of international sanctions.

The Beira Patrol was the classic Tribal job and it is worth knowing how long it went on: from March 1966 to June 1975, continuously, nine years and three months, with a British frigate permanently on station in the Mozambique Channel. It is the longest continuous naval blockade in modern British history and it did not work, because oil went into Rhodesia overland from South Africa the whole time and everybody knew it. What that felt like from the deck of a ship doing it is set out in HMS Eskimo (F119) and HMS Mohawk (F125).

Fighting a Tanker Fire

In 1970, Zulu assisted in fighting a fire aboard the tanker Pacific Glory, going on to further deployments to the West Indies, the Far East and Belize over the following years, a well-travelled frigate whose service record ranged from sanctions enforcement to firefighting at sea.

The Pacific Glory

Assisted in fighting a fire aboard the tanker Pacific Glory is one line for one of the worst things ever to happen in sight of the Isle of Wight.

On the evening of 23 October 1970, six miles off the island, the Liberian tanker Pacific Glory and the tanker Allegro collided. Allegro had altered course to avoid a third ship, could not get out of the way in time, and went into Pacific Glory's side. The impact set off an explosion in Pacific Glory's engine room and she caught fire, loaded, in the middle of one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Thirteen of her forty-two crew were killed. Twenty-four survivors, several of them critically burned, were brought ashore that night and taken to the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar in Gosport. A Portsmouth Fire Brigade officer was the first man to get aboard the burning ship.

What followed was a salvage operation run by the Royal Navy, with tugs, fire parties and warships working a blazing tanker for days while trying to keep her away from the shore and stop the oil coming out of her. She ended up aground on a shingle bank about four miles off the south-east corner of the Isle of Wight, and the whole affair was one of the events that pushed Britain into taking oil pollution at sea seriously.

Zulu was one of the ships that went. Nothing about her design or her training had anything to do with fighting a fire on a tanker, which is precisely the point of a general purpose frigate: she was there, and she had people, boats, pumps and a helicopter.

Reserve, the Falklands, and the Last Full Broadside

Manpower shortages saw Zulu placed in reserve in 1979, before she was recommissioned during the Falklands War in August 1982, called back into service at a moment when every available hull mattered.

She was finally decommissioned on 30 March 1984, and in doing so earned herself a genuine footnote in naval history: as the last Royal Navy ship in service armed with multiple gun turrets, she fired what is recorded as the Royal Navy's last 'full' broadside, a fittingly resonant send-off for a type of firepower that had defined naval warfare for centuries.

What the Last Broadside Actually Was

The last full broadside is a claim worth explaining rather than repeating, because a broadside from a frigate is not what the phrase conjures up.

A broadside, properly, is every gun that will bear fired together on one side. It is a battleship idea, and by the 1980s it belonged to the past for the plainest possible reason: British warships had stopped having more than one gun. The Leanders had a single twin mounting forward. The Type 21s, the Type 22s and the Type 42s all had one 4.5-inch gun, forward, and nothing else. There is no such thing as a broadside from one gun.

The Tribals were different, because they had been designed for shore bombardment and colonial work, and they carried a 4.5-inch gun forward and another aft. By 1984 they were the last ships in the Royal Navy so arranged, and Zulu was the last of the Tribals in commission. When she fired both together for the last time before paying off on 30 March 1984, that was the end of a way of arming warships that had run continuously since the sixteenth century.

It is a small thing and it is not nothing. Every British warship built since has had one gun, mounted forward, and it is there mainly for naval gunfire support and for shooting at small boats. The business of putting several heavy guns in a ship and firing them at another ship, which is what a navy meant for four hundred years, stopped with her.

A Second Career in Indonesia

HMS Zulu was sold to Indonesia on 16 April 1984 and renamed KRI Martha Khristina Tiyahahu. After refurbishment, she was commissioned into the Indonesian Navy on 2 May 1985, going on to serve for a further fifteen years before being struck from the Indonesian naval register in 2000, bringing to a close the career of a frigate whose most famous moment had come at the very end of her British service.

Who Martha Christina Tiahahu Was

The Indonesian name is the best thing in the whole story and it goes by as a spelling difficulty. It should not.

Martha Christina Tiahahu was born on the island of Nusa Laut in the Moluccas, in what is now eastern Indonesia, in about 1800. In 1817 the Moluccans rose against the returning Dutch colonial administration in what is remembered as the Pattimura rebellion. She fought in it, alongside her father, at the age of seventeen: not in a supporting role but in the fighting, with a spear, and there are contemporary Dutch accounts of her doing it.

The rebellion was crushed. Her father was executed. She was captured, and was being shipped to Java as forced labour when she refused all food and medicine, and died aboard on 2 January 1818. She was eighteen. She was buried at sea in the Banda Sea, and she is a National Hero of Indonesia; her birthday is a public commemoration in the Moluccas.

So a British frigate built on the Clyde to police an empire spent the last fifteen years of her life under the flag of a country that had thrown out its own empire, carrying the name of an eighteen-year-old girl who died resisting one. She was struck off in 2000, thirty-six years after commissioning at Govan, and there is no obvious way to improve on that as an ending.