NOTES TO EDITORS:The Ship’s details are as follows: Commanding Officer: Cdr R J Cox RN. HMS MANCHESTER is a Type 42 Batch 3 Air Defence Destroyer with a length of 141 meters and a displacement of 5200 tonnes. Her primary role is air defence and as such she is fitted with the Sea Dart missile system, other assets include her Lynx Mk 3 Helicopter, 4.5 inch gun, Phalanx close-in weapon system and 20mm guns. The ship was launched in 1980 and has a crew of 250. HMS MANCHESTER Public Relations Officer: Lieutenant Commander Tim Bailey Royal Navy.

Fifteen years ago after two centuries of presence at Bermuda, the Royal Navy, as a station, slipped its moorings at the Dockyard at Grassy Bay, the victim of the latest rounds of financial downsizing by the British Government of the day. A major element in the community life of Bermuda was thus swept away by the pen stroke of a bean counter.

Exiting stage left and right at the same time were detachments of the United States Navy and the Canadian Forces, removing from Bermuda all overseas military forces. March 1995 did not bring a spring of new growth in those arenas, but a winter of cold buildings, deserted docks and empty moorings, in large part due to the end of the Cold War and the break-up of that old enemy developed in Stalinist times, the USSR, that is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Some may have rejoiced at the departure of those friendly militaries, but much was lost to us as a community, as evinced by the recent celebration of the Dockyard Apprentices, to say little in these recessionary times of the multi-million-dollar charge to our small exchequer in taking over the running and expense of the airport.

Perhaps we too readily forget that Bermuda was for more than a century the epicentre of military readiness on the part of the British in the waters of the western North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, supported by Halifax in the north and stations like Jamaica to the south. In 1995, we lost our identity as the “Gibraltar of the West” and while it might be said that we are the better for it, the reality check is that the island has lost its international military significance, perhaps forever. Along with the significance went the billions of pounds and dollars that poured into the local economy from 1795 to 1995.

The military funding was augmented after a time by a vibrant tourism economy, particularly after the advent of airplane travel, and latterly by the so-called “international business” (defined as to ignore the fact that the largest international business is tourism). Like the military, however, the great ship of tourism is somewhat in unchartered waters, with a number of hotels and guest houses lost to the reefs of history in the last 25 years and, as we are seeing, some of the warships of international business appear to prefer the ski slopes of the Alps to the slalom of uncertain waters around these shores.

Thus for some, it was of interest of late to experience the visit of the West Indies Guardship of the Royal Navy, HMS Manchester, on it way home after some months of duty in the Caribbean. That, however, was the last voyage of the warship, for unless it is bought by another country, it is destined for a modern scrap yard of history, perhaps on one of those strands in the East where they beach such obsolete vessels and take them apart by hand, like the flensing of a great whale.

This last Manchester is the third Royal Navy vessel to carry that name, assigned eponymously for the northern English city. The first vessel was a stores ship, hired in 1814. The second, appropriately was a “Town class” light cruiser, launched in 1937, but lost in action in the Mediterranean Sea in 1943, the only warship to be sunk by torpedo boats, in that case Italian, in the Second World War. The third is a Type 42 destroyed, laid down at the great Vickers shipyard in 1978 and commissioned in 1982.

From part of the image of the ship’s crest, taken from that of the city of Manchester, the vessel’s nickname is apparently “Busy Bee”, and that is exactly what she had been doing of late, stinging drug traffickers in the Caribbean or bringing a little honey by way of assistance to St. Lucia after the devastation of Hurricane Tomas.

Under Commander Rex Cox RN, HMS Manchester was at Barbados for the funeral of its late Prime Minister, David Thompson, when assistance at St. Lucia was requested through the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the wake of the hurricane, which killed 14 people there in the last days of October 2010.

As CO Cox related: “HMS Manchester arrived off the town Soufriere not knowing what to expect. Once the team had deployed it was immediately obvious that help was required to recover from the hurricane. HMS Manchester’s Ship’s Company will do everything in their power to save life and ease suffering of the villagers until local authorities are in a position to take over.” The town of 1500 had been cut off from the rest of St. Lucia by landslides and was without electricity or running water. The ship also supplied help in various ways to the village of Morne Fond St Jacques.

In other Caribbean work, while on a Counter Narcotics Patrol, HMS Manchester intercepted a Colombian fishing vessel that had been converted to smuggle cocaine: its boarding parties managed to save as evidence two of the eight bales of the illicit drug thrown overboard by the traffickers. Thus a ship of the Royal Navy continued partly on a war footing, although the “war on drugs” is now perhaps the longest running conflict in history and more unwinnable perhaps than Afghanistan.

At Bermuda, the crew took a bit of a break from their seven-month cruise, the Dart missiles and other weaponry inactive, though one took note on boarding of the machine guns in the hands of the female guards. The helicopter too was idle, so one could not cadge a ride to take some new aerial pictures of the works at the Casemate Barracks, one of the military monuments of the old Royal Navy Dockyard at Bermuda now in service to defend a tourism, rather than a war economy.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.