There have been three warships to bear the name Cardiff named after the capital of Wales, UK. The ships motto is "Agris in cardine rerum" which translates as "Keen in emergency". She has certainly adhered to that motto, whether it be in war or peace-time disaster relief operations.

HMS Cardiff (1652-1658)

The first HMS Cardiff was not built on the shores of Britain, but captured from the Dutch in 1652 by HMS Tiger, during the numerous clashes that took place between England and Holland. She was a modest 360 ton ship with an armament of 8 guns. Her primary roles were fishery and convoy protection, though in 1658 her relatively brief career in the RN came to an end when she was sold to Jamaica.

HMS Cardiff (1917-1947)

An astonishing absence of a Cardiff in the Royal Navy took place after the selling of the first ship, in which over 250 years passed until the second Cardiff was commissioned. It was an amazing, quick procession, from being ordered under an Emergency Plan in April 1916, due to WWI, then to being laid down in July 1916, to the culmination of her being launched in April 1917. She was a Ceres Class light cruiser, of 4,100 tonnes and an armament of just 5 x 6-inch guns. She was commissioned in 1917, becoming flagship of the 6th Light Cruiser Squadron, part of the Grand Fleet in July 1917. In 1918, the war had come to a close, and Cardiff had the presitigious distinction to lead the defeated German High Seas Fleet to the River Forth, where unknown to the British, they be scuttled by the Germans to ensure they did not become fall into the hands of the victors. Though WWI was over, her service was not. She deployed to the Baltic, operating near Reval against the Bolsheviks in operations that also involved Allied ground troops.

HMS Cardiff was to see yet another war, though she would not see action. She trained the Royal Navies future sailors, the sailors that would protect Britain, the way Cardiff and her crew had done so in WWI. She was broken up in 1946.

HMS Cardiff (1979-present day)


The third and present HMS Cardiff (D108) is a Type 42 (Batch 1) destroyer, and is much smaller than the Batch 3 of the Type. She was launched in 1974 by Lady Caroline Gilmore and commissioned in 1979. She is one of only a few ships still in the Royal Navy to have been involved in the Falklands War. She was not damaged in that conflict, though two of her sister-ships were sunk (HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry) and one suffered damage (HMS Glasgow). In 1991, Cardiff was deployed at the then largest deployment of Royal Navy warships since the Falklands War, in which she also had the distinction of being part of, during the Gulf War. On 24th January, while deployed to the Persian Gulf, Cardiff sighted three Iraqi vessels operating from the occupied Kuwaiti island of Qaruh. Her Lynx helicopter destroyed two of the vessels, which later turned out to be minesweepers. Late last year, Cardiff was once again in the Persian Gulf, this time on a six-month deployment as part of Armilla Patrol, returning to Britain in August 2003.

Type 42 (Batch 1) Statistics

  • Displacement: 4,820 tonnes
  • Length: 410 feet/125 metres
  • Beam: 47 feet/14.3 metres
  • Speed: 30 knots
  • Complement: 287 (Maximum 301)
  • Armament:
    • 2 x Sea Dart missile launcher
    • 4.5-inch (114 metres) Mk8 gun
    • 2 x 20mm Oerlikon guns
    • 2 x Phalanx (CIWS)
    • 2 x triple anti-submarine torpedo tubes
    • NATO Seagnat and DLF3 decoy launchers
  • Aicraft: Lynx Mk 8 helicopter:
    • Armament:
      • Sea Skua anti-ship missiles
      • Stingray anti-submarine torpedoes
      • Mk 11 depth charges
      • Machine Guns
  • Propulsion: Combined Gas and Gas (COGAG) turbines, two shafts, two turbines producing 36MW