40 Years of The 42
ON a winter day in 1975 tugs busied themselves around a new arrival at the Royal Navy dockyard in Portsmouth. The subject of their attention, a ship called Sheffield. A brand new ship, the first of a new generation of vessel that was to take the Royal Navy out of the steam age, through the cold war and into the hazardous waters of the 21st Century. By modern naval standards the Type 42 destroyer was a rush job. There was an urgency behind its building because the Royal Nav
