Falklands warship to adventure cruise ship – tales from a life spent at sea
Most sailors sensibly run for safety if a hurricane is looming, but Rear-Admiral Richard Lippiett CB, CBE is not like most sailors. As warfare officer on a guided-missile destroyer, he found himself chasing a hurricane across the Caribbean in 1979 to deliver emergency relief supplies to islands in its path.
He recalls anchoring under black skies off Dominica and finding total devastation: “It was like a nuclear explosion, the people were shell-shocked.” He promptly organised a rescue party of 100 sailors who built a hospital and a morgue, and assisted in operations.
In his new role as guest lecturer on board Noble Caledonia cruise ships, Lippiett recently returned to Dominica, where he and his wife Jenny were invited by its president to a mini-state banquet, held in his honour. One minister said to him, with tears in his eyes: “I remember your ship coming in after the storm, it was the finest sight I’ve ever seen. God bless the Royal Navy.”
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Lippiett sees the relief operation as the highlight of a distinguished career that saw him rise from an 18-year-old cadet at Dartmouth to command a minesweeper eight years later, serve in the Falklands War as second in command of a frigate, become chief of staff to Nato naval forces in the Mediterranean, and then commandant of the Joint Services Command and Staff College. On retiring, he supervised the conservation of Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose.
Along with accounts of the voyages of early navigators and the Napoleonic Wars, his talks are peppered with anecdotes from his own life. Lippiett’s father was padre on HMS Glasgow during Second World War Arctic convoys and the D-Day landings. An early memory is of accompanying his father onto the ship at the age of 11, when it called at Brighton after the war.
“There was never any question after that of another career. I wanted to be at sea, preferably on a warship,” he says. As a teenager he read voraciously about naval history, and went dinghy sailing in conditions that would have health and safety officials in fits today. Some officers may find it daunting to take command of a ship at 26, but Lippiett revelled in it: “I thought it was fantastic. When you are given sole responsibility for a ship and its crew, you learn leadership skills quickly.”
Throughout the Falklands War he served on the frigate HMS Ambuscade: “We didn’t expect a shooting war but were prepared for it. We had been trained to fight Russians during the Cold War, and the drills we had learned were used against the Argentinians.”
His ship came under fire from Exocet missiles, and two sister frigates were sunk, but he says replenishing from supply ships for hours in hideous seas was far scarier than the adrenalin rush of being under attack. He kept family letters to and from the fleet, later publishing them in a book called War and Peas: Intimate Letters from the Falklands War 1982.
He insists that an equally challenging commission was his role as chief executive of the trust that preserved the Mary Rose and its artefacts in an award-winning new museum: “If I have a legacy, it is that my naval career was preparation for saving the Mary Rose.”
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His latest posting with Noble Caledonia also makes for rewarding retirement: “I love travel and being at sea, getting up at first light. Every day is different. Being just a speck in a huge ocean puts it all into perspective. I enjoy the challenge of applying my knowledge to help passengers.” Lippiett will be speaking on cruises to Holland, Antarctica and Melanesia departing between September 2018 and May 2019.
Does he miss the service? “No, but when I saw from the window of my Mary Rose office at Portsmouth a warship sailing out into rough seas, I had pangs of longing to be on board.”
Travelling on adventure cruise ships is clearly the next best thing.