The decision was taken in 1981 to end Britain’s naval presence in the South Atlantic. Given the sum total of that presence was a small ice patrol vessel named HMS Endurance, this decision might have seemed an insignificant part of the defence review that year which condemned around a fifth of the royal navy’s warships.
But the South Atlantic is home to the Falkland Islands, a British archipelago that had long been the subject of a bitter territorial dispute with nearby Argentina, and in choosing to scrap its lone ship based in the region Britain had signalled that it would not, seemingly even could not, fight to defend its claim to the islands.
The captain of the Endurance, Nicholas Barker, recognised this and warned London that minds in Buenos Aires were turning towards taking the Falklands by force. Within a year Argentina had invaded, starting a conflict in which nearly a thousand people were killed.
