HMS Kent: Crew aboard Royal Navy frigate honour legendary stoker's 40-year career

Chief Petty Officer Paul Musselwhite has completed the rare feat of serving for four decades in the Navy. He has gone from being a 17-year-old rookie marine engineer to one of the most experienced damage control specialists in the Navy.

Commanding Officer Commander Jeremy Brettell celebrated the stoker’s achievement alongside the rest of the HMS Kent crew. CPO Musselwhite has spent just shy of 5,450 days at sea, nearly 15 years on the oceans.

The Wiltshire native passed through the gates of HMS Raleigh at the end of May 1983. He has spent most of his career on Portsmouth-based ships.

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His first deployment was aboard the destroyer HMS Bristol – which was the only one in its class – which took him to the Great Lakes, Canada and the the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans. CPO Musselwhite was then transferred to MS Ark Royal to bring her into service and another trip to the USA, this time to Fleet Week in New York where the carrier’s Harrier jets famously ‘bowed’ to the Statue of Liberty.

He has also served in all three Harrier carriers: Invincible, Illustrious and especially Ark Royal, surviving the bombing of the latter in 1992: an RAF Sea Harrier pilot accidentally dropped a practice bomb on the carrier rather than a towing target; the 28-pounder penetrated the flight deck and eventually exploded in the bowels of the ship wounding half a dozen crew and causing £60k damage.

CPO Musselwhite is also a veteran. He has been involved in the first Gulf War in 1990-1991, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns, the enforcement of the southern no-fly zone over Iraq in 1991-2003.

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The serviceman also helped evacuate British citizens from Libya during the North African nation’s civil war. He’s enjoyed two patrols of the Falklands with HMS York, at least one Christmas in Rio, six months in the Baltic with frigate HMS Iron Duke (and three successive appearances at Kiel Week).

And he finally got further than east than Singapore after 39 years with HMS Kent as she accompanied HMS Queen Elizabeth’s carrier group to the Pacific Rim in 2021.