HMS Active (F171): From Mount Tumbledown to a Pakistani Target Range

A Frigate Built to a Budget

HMS Active was one of the Royal Navy's Type 21 frigates, a class conceived in the 1960s as a fast, comparatively lightly armed design built to commercial shipbuilding standards, a deliberate choice to keep costs and build times down.

There were eight of them, and Active was the fifth. The Type 21 was unusual in being largely a commercial design, drawn up by Vosper Thornycroft and Yarrow rather than by the Admiralty's own constructors, and built to merchant rather than warship standards with an aluminium superstructure to save weight. Sailors liked them: they were fast, handsome, comfortable and roomy in a way that Admiralty designs of the period conspicuously were not. Naval architects were less enthusiastic, and the class would spend its whole career answering for the shortcuts that made it affordable.

Built by Vosper Thornycroft at Southampton, laid down on 23 July 1971 and launched on 23 November 1972, she entered service in June 1977, and had the distinction of being the first ship of her class completed with Exocet anti-ship missile launchers fitted forward from the start, giving her more punch than her earlier sisters.

At around 3,250 tons fully loaded, she measured 384 feet long with a 41 foot 9 inch beam, could reach 32 knots, and carried a complement of about 177, her main punch built around a single 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun forward alongside her Exocet launchers, Sea Cat missiles and torpedo tubes.

Her peacetime years followed the familiar pattern for a general-purpose frigate: fleet exercises, patrols, and the sort of overseas port visits collectively filed under showing the flag. None of it particularly hinted at what was coming in 1982.

The Falklands War

Active left Devonport on 10 May 1982 as part of the Bristol Group, reinforcements sent south after the Falklands War had already begun, and joined the task force later that month. Once there, she was worked hard: operating with the fleet east of the Falklands by day, escorting vital supply convoys into San Carlos Water, and repeatedly closing the coast at night to provide naval gunfire support.

She fired in support of troops ashore on five separate occasions, at Bluff Cove, Fitzroy, Berkeley Sound, Mount Tumbledown, and finally Port Stanley itself, including a night of shelling Argentine positions during the battle for Mount Tumbledown on 13 and 14 June, just before the Argentine surrender.

The gunfire support was not token. In one bombardment alone she put roughly 144 rounds of 4.5-inch ashore in a few hours, destroying an Argentine ammunition dump and supporting a Royal Marines advance. A Type 21 firing at that rate, close inshore, at night, in range of shore batteries and air attack, was doing precisely the job the class had been criticised for being too lightly built to do.

In the aftermath of the conflict, Active had a pair of 20mm Oerlikon cannon fitted to her hangar sides, guns salvaged from the wreck of HMS Ardent, one of the ships lost during the campaign. It was a quiet, practical way of putting recovered equipment back to use, and a small, permanent reminder aboard Active of the cost the campaign had carried elsewhere in the task force.

The detail worth pausing on is whose guns those were. HMS Ardent was not simply another ship lost in the campaign. She was a Type 21, one of Active's own seven sisters, bombed to destruction in Falkland Sound on 21 May 1982 with the loss of twenty-two of her people. Two of the eight ships of the class did not come home, Ardent and HMS Antelope, which is a quarter of the class gone in a fortnight. Active carried a piece of one of them on her hangar for the rest of her Royal Navy life.

One name recurs on her list of commanding officers. Commander Paul Canter had her through the Falklands, from 1981 to 1982, and came back as Captain Canter to command her again in 1988 and 1989. He is the only officer to have had her twice, which suggests either unusual affection or unusually short memory.

Mount Tumbledown usually gets a subordinate clause and no more, so it is worth setting out what she was firing into. Tumbledown is one of the highest points above Port Stanley and it was the last serious obstacle between the British force and the town. It was held by the 5th Marine Infantry Battalion under Commander Carlos Robacio, who were regulars, well dug in among the rocks, and who fought a great deal harder than a good many British accounts of the campaign expected anybody to.

The attack went in on the night of 13 June, made by the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards with mortar detachments from 42 Commando and the Gurkhas, and a troop of the Blues and Royals with two Scorpions and two Scimitars. A diversionary assault opened at half past eight in the evening, and the western end of the mountain was in British hands about two hours later. The rest of it took most of the night, at very close quarters among the rocks, and finished with bayonets; Major John Kiszely was first into one of the positions and broke his in the process. Nine British soldiers were killed and forty-three wounded. The Argentine battalion lost about thirty killed and thirty taken prisoner. Stanley surrendered the following day.

Two frigates supported that attack with their 4.5-inch guns through the night, Yarmouth and Active. What that means in practice is a ship steaming a slow, predictable pattern close inshore in the dark, within range of anything the shore cares to shoot back with, firing on corrections passed by a naval gunfire observer lying on a hillside with the infantry. It is the oldest job in the fleet and it is entirely unglamorous: nobody aboard sees a target, and the only measure of whether it worked is whether the men on the hill get where they are going. On the night of 13 June they did, and thirty-six hours later the war was over.

Cracks, Hurricanes, and a Freedom of the Town

Like several of her sister ships, Active suffered from hull cracking in the mid-1980s, a known weakness of the lightly built Type 21 design, and needed extra steel plating welded along both sides to keep her seaworthy.

Cracks were not her only structural problem. In 1987 she was run into by HMS Juno, a Leander that had by then been stripped of her weapons and converted into a navigational training ship, which is an embarrassing sentence to have to write in either ship's history. Active came off badly: dented along her side from abaft the bridge to the stern, her after 20mm gun damaged, and a torpedo launcher flipped over while still loaded with live weapons.

She carried on regardless, and in September 1988 was among the first Royal Navy ships on the scene after Hurricane Gilbert devastated Jamaica and Grand Cayman, arriving on 13 September to help with emergency relief.

She also kept up the Navy's tradition of civic affiliation, as the adopted ship of Burnley in Lancashire, a relationship close enough that she was granted the Freedom of the Town in 1989.

One of her anchors still stands at the town's Anchor Retail Park, and a nearby road is named Active Way in her honour, a lasting bit of Lancashire geography named after a warship that spent most of its life several thousand miles offshore.

A Second Career as Shah Jahan

Active was decommissioned and sold to Pakistan on 23 September 1994, recommissioned into the Pakistan Navy as PNS Shah Jahan.

She was not alone in going. Every one of the six Type 21s that survived the Falklands was sold to Pakistan between 1993 and 1995 and renamed as the Tariq class: Amazon became Babur, Ambuscade became Tariq, Arrow became Khaibar, Alacrity became Badr, Avenger became Tippu Sultan, and Active became Shah Jahan. An entire class of Royal Navy frigates emigrated intact, minus the two that had been sunk.

Her Exocet missiles and Sea Cat launcher were removed and replaced with SRBOC chaff launchers, a Phalanx close-in weapon system, and a Signaal DA08 air search radar in place of her original Type 992, while she was also fitted to operate a Westland Lynx helicopter, and between 1998 and 2008 she underwent an extensive modernisation at Naval Base Karachi that saw her reclassified as a guided missile destroyer.

In her new role she patrolled some particularly far-flung waters for a ship built on the Solent, including the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, and the wider Arabian Sea, and took part in exercises such as Inspired Union in 2008.

A Fitting, if Blunt, Final Chapter

Shah Jahan was finally decommissioned on 1 January 2021, having given Pakistan almost as many years of service as she had given Britain. Rather than being scrapped quietly, she was towed out into the North Arabian Sea and, on 12 January 2021, sunk as the target in a live-fire exercise, struck by anti-ship missiles and torpedoes in a demonstration of exactly the kind of firepower she herself had once carried.

It was a dramatic, almost theatrical end for a ship that had spent her career on the giving end of naval gunfire rather than the receiving end, and about as fitting a retirement as a warship can hope for.