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. Built by Vosper Thornycroft at Southampton, 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.

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.

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.

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. 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. Her Exocet missiles and Sea Cat launcher were removed and replaced with SRBOC chaff launchers, a Phalanx close-in weapon system, and updated radar, 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 genuinely 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.