HMS Alacrity (F174): The Frigate That Dodged Torpedoes in the Dark

A Quietly Adventurous Peacetime Career

HMS Alacrity, built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, was a Type 21 frigate commissioned on 2 July 1977 and completed with Exocet anti-ship missiles fitted from new, and even before her most famous year she had picked up an unusual claim to fame.

Yarrow is a name worth knowing, because for the best part of a century it meant one particular thing. Alfred Yarrow opened his first yard at Folly Wall in Poplar, on the Isle of Dogs, in 1865, building steam launches for rivers and lakes; he moved into torpedo boats, and then into destroyers, and the firm built the Royal Navy's first of those, the Havock class of 1893. What Yarrow sold was speed. The yard built the first naval vessel anywhere in the world to exceed thirty knots and, later, the first to exceed forty, and in navies from Brazil to Japan a Yarrow ship was understood to be a fast ship. The whole business moved to Scotstoun on the Clyde in 1906, four or five thousand tons of plant going north on a trainload of forty or fifty wagons a day, and the first hull off the new slips in July 1908 was a destroyer for Brazil. The yard is still there, now part of BAE Systems, still building frigates for the Royal Navy.

She was the sixth of the eight Type 21s, a class the sailors liked and the naval architects did not, built to commercial standards with an aluminium superstructure to keep the weight and the price down. Alacrity was one of the later ships, which is why she came out of the yard with Exocet already fitted rather than having it added afterwards.

That same year she took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, and in 1980, on deployment to the Far East, a visit to Shanghai made her the first British warship to enter China's Yangtze River since HMS Amethyst famously escaped it under fire in 1949, a small but pointed piece of Cold War-era naval diplomacy given what that river had meant to Anglo-Chinese relations barely three decades before.

The Yangtze reference is worth unpacking, because it was not a casual bit of history. In 1949 HMS Amethyst had been shelled, grounded and then trapped in that river for a hundred days by Communist artillery before making a night dash for the sea. For a British frigate to steam up the same water on a courtesy visit thirty-one years later was a quiet way of noting that the relationship had changed.

South to the Falklands

Alacrity departed Devonport on 5 April 1982 under the command of Commander Christopher Craig, bound for the South Atlantic as part of the task force assembled to retake the Falkland Islands. She was in the thick of it almost immediately: on 1 May she was damaged by an Argentine bomb, and her embarked Lynx helicopter carried out an attack on the settlement of Islas Malvinas and the Argentine vessel Forrest.

Her captain that year is worth knowing about too. Christopher Craig had Alacrity from 1980 to 1982, and nine years later he was back in a war zone as the officer commanding all twenty-six British ships in the Gulf campaign, which made him the only senior British officer to hold command afloat in both conflicts. He later wrote the whole thing up in a book called Call for Fire. Whatever else the night in Falkland Sound was, it was a very unusual thing to ask of a frigate captain, and it was asked of a man who would end up doing the same job on a very much larger scale.

Her most dramatic moment came on the night of 10 to 11 May, when she was sent through the dangerous waters of Falkland Sound specifically to draw out any Argentine ships, or at least confirm the strait was clear of mines.

She found rather more than she bargained for, running into the Argentine naval transport Isla de los Estados, a roughly 3,000-ton supply ship laden with aviation fuel, and sinking her with her own 4.5-inch gun in a short, sharp night action near the aptly named Swan Islands.

On her way back out of the Sound in the small hours of 11 May, she and her sister ship Arrow, both towing anti-torpedo decoys, were stalked by the Argentine submarine San Luis, which crept to within a few kilometres and fired an SST-4 torpedo before the weapon's guidance wire cut out.

By some accounts the torpedo went on to strike one of Arrow's decoys without exploding rather than simply missing outright; either way, neither frigate was hit, and Commander Craig did not learn quite how close the attack had come until after the war was over.

The ship alongside her that night has her own account of the war worth reading: HMS Arrow was the first British ship hit in the campaign and the one that went alongside Sheffield to take off her people.

Alacrity's war was not over. On 25 May, the day Britain lost the container ship SS Atlantic Conveyor to an Exocet strike, she closed alongside the burning ship despite a heavy swell, using lifelines to help survivors across and pulling others from the water as they scrambled down nets; her own hull, already stressed by weeks of South Atlantic weather, took further damage in the process.

She recovered the last of Atlantic Conveyor's lifeboats at eleven that night, part of a rescue that could not save everyone: twelve men were lost with the ship, including her master, Captain Ian North.

A Long Cold War Coda

Like most of her class, Alacrity suffered from the Type 21's well-known hull cracking problems through the mid-1980s, a design weakness rooted in the mismatched expansion rates between the ships' steel hulls and their weight-saving aluminium superstructures, worsened by the pounding they had taken in South Atlantic seas; welded steel plates and girders were needed to keep her sound.

The fix was not subtle. A steel plate was welded down each side of the ship to hold her together, and while the yard had her open they took the opportunity to make changes aimed at reducing her hull noise, which mattered rather more to an anti-submarine frigate than it might sound.

She continued in service through the rest of the decade, including humanitarian relief work off Montserrat in 1989 following the devastation of Hurricane Hugo, a rather gentler kind of deployment after the violence of 1982.

A Second Career as PNS Badr

Alacrity was transferred to Pakistan on 1 March 1994 and recommissioned as PNS Badr, with her original Sea Cat missile system replaced by a Phalanx close-in weapon system and Harpoon anti-ship missiles added as part of her modernisation.

She was not sold on her own. The Type 21s were designed by Vosper Thornycroft and Yarrow from 1968 and were the first purpose-built Royal Navy frigates with gas turbines throughout, eight of them altogether; two, Ardent and Antelope, were lost in Falkland Sound within three days of each other in May 1982. The six that survived went on until 1993 and 1994 and were then sold in a single job lot to Pakistan, where they became the Tariq class, named for the first of them handed over, the former HMS Ambuscade (F172). A whole class of British frigates changing flag together is a rare thing, and it is why so many of these articles end in Karachi.

The name she was given had been used before, and by another British ship. Badr commemorates a battle fought in 624, and the Pakistan Navy had already put it on a warship once: PNS Badr of 1957 was the former HMS Gabbard, a Battle-class destroyer sold at the same time as HMS Cadiz (D79). So Alacrity took a name that a British-built destroyer had already carried at the bombardment of Dwarka in 1965, and then wore it for nineteen years, which is two years longer than she had spent under the White Ensign. She was decommissioned in April 2013, thirty-six years after she was commissioned at Yarrow's.

She went on to serve Pakistan for almost two more decades, taking part in exercises such as Inspired Union in 2008, before finally being decommissioned in April 2013, more than forty years after her keel had first gone down on the Clyde, a career spanning a Chinese river, a South Atlantic war, a Caribbean hurricane, and two navies.