HMS Amazon (F169): The Fire That Exposed a Whole Class's Weakness

The First of a New Breed

HMS Amazon has the distinction of being the lead ship of the Royal Navy's Type 21 frigate class, a design built to commercial shipbuilding standards to keep costs and construction times down. Built by Vosper Thornycroft in Southampton, her keel was laid on 6 November 1969, she was launched by Princess Anne on 26 April 1971, and she finally entered service on 11 May 1974, at a cost of £16.8 million.

The phrase built to commercial standards undersells what was actually going on. The Type 21s were the first modern British frigates not designed by the Admiralty at all. Vosper Thornycroft and Yarrow designed, financed and built them on a fixed price, with the Ministry of Defence undertaking to buy the ships once they were finished. The idea was that commercial yards would be quicker, cheaper and rather better at producing something other navies might want to buy as well. Early bids put a Type 21 at roughly three and a half million pounds against about five million for a Leander, which is precisely the sort of number that makes a Treasury sit up.

It did not work out that way. The 1970s supplied inflation, the Navy supplied changes to the specification once building was under way, and the yards discovered that designing a whole warship is a genuinely different discipline from designing a good hull with a nice bridge. Costs ran far past the estimates, as the figure for Amazon herself makes plain. What the Navy got in return was the best-looking and by common consent the most comfortable frigate in the fleet, adored by the men who served in her. What it did not get was margin. An Admiralty design carries spare weight and spare volume for the thirty years of extra sensors, aerials and weapons that any warship accumulates, and the Type 21s had almost none, which is the thread running through everything that went wrong with the class afterwards.

The name has a rather good piece of symmetry attached to it. The previous HMS Amazon was a destroyer ordered in 1924, designed and built privately by Thornycroft in answer to an Admiralty request for a ship that gathered up everything the Great War had taught about destroyers. Thornycroft worked up at least four competing designs before settling on the one that was built. Yarrow submitted its own answer in HMS Ambuscade, and between them those two prototypes settled the pattern that produced the A class of 1929 and, through it, essentially every British destroyer down to 1945. Half a century later the Navy went to the same two firms with the same sort of question and got the Type 21, with Vosper Thornycroft naming the first of them Amazon and Yarrow's contribution to the class including a ship called Ambuscade. Some jokes in the Royal Navy take fifty years to land.

Her machinery was arranged as a combined gas or gas plant, cruising on Rolls-Royce Tyne turbines and sprinting on Olympus turbines to a top speed of over 30 knots. On a full load displacement of around 3,250 tons and a crew of some 177, that combination made her one of the fastest general-purpose frigates in the fleet.

She carried a single 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun forward, a Sea Cat missile launcher for close-range air defence, two triple torpedo tubes and a flight deck aft, originally for a Westland Wasp helicopter. The Wasp gave way to the more capable Lynx from 1978, following successful trials aboard Amazon herself in July 1977.

A Fire That Revealed a Real Weakness

In June 1977 Amazon took part in the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, a proud showcase moment for the Royal Navy's newest class of frigate. Only months later, in November 1977, she suffered a serious engine room fire near Singapore that turned into a truly important lesson for the entire Type 21 class.

The blaze started with a fuel leak, and once it took hold it found fuel of a different kind in the ship's own construction: ladders made of aluminium alloy, used extensively to save weight, actually melted in the heat.

A Warning Not Heeded

That fire was an early, largely contained demonstration of a trade-off the Royal Navy had made deliberately. Aluminium had gone into the Type 21s specifically to save weight and cost, part of a wider Ministry of Defence push during the 1960s and 1970s to avoid what critics of the era called gold-plating expensive warships.

Five years later, two of Amazon’s sister ships paid the fuller price. HMS Ardent was sunk by Argentine air attack on 22 May 1982, and HMS Antelope was lost two days later after an unexploded bomb detonated on board.

In both cases fire took hold fast, and the class’s aluminium content, along with the way steel and aluminium expand differently under heat and can crack a ship’s decking, was identified as a real factor in how quickly the damage spread.

Amazon herself never had to answer that question in combat. While all seven of her sister ships fought through the South Atlantic campaign, she was thousands of miles away on the Armilla Patrol, the standing Royal Navy deployment set up in September 1980 to protect British shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War’s Tanker War.

The Armilla Patrol is worth a note of its own, because it turned out to be one of the longest running commitments the Royal Navy ever took on. It was set up in September 1980, immediately after Iraq invaded Iran, to put British warships in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz alongside British-flagged merchant shipping, and it simply never stopped. Amazon was not in the South Atlantic in 1982 because she was already somewhere else the country had decided it needed a frigate. That is not a footnote to her career. For most warships, most of the time, that is the career.

She was the only Type 21 not to serve in the Falklands, sailing south afterwards between August and November 1982 to support the fleet once the fighting was over.

It is worth reading her story alongside theirs. HMS Ardent and HMS Antelope were lost within two days of each other in San Carlos Water, while HMS Active spent the war firing her 4.5-inch in support of the soldiers ashore. HMS Avenger sailed late and stayed to the end. Amazon, the ship that had already shown the class what a serious fire could do to it, was the one that never had to find out in earnest.

A Coral Reef and Two Decades on Patrol

Amazon added a further scrape to her record in December 1980, striking a coral pinnacle off Belize. Later in her career she ranged much further still, joining the multinational RIMPAC exercise in the Pacific and entering Pearl Harbour on 1 June 1986, a striking demonstration of just how far a general-purpose frigate’s reach could extend.

Like other Type 21s, she suffered from hull cracking through the mid-1980s and underwent major refitting, with steel plating reinforcing her structure and four Exocet anti-ship missile launchers added to sharpen her offensive punch, fitted last among her class to receive them.

A Long Second Career as PNS Babur

Amazon was decommissioned on 30 September 1993 and sold to Pakistan the same day, recommissioned as PNS Babur with pennant number D-182 as part of what the Pakistan Navy grouped together as its Tariq class.

Between 1998 and 2002 she was substantially modernised at Karachi Shipyard, emerging with new missile systems, a close-in weapon system, and updated radar and sonar, changes significant enough that Pakistan reclassified her as a destroyer rather than a frigate.

Her long Gulf record continued into the era of anti-piracy patrols. On 16 June 2011, while escorting the merchant ship MV Suez off the Horn of Africa, Babur and the Indian frigate Godavari came together and brushed sides. Each navy blamed the other. India said Babur had closed at speed and damaged a safety net on Godavari’s helicopter deck; Pakistan said Godavari had hampered a humanitarian operation with dangerous manoeuvring, and its Foreign Office summoned the Indian High Commissioner the following day to lodge a formal protest. It was a small footnote that briefly made international news.

The ship she was escorting had been through something considerably worse than a scraped safety net. MV Suez was an Egyptian-owned cargo vessel taken by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden on 2 August 2010 with twenty-two men aboard, from India, Pakistan, Egypt and Sri Lanka. She was held for ten months. Nobody in any government was in a hurry to pay for her, and the crew were left where they were.

What eventually got them out was one man with a collecting tin. Ansar Burney, a Pakistani human rights campaigner, opened negotiations with the pirates himself and raised something like two point one million dollars in public donations towards the ransom. The ship and her crew were released on 13 June 2011, and the men of four nationalities who had been locked up together for the better part of a year went home.

The voyage out was almost worse than the captivity. Pirates came back at the freed ship with rocket-propelled grenades within days of her release. She then ran out of fuel and had to be supplied at sea or her crew taken off altogether. Her master signalled for help, the Pakistan Navy sent Babur, and it was in the middle of that, on 16 June, that the former HMS Amazon and the Indian frigate Godavari came together. Both navies then accused the other of causing it, in public, in the middle of an operation to get twenty-two exhausted men of both nationalities safely to Oman.

She was finally retired in December 2014 after 22 years of Pakistani service, a second career considerably longer than the nineteen years she had originally spent under the White Ensign.

As the ship that led an entire class into service and then helped expose one of its more serious design weaknesses in the process, Amazon’s career reads as exactly the kind of practical, occasionally uncomfortable education every new class of warship has to go through, one that later cost her sister ships dearly in the South Atlantic.