HMS Ariadne (F72): The Very Last Leander Off the Slipway

HMS Ariadne (F72)

Closing Out a Famous Class

HMS Ariadne was laid down at Yarrow's Scotstoun shipyard on 1 November 1969, one of the final two ships of the Leander class ever built. Launched on 10 September 1971 and commissioned at Devonport on 2 March 1973, she holds the small but genuine distinction of being the very last Leander-class frigate completed for the Royal Navy, closing out a production run that had shaped a whole generation of British frigate design. A Batch 3 broadbeam Leander, she displaced just under 3,000 tons fully loaded and carried twin 4.5-inch guns, Sea Cat missiles, a Limbo anti-submarine mortar and a Westland Wasp helicopter, with a crew of around 260.

Straight Into the Cod Wars

Ariadne's active career began almost immediately with fishery protection patrols during the Second Cod War with Iceland in 1973, a suitably eventful introduction for a brand-new frigate. She followed this with a nine-month Far East deployment in 1974 and 1975 that included duty on the Beira Patrol, enforcing the oil embargo against Rhodesia, before taking part in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review and being appointed Belize guardship, protecting the small Central American territory during a period of tension with neighbouring Guatemala.

NATO Duty and a Soviet Shadow

From 1979 Ariadne served with NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic, and from 1981 onward took up West Indies Guard Ship duties, the kind of steady global presence work that characterised much of the frigate fleet's later Cold War career. In 1983 she had a rather more pointed assignment, shadowing the Soviet cruiser Slava, part of the constant, watchful game of naval cat-and-mouse that defined so much of the era's maritime tension without ever quite tipping into open conflict.

A Fitting Send-Off

In 1989 Ariadne replaced HMS Juno in the Dartmouth Training Squadron, taking on the role of training future Royal Navy officers, and in 1990 took part in Endeavour 90, a circumnavigation covering some 32,000 miles, a genuinely fitting final adventure for the last of a class that had itself circled the globe many times over during its long service life. She was decommissioned in May 1992 and sold to Chile, recommissioned as General Baquedano, serving the Chilean Navy until her own decommissioning in December 1998, and was finally sunk as a target in 2004, bringing to a definitive close the story of the last Leander-class frigate ever built.