HMS Avenger (F185): Fourteen Days South, and a War That Left No One Untouched

One of the Boy Racers

HMS Avenger was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, completed with Exocet missile launchers fitted in the B position forward of her bridge, one of the Type 21 frigates whose speed and sleek lines earned the class the affectionate nickname the Boy Racers. Following Captain Hugo White's appointment in 1981, she became leader of the 4th Frigate Squadron, a role she would hold, war notwithstanding, until 1986.

The Fastest Ship South

When the Falklands War broke out, Avenger departed the United Kingdom on 10 May 1982 and reached the South Atlantic by 25 May, covering the distance in just 14 days, the fastest transit achieved by any vessel involved in the entire conflict, a genuinely striking demonstration of exactly the kind of speed that had given her class its nickname.

On 30 May she survived an Exocet missile attack that had been aimed at HMS Invincible, one of several close calls that punctuated the campaign for ships operating in the exposed waters around the islands. In a small, poignant gesture during the campaign, divers recovered a 20mm gun from the wreck of HMS Antelope and it was mounted aboard Avenger, nicknamed Antelope's Avenger, a tangible link between two ships whose fortunes in the war had been very different.

A Heavy Cost Close to Port Stanley

On 11 June, during naval gunfire support operations near Port Stanley, a round from Avenger struck a civilian shelter, killing three people, the only British-caused civilian deaths of the entire war. It remains a genuinely sobering footnote to a campaign fought, on the British side, with the explicit aim of liberating the islands' own civilian population, and a reminder that even carefully targeted naval gunfire support carried real and sometimes tragic risk to the people it was ultimately meant to protect. Avenger also developed a progressive hull crack during the deployment, later repaired with steel plating, physical evidence of just how hard the ship had been worked throughout the campaign.

A Close Call in the Gulf, and a Long Retirement

Avenger had a further brush with danger the following year: on 4 May 1983, Captain Peter Woodhead's Westland Lynx helicopter suffered a tail rotor failure off Muscat in Oman, though all four aircrew survived, Woodhead himself with a back injury. She was decommissioned and sold to Pakistan on 23 September 1994, recommissioned as PNS Tippu Sultan, and went on to serve in Pakistan's 25th Destroyer Squadron for a remarkable further 26 years, before finally being expended as a target on 27 April 2020, bringing to a close the career of a ship whose Falklands service had encompassed both a genuine record for speed and one of the war's most difficult, sobering moments.