HMS Boxer (F92): First of a New Breed, Commanded by a Royal Son-in-Law

First of a New Generation

HMS Boxer was ordered on 25 April 1979 and built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, her keel laid on 1 November 1979, launched on 17 June 1981, and commissioned on 22 December 1983, the first of the Batch 2 Type 22 frigates, an improved version of the original Type 22 design that added a longer hull, an Exocet anti-ship missile capability and other refinements learned from the first batch's service. She spent her first weeks in commission as trials ship for the Computer Assisted Command System, the Royal Navy's next generation of combat data handling, a fitting first job for the class's own lead ship.

Displacing 4,800 tons, HMS Boxer carried two GWS25 Sea Wolf missile launchers for point air defence, four Exocet surface-to-surface missile launchers, twin 30mm and 20mm anti-aircraft guns, general-purpose machine guns, and hangar space for two Lynx Mark 8 helicopters, a truly formidable and versatile package for a frigate of her era. She was something of an oddity even among her own sisters, one of only two Batch 2 ships completed with the shorter Batch 1-style hangar, which meant she could only ever operate Lynx helicopters rather than the larger types her later half-sisters were built to carry.

The Batch 2 changes are worth spelling out, because they turned a frigate into something close to a destroyer. The hull was stretched by about fourteen metres, principally to make room for a towed array sonar streamed from the stern and for very much better accommodation, and Exocet was added forward. The result displaced nearly five thousand tons, which made the later Type 22s the largest frigates the Royal Navy has ever operated and larger than the front-line destroyers of a good many other navies. Boxer's short hangar was a leftover from the earlier design and the only respect in which she was less capable than the sisters that followed her.

There is one thing missing from that armament list and it is the most interesting fact about the class. The Type 22 was the first British frigate designed from the keel up without a large calibre gun at all. Everything went into hunting submarines in the North Atlantic: a hull big enough for a towed array sonar, two helicopters instead of one, and Sea Wolf purely to keep the ship alive while she did it. Against Soviet submarines that was exactly the right set of choices. Then the Falklands happened, and the Royal Navy discovered that a war might also involve holding an anchorage against low-level air attack and putting shells onto a hillside for the army, and that a frigate with nothing bigger than a 30mm cannon can do only one of those things. The Batch 3 ships, ordered afterwards, were given a 4.5-inch gun on the forecastle.

Sea Wolf itself was a genuinely advanced piece of equipment and deserves its reputation. It was designed to kill a sea-skimming missile in the last few seconds of its flight, which means the whole sequence, detection, tracking, launch and guidance, had to run automatically because no human being can react quickly enough. The trial result everybody quotes is that it intercepted a 4.5-inch shell in flight, and whatever the circumstances, that is a fair illustration of the timescales involved. In the Falklands HMS Brilliant became the first ship to fire it in action on 12 May 1982 and brought down three Skyhawks with it. Its weakness, as San Carlos also demonstrated, was that the tracker could be confused by several aircraft arriving close together and would occasionally reset itself at the worst possible moment.

Which is roughly what happened to her sister on 25 May 1982. Argentine aircraft attacking HMS Broadsword came in so low that one of their bombs bounced off the sea, went in through her starboard quarter, passed up through the flight deck taking her Lynx with it, and never went off. HMS Coventry, in company with her that afternoon, was hit and sank. It is worth remembering when reading a specification sheet that the difference between those two outcomes was a fuse.

Standing In on the Armilla Patrol

HMS Boxer's first real operational test came in October 1988, when she was sent out to the Gulf at short notice as a replacement for HMS Southampton on the Armilla Patrol, Britain's long-running Gulf escort commitment, after Southampton was damaged in a collision. Boxer sailed with a pair of Lynx helicopters embarked and simply got on with the job, a reminder that a frigate squadron's peacetime routine could turn urgent with very little warning.

A refit that ran from 1989 into 1990 left her faster than ever, Boxer reportedly touching almost 34 knots on trials afterwards, a notable turn of speed for a 4,800-tonne warship. She returned to more conventional flag-showing duty in May 1992, joining Task Group 318.1 for Exercise Dragon Hammer in the eastern Mediterranean before a port visit to Piraeus as part of the wider Orient 92 deployment.

A Squadron Leader, and a Royal Connection

Among her commanding officers across the 1980s and 1990s was Timothy Laurence, posted to HMS Boxer in October 1989 and taking over command on 30 January 1990 at the age of thirty-four, two years before he became better known to the wider public as the second husband of Princess Anne, the Princess Royal, a particularly notable footnote for a frigate whose day-to-day service was otherwise the standard, steady round of Royal Navy deployments and exercises.

The rest of his career is worth a paragraph, because the marriage is generally the only thing anybody records about him and it is the least interesting part. Timothy Laurence had been equerry to the Queen from 1986 to 1989 and came to Boxer more or less straight out of that appointment, promoted commander at thirty-two and given a five-thousand-tonne frigate at thirty-four. He went on to command the Type 23 frigate HMS Montrose and then the Type 22 HMS Cumberland, was promoted rear-admiral in 2004 and made Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff for Resources and Plans, and became a vice-admiral in 2007 as Chief Executive of Defence Estates, which is to say the man responsible for the entire property estate of the Ministry of Defence, one of the largest landholdings in the country.

He retired in 2010 after thirty-seven years. That is a full and demanding naval career by any measure, and it ran alongside the other thing rather than because of it, which is a distinction the newspapers have never had much patience with.

HMS Boxer went on to lead the 1st Frigate Squadron during 1996 and 1997, a mark of the confidence placed in the Batch 2 Type 22 design as a capable and reliable frontline frigate.

The End of Service, and a New Purpose

HMS Boxer was decommissioned on 4 August 1999, her service life complete after some sixteen years in commission, a career that had spanned the final years of the Cold War and the early post-Cold War reshaping of the Royal Navy's frigate fleet.

Rather than being sold or broken up in the conventional sense, HMS Boxer was expended as a target. Towed out of Portsmouth on 27 July 2004 alongside the former HMS Brave, she was sunk days later by the Royal Navy in the Western Approaches during a live-fire exercise known as a SINKEX, struck by Harpoon missiles and torpedoes fired by British and American forces working together, the last exercise of its kind the Royal Navy would carry out for the next eighteen years. Her hull was put to one final use testing modern weapons and providing invaluable data on ship survivability, a role that, however unglamorous it sounds, continues to inform the design and protection of the ships that succeeded her.

The class went out abruptly. The four Batch 2 ships were disposed of within a few years of each other at the end of the 1990s, and the four Batch 3s, the ones with the gun, were all cut in a single stroke in the 2010 defence review despite being the newest and most capable general purpose frigates in the fleet. HMS Cumberland was actually on her way home to pay off when she was diverted to Libya in February 2011 to take civilians out of Benghazi, did the job, and was decommissioned anyway a few weeks later. Expending Boxer as a target in 2004 at least produced something useful: instrumented data on what modern weapons actually do to a modern hull, which is information no amount of modelling can supply and which nobody can obtain any other way.

The eighteen-year gap finally closed on 7 September 2022, in the North Atlantic, in an exercise called Atlantic Thunder: HMS Westminster, a Wildcat helicopter and three RAF Typhoons between them sank the decommissioned American frigate USS Boone. The target that time belonged to somebody else, which is now the usual arrangement. The United States has far more retired hulls than anybody and runs these exercises regularly, and allied navies are invited to fire at them.

Britain has not expended a ship of her own since Boxer and Brave went down together in the Western Approaches in July 2004. Whether that is because there is nothing to spare, or because a retired frigate is now worth more sold abroad than sunk at home, is a matter of opinion, and there is a good deal of truth in both answers. What is not in doubt is that a warship's last useful act can be to find out, precisely and at first hand, what a modern weapon does to a modern hull, and that Boxer, the lead ship of the most heavily built frigates the Royal Navy ever owned, was as good a subject for that as anybody could have asked for.