HMS Clyde (P257): Twelve Years Guarding the Falklands, and a Rescue at Sea

The First Ship Laid Down at Portsmouth in Forty Years

HMS Clyde was built by VT Shipbuilding at Portsmouth Naval Base, launched on 14 June 2006, the first ship built entirely at Portsmouth Naval Base in forty years, a properly notable milestone for a dockyard with such a long shipbuilding heritage.

Forty years deserves a name attached to it. The last warship built at Portsmouth before Clyde was the Leander-class frigate HMS Andromeda, launched in 1967, after which the yard gave up building and confined itself to repair and refit. Clyde turned out to be an exception rather than a revival. BAE announced in 2013 that shipbuilding at Portsmouth would end, and in 2014 it did. Ships have been built and docked there since Henry VII ordered the world's first dry dock cut into the mud in 1495. As things stand, HMS Clyde is the last complete ship to come out of it.

She commissioned on 30 January 2007, the fourth vessel of the River-class offshore patrol vessels, displacing between 1,850 and 2,000 tonnes and armed with a 30mm DS30B gun, miniguns and general-purpose machine guns, carrying a complement of 36 with an impressive endurance of 21 days and a range of 5,500 nautical miles. Uniquely among her three River-class sisters, Tyne, Severn and Mersey, Clyde carried this heavier 30mm gun from build rather than the lighter 20mm fitted to the earlier three, a distinction of her own within a class otherwise built to a common design.

There is something a good deal odder about her than the gun, which is that the Royal Navy never owned her. The River class was the first time the Navy took ships on charter rather than buying them. VT built them, VT owned them, VT maintained them, and the Ministry of Defence leased them for an initial five years with the option to extend the charter, buy them outright, or simply give them back. Clyde was leased for twelve years and never bought. When she paid off at Portsmouth in December 2019 she was returned to her owners, by then BAE Systems, and stayed on charter until the end of March 2020 while the paperwork caught up. A ship that had worn the White Ensign in the South Atlantic for twelve years went back to the manufacturer.

The gun was not her only South Atlantic modification either, and it was not the important one. She was built with an aft flight deck large enough to take a helicopter up to the size of a Merlin, which none of Tyne, Severn or Mersey had at all, and the accommodation to support one. She was not a River that happened to be sent south. She was drawn up from the start for the single job she then did for the next twelve years.

Twelve Years Guarding the Falklands

HMS Clyde was stationed in the South Atlantic almost immediately after commissioning, replacing HMS Dumbarton Castle as the dedicated Falkland Islands patrol vessel, and went on to remain there for an extraordinary twelve years, considerably longer than her original contract, which had initially been set to run only until 2018.

Her long South Atlantic posting made her an enduring and familiar presence in the region, providing fisheries protection, maritime security and a visible symbol of British commitment to the islands' defence. Rather than returning home to Britain between deployments, she would instead sail for South Africa for essential maintenance breaks, the nearest capable dockyard to a posting some 8,000 miles from Portsmouth.

It is easy to underrate what that job actually consisted of. The Falklands fishery zone reaches two hundred miles out from an archipelago of some seven hundred islands, and the islands live on it: licences to fish for squid are the largest single source of the Falkland Islands government's revenue, and the edge of the zone is worked hard by trawlers of a dozen nationalities who would rather not be looked at. One ship covered all of it. Add search and rescue for anything that went wrong within a thousand miles of Stanley, calls at South Georgia, and being the visible answer to a question Argentina has never stopped asking, and the phrase fishery protection begins to look like an understatement.

Rescuing 347 From a Burning Cruise Liner

The alarm was raised at 0201 local time on 18 November 2015, when an engine room fire broke out aboard the French cruise ship Le Boreal as she sailed from Grave Cove towards South Georgia with 347 passengers and crew aboard, north of the Falklands near Cape Dolphin. HMS Clyde diverted at full speed, covering the distance in around four hours, and on arrival resupplied fuel to Le Boreal's own lifeboats and took people aboard from the smaller ones, escorting the whole flotilla into the calmer waters of Falkland Sound.

RAF Sea King search and rescue helicopters, backed by support helicopters, a Hercules and a Voyager providing command and control, winched 79 people directly from Le Boreal's deck and from liferafts, while two oil-rig support tugs added their own firefighting pumps to the effort. Every one of the 347 was accounted for without serious injury, passengers eventually transferred to Le Boreal's own sister ship, L'Austral, for passage into Stanley, a genuinely major maritime emergency resolved by exactly the kind of multi-agency response a scattered island community depends on having ready.

In November 2017, HMS Clyde was recalled from South Georgia and sailed north to join the international search for the missing Argentine submarine ARA San Juan, a diplomatically significant gesture of assistance to a nation with which Britain's relationship remained shaped by the legacy of the 1982 Falklands War. There was a grim irony to her involvement: Argentine naval orders issued that June had specifically tasked San Juan with locating, identifying and photographing British ships in the South Atlantic by name, HMS Clyde among them, and a naval intelligence report reaching her captain just three days before she vanished had included HMS Clyde's own position. More than 4,000 personnel from a dozen countries eventually joined the search across some 190,000 square miles of ocean, a truly difficult operation that, a year later, confirmed the tragic loss of the submarine and her entire 44-strong crew.

She was found on 17 November 2018, a year and two days after she vanished, and not by a navy. Ocean Infinity, a commercial survey company, ran five autonomous underwater vehicles off the vessel Seabed Constructor with a team of about sixty aboard, and after two months of searching found her in the small hours: lying in a ravine in 920 metres of water, roughly six hundred kilometres east of Comodoro Rivadavia, the pressure hull collapsed. It was the same company and the same ship that had spent much of the previous year looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Argentina had asked for help and the Royal Navy had sent, among others, the patrol vessel San Juan had been ordered to photograph. In the end it took a private firm with better robots than either navy had to find her.

A New Flag in the Gulf

HMS Clyde was decommissioned on 20 December 2019, her long Falklands vigil finally at an end, and on 7 August 2020 was formally handed over to the Royal Bahrain Naval Force at a ceremony held at HMNB Portsmouth, the very dockyard that had built her fourteen years before, and renamed RBNS Al-Zubara, continuing in active service with an entirely different navy in an entirely different ocean.

Somebody had to take the job on, and the handover was seamless enough that almost nobody noticed. HMS Forth (P222), the first of the Batch 2 Rivers and a considerably larger ship, arrived at East Cove Military Port on 13 January 2020, three weeks after Clyde paid off, and she has been there ever since. Her patch is not just the Falklands: it runs to Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic and down to South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, which is a stretch of ocean roughly the size of Europe covered by one ship.

Forth is forward-based at Mare Harbour rather than deployed from home, exactly as Clyde was, and by early 2025 she had run up something in the region of a hundred and fifty-five thousand nautical miles down there. That is the shape of the commitment: not a task force, not a deterrent squadron, but one patrol vessel, permanently, with a helicopter deck and a 30mm gun, doing fishery work and search and rescue and making the point simply by being visible. Clyde established that model over twelve years and Forth inherited it intact.

What she has actually been doing since is worth saying. She was handed over at Portsmouth in August 2020 and formally commissioned into the Royal Bahrain Naval Force on 9 February 2021, as RBNS Al-Zubara with the pennant number 80, in a ceremony that took eight ships into the fleet at once: two thirty-five-metre fast patrol craft and five twenty-five-metre patrol boats alongside her. At eighty-one metres she was by a very long way the largest ship commissioned that day, the next biggest being less than half her length.

They have also armed her rather more heavily than the Royal Navy ever did. Photographs from the commissioning show a remotely controlled weapon station of Turkish manufacture, heavy machine guns and miniguns, on a hull that spent twelve years in the South Atlantic mostly pointing a single 30mm at trawlers. Bahrain sits at the top of the Gulf, a few miles from the Iranian coast, with the American Fifth Fleet and the Royal Navy's own Gulf presence in the same harbour, and the work there is a good deal more crowded than counting squid licences off Stanley.

It is a decent second act for a ship the Royal Navy never owned in the first place. She was built at Portsmouth by a company that then leased her back to the government, spent twelve years doing a job nobody else could do, was handed to her manufacturer at the end of the charter, sold on, and is now the largest patrol vessel of a small navy on the other side of the world. Whether that counts as a Royal Navy career at all is a question the accountants and the ship's company would answer differently, and the ship's company would be right.

Her career, spanning twelve years of steady, essential South Atlantic patrol work punctuated by a dramatic rescue and a poignant search for a lost submarine, stands as one of the more quietly significant contributions of any single Royal Navy patrol vessel of the twenty-first century.