HMS Mermaid (F76): Built as Ghana's Presidential Yacht, Sunk a Sister Ship in a NATO Exercise

Built for a President Who Never Took Delivery

HMS Mermaid was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the River Clyde, though she began life under an entirely different flag and an entirely different name. She was originally ordered to be named Black Star, intended to serve as the flagship of Ghana's navy and as the presidential yacht for President Kwame Nkrumah, a genuinely grand commission for a young African nation asserting its place on the world stage. That plan collapsed when a military coup in February 1966 toppled Nkrumah's government, and Ghana's new administration cancelled the order over its roughly £5 million cost. Yarrow, left with a half-finished warship and no buyer, completed her as a private venture, launching her without ceremony in December 1966.

A Ship Nobody Wanted, Then a Government Subsidy

HMS Mermaid was completed in June 1968 but remained unsold for years afterward, a genuinely awkward situation for a modern frigate with nowhere to go. It took until 1971 for Britain's Conservative government to step in and purchase her outright, effectively as an indirect subsidy to keep Yarrow's shipbuilding business afloat, a solution that said as much about British industrial policy as it did about naval requirements. After refitting at Portsmouth and Chatham dockyards, she was finally commissioned into the Royal Navy on 16 May 1973 as HMS Mermaid, pennant number F76, based on the Type 41 and Type 61 frigate designs and displacing 2,300 tons, armed with dual-purpose 4-inch guns, 40mm Bofors guns and a Squid anti-submarine mortar.

Defence Diplomacy and the Third Cod War

HMS Mermaid served primarily in the Far East out of Singapore, undertaking what was described as defence diplomacy work, showing the flag and building relationships across the region. She also found herself embroiled in the Third Cod War between 1975 and 1976, the last and most serious of Britain's fishing disputes with Iceland, suffering collision damage during clashes with Icelandic patrol boats defending their exclusive fishing zone.

The Loss of HMS Fittleton

HMS Mermaid's Royal Navy career came to an abrupt and tragic end following an incident on 20 September 1976, when she collided with the minesweeper HMS Fittleton during a NATO exercise, an accident that caused HMS Fittleton to sink and claimed twelve lives, one of the worst peacetime disasters to befall the Royal Navy in that era. It was a genuinely sobering reminder that training exercises, however routine, could turn fatal in an instant, and the collision brought HMS Mermaid's British service to a close in early 1977, after barely five years in Royal Navy hands.

A Long Second Life as KD Hang Tuah

HMS Mermaid transferred to the Royal Malaysian Navy in April 1977, commissioned at Southampton on 22 July that year and renamed KD Hang Tuah, after a legendary fifteenth-century Malaccan warrior-admiral, replacing the earlier former Royal Navy frigate HMS Loch Insh in Malaysian service. She went on to serve as flagship of the Royal Malaysian Navy alongside KD Rahmat, before shifting to training duties in 1992. A major refit between 1995 and 1997 replaced her obsolete 4-inch guns with a modern Bofors 57mm gun, fitted new, more powerful diesel engines, and removed her anti-submarine systems entirely, reflecting her transition from front-line combatant to training vessel.

From Presidential Yacht to Museum Ship

HMS Mermaid, as KD Hang Tuah, celebrated her fortieth anniversary at the Armada 2017 event at Lumut Naval Base in April 2017, before finally being retired in 2018 and converted into a naval museum ship, where she remains on display today, a genuinely remarkable end for a vessel that began life as a cancelled presidential commission, spent years unwanted on a Scottish slipway, and ultimately found two full careers under two different flags.