HMS Montrose (F236): The Frigate That Warned Off Iran's Revolutionary Guard in the Strait of Hormuz

Built on the Clyde

HMS Montrose was laid down by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the River Clyde in November 1989, launched on 31 July 1992 by Edith Rifkind, wife of the then Secretary of State for Defence Malcolm Rifkind, and commissioned in June 1994, the eighth of sixteen Type 23 Duke-class frigates, carrying the motto Mare ditat rosa decorat, meaning the sea enriches and the rose adorns, and maintaining a strong affiliation with her namesake town of Montrose in Angus, which granted her the Freedom of the district in 2002.

Falklands Guardship and a Fallen Sister's Flag

HMS Montrose served as Falkland Islands guardship in the South Atlantic between 1994 and 1996, and later, during a further Atlantic Patrol Task in 2002, took part in a quietly moving ceremony, replacing the White Ensign flying on the wreck of HMS Antelope, a ship lost during the Falklands War two decades earlier, a particularly fitting piece of remembrance carried out by one warship on behalf of another.

Assisting a Stricken Submarine

HMS Montrose assisted the Canadian submarine HMCS Chicoutimi after a serious fire aboard in 2004, before deploying to the Persian Gulf in 2006 as part of Operation Telic, and to the Mediterranean in 2007 with Standing NATO Maritime Group Two, taking part in Operation Active Endeavour, NATO's counter-terrorism maritime patrol operation launched in the wake of the September 2001 attacks.

Twenty-Three Tonnes of Drugs and a Pirate Vessel Destroyed

HMS Montrose deployed to the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea in 2008, seizing more than 23 tonnes of illegal drugs during that tour, and returned to anti-piracy operations in 2010, during which she destroyed a Somali pirate vessel, a notably tangible contribution to the multinational effort curbing piracy off the Horn of Africa at the height of that crisis.

Escorting the Queen

HMS Montrose deployed to the South Atlantic between 2011 and 2012, and in 2012 had the honour of escorting Queen Elizabeth II during her Diamond Jubilee visit, before returning to Middle East operations in 2013 and 2014, where she assisted with the removal of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile, a significant contribution to one of the more delicate international security operations of the decade.

She also took part in the BALTOPS 14 exercise in the Baltic Sea in 2014.

The Royal Navy's First Permanent Gulf Frigate

HMS Montrose was forward-deployed to Bahrain from 2019 to 2022, becoming the first Royal Navy frigate ever permanently stationed overseas, conducting sustained counter-piracy and counter-narcotics operations from that base.

The base was not really the innovation. The crewing was. A frigate sent to the Gulf in the ordinary way spends the better part of two months of a nine-month deployment simply getting there and back, and then the whole ship comes home so that her people can. Montrose went out in April 2019, by the long way round through the Panama Canal, and then stayed put for three years while her crew commuted.

She carried two complete ship's companies, Port and Starboard, who rotated through her four months at a time, flying out and flying home, with the changeovers arranged so that everybody got at least one Christmas in two at home. The ship never left the theatre; only the people did. The result was that she ran at the highest operational tempo of any escort in the fleet, for the simple reason that she was never spending weeks in transit. It worked well enough that HMS Lancaster took the arrangement over from her in 2022 and is still doing it.

On 11 July 2019 she found herself at the centre of a genuinely tense international incident. Five vessels belonging to Iran's Revolutionary Guard approached the British-flagged tanker British Heritage as she entered the Strait of Hormuz, three of them ordering her to stop, change course and move into Iranian territorial waters, in what British officials linked directly to the seizure of the tanker Grace 1 by Gibraltar authorities exactly a week earlier. Montrose, already escorting the tanker, drove herself between the Iranian boats and British Heritage, executed a full-speed turn to bring her guns to bear, and issued repeated verbal warnings over the radio while her Wildcat helicopter, already airborne on a routine surveillance sortie, closed in to reassure the tanker's crew. The Iranian vessels backed off, and British Heritage completed her passage unharmed, a fairly textbook demonstration of exactly why the Royal Navy keeps a frigate on permanent Gulf watch.

It also demonstrated the limits, eight days later. On 19 July the Revolutionary Guard came back for another British-flagged tanker, the Stena Impero, this time with small craft and a helicopter and no British warship close enough to get between them. She was taken into Bandar Abbas with twenty-three crew aboard and held there for two months, as leverage over the Grace 1 and the wider argument about the nuclear deal, and did not get out into international waters again until late September.

Which is the uncomfortable half of the story. Montrose did exactly what she was there for and did it well, and one frigate cannot be alongside every British-flagged ship in the Strait of Hormuz at once. That gap, between what a single very capable warship can do and how many hulls it actually takes to cover a sea lane, is the argument that has been running about the size of the escort fleet ever since, and it was made rather sharply that July.

In January 2022 she capped her Gulf deployment with one of the largest single drug seizures of her career, intercepting 663 kilograms of heroin, 87 kilograms of methamphetamine and 291 kilograms of hashish, together valued at some £15 million.

Decommissioned, and Finally Broken Up

HMS Montrose was decommissioned on 17 April 2023, and spent more than three years afterwards laid up at Portsmouth Naval Base, her fate genuinely undecided for a while after she failed to attract any bids at an early scrapping auction. That uncertainty was finally resolved in 2026, when she was awarded to the Turkish firm Leyal Ship Recycling and towed out of Portsmouth Harbour at seven o'clock on the morning of 15 July, bound for the breakers at Aliağa. By then she was, by all accounts, thoroughly rusted and hollowed out, stripped of every piece of equipment worth salvaging, a far cry from the frigate that had once faced down Iranian gunboats in the Strait of Hormuz. It is, as one report rather bluntly put it, the fate awaiting virtually every Royal Navy ship that isn't lucky enough to be preserved.