HMS Northumberland (F238): Rammed by a Russian Submarine She Was Tracking

Built on the Tyne

HMS Northumberland was built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne, launched in April 1992 sponsored by Lady Kerr, and commissioned in May 1994, the ninth Type 23 frigate built for the Royal Navy, carrying the pennant number F238 and a strong regional affiliation with the county whose name she bore. She was also the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name Northumberland, a lineage stretching back to a 70-gun ship of the line launched in 1679.

One of those earlier ships is worth more than a date. The 74-gun Northumberland was launched at Deptford in February 1798, and in the summer of 1815 she was given the job nobody else could be trusted with. Napoleon had surrendered aboard HMS Bellerophon and been brought into Plymouth, but Bellerophon was judged too old and too worn for what came next, so it was Northumberland that took him.

Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn hoisted his flag in her at Spithead, collected two troopships carrying a battalion of the 53rd Regiment and a detachment of artillery, met Bellerophon in Plymouth Sound, took the former Emperor of the French and his suite aboard, and sailed for St Helena with seven other vessels and a store ship in company. Cockburn kept a diary of the passage, which was published afterwards and remains one of the very few first-hand accounts of what Napoleon was actually like at sea.

What became of him once he arrived, and the naval officer who ended up as his most unlikely friend on the island, is set out in the articles on HMS Malcolm (F88) and HMS Lancaster (F229). It gives the name a fairly wide span: the ship that carried Napoleon to the end of the world, and the frigate that had a Russian submarine reverse into her sonar off the coast of Scotland.

A Costly Repair in Rio

HMS Northumberland deployed south with the Devonport Flotilla to the Falkland Islands between 1994 and 1995, diverting during the passage to rescue a fishing trawler caught in rough seas, a useful piece of unplanned lifesaving.

The deployment took a more troublesome turn when her bow sonar dome began leaking, forcing a three-week dry dock repair in Rio de Janeiro that ended up costing some £3 million, a significant unplanned expense for what had started out as a routine deployment.

Two Tonnes of Cocaine

HMS Northumberland deployed to the Caribbean in 1999 for disaster relief and drug interdiction work, seizing more than two tonnes of cocaine with an estimated street value of £135 million, working in cooperation with an embarked United States Coast Guard law enforcement detachment, a substantial single haul even by the standards of Royal Navy counter-narcotics operations.

Pioneering Operation Atalanta

HMS Northumberland underwent her first major overhaul since build at Rosyth between 2004 and 2005, receiving weapons and sensor upgrades along with new helicopter handling systems to accommodate the Merlin helicopter, and went on in 2008 to become the first Royal Navy warship to take part in the European Union's counter-piracy Operation Atalanta, patrolling the Gulf of Aden and escorting World Food Programme shipments between Mombasa and Mogadishu at a time when Somali piracy posed a truly serious threat to international shipping.

She returned to anti-piracy work with Task Force 151 in 2010, an eight-month Indian Ocean deployment disrupting piracy activity along the Somali coast, and in 2012 captured and destroyed more than £5 million worth of cannabis resin from smugglers operating in the Arabian Sea.

Upgraded Three Times Over

HMS Northumberland received a Sea Wolf Mid-Life Update along with a combat system upgrade and new 30mm cannon during a 2011 refit, and underwent a further major upgrade between 2016 and 2018, fitted with the new Sea Ceptor surface-to-air missile system before returning to service, keeping a frigate originally commissioned in the mid-1990s truly relevant well into the following decades.

Struck by the Submarine She Was Hunting

HMS Northumberland experienced one of the more remarkable incidents of her later career in late 2020, while tracking a Russian submarine in the North Atlantic with a television crew embarked to film the operation: the Russian submarine being tracked struck HMS Northumberland's own towed sonar array, forcing the frigate to abort what had been planned as a 48-hour mission and return to port to have the damaged sonar replaced, a remarkably striking real-world reminder of just how close and physically hazardous modern anti-submarine tracking work can become.

Her own embarked helicopter had briefly spotted the submarine's periscope on the surface shortly before the two vessels made contact, and a Ministry of Defence source later told the BBC there was no suggestion the collision had been deliberate, since the Russian crew would have had no way of knowing the towed array was there in the first place. Remarkably, the whole affair stayed out of the public eye for well over a year, only coming to light in January 2022 when it featured in the third series of the Channel 5 documentary Warship: Life at Sea, filmed with a television crew embedded aboard for the very patrol on which it happened.

The array is worth a word, because it explains the whole incident. A towed array is a string of hydrophones streamed a mile or more astern on a cable, out beyond the ship's own machinery noise and wake, and it is the only practical way of hearing a modern nuclear submarine at any useful distance; the technology is described in the article on HMS Beaver (F93).

It is also, from the point of view of anything else in the water, invisible: a thin flexible cable a long way behind a ship, making no noise of its own because the entire point of it is to listen. Which is exactly why the Ministry of Defence was able to say, quite reasonably, that the Russians could not have known it was there. Two of the quietest objects in the North Atlantic, each spending a great deal of effort on not being noticed, found each other by touch.

COVID, the G7, and a Final Retirement

HMS Northumberland returned to Devonport in December 2020 for crew isolation after suspected COVID-19 cases were discovered aboard, and deployed off Cornwall alongside HMS Tamar and HMS Tyne in June 2021 to provide security for the G7 Summit.

She remained an active and heavily used ship right through to the end of her career, logging 191 days at sea in 2022 alone and escorting the American submarine USS Tennessee during visits in both 2023 and 2024.

Her career finally came to an end in November 2024, when Defence Secretary John Healey announced her retirement after structural damage was found uneconomical to repair, with decommissioning scheduled to follow by March 2025, closing out the career of a frigate that had, quite literally, been run into by the very Russian submarine she had been sent to track.

The decision followed the discovery of structural damage during a dry-docking, on a hull that, like her Type 23 sisters, had been built from thinner steel plate around a designed service life of just eighteen years, one she had already outlasted by well over a decade. Announced to Parliament by written ministerial statement as part of a wider £100 million saving and the fleet's ongoing transition toward the new Type 26 frigates, Northumberland was formally decommissioned on 12 March 2025 and was later towed into Portsmouth, her ultimate fate, like that of several of her sister ships, still undecided.