HMS Peacock (P239): The Little Warship That Watched Over Hong Kong

Built for One Job, in One Place

Most Royal Navy warships are designed to go wherever the fleet needs them. HMS Peacock was designed to stay put.

She was the lead ship of the five-strong Peacock class, small offshore patrol vessels built by Hall Russell of Aberdeen in the early 1980s for one specific and rather unglamorous purpose: policing the crowded, complicated waters around Hong Kong, then still a British Crown Colony, in place of the ageing Ton-class minesweepers that had been doing the job for far longer than anyone had intended.

Peacock was the first of the five to commission, in 1983, and Swift the last, in 1985. She was a particularly compact warship: just 62 metres long, displacing around 712 tonnes fully loaded, and armed with a single 76mm OTO Melara gun and a pair of general-purpose machine guns, an outfit intended less for fighting a war than for looking serious enough to deter smugglers and enforce the law.

Twin APE-Crossley SEMT-Pielstick diesels gave her a useful 25 knots and enough range to patrol effectively without straying far from her home waters, which was, after all, rather the point.

Mostly Bought by Hong Kong, and Two Years Late

Somebody had to pay for all that, and for the most part it was not the British taxpayer. The five Peacocks were built under an arrangement close to unique in Royal Navy shipbuilding: the Hong Kong government met three quarters of the bill and the Ministry of Defence found the remaining quarter. To all practical purposes the colony owned five White Ensign warships. Nobody was thinking much about that in 1980, and it would decide their fate fifteen years later. They replaced, one for one, the five modified Ton-class minesweepers of the 6th Patrol Squadron, one of which, HMS Hubberston (M1147), has her own account of what the job looked like a generation earlier.

Hong Kong's three quarters turned out to be a good deal larger than advertised. The estimate put together in 1980 and 1981 was somewhere around 240 million Hong Kong dollars for the five ships. The final bill came to 455 million, near enough double, and the ships were delivered two years late.

The competition that produced them was, in the words of the maritime historian Stephen Davies, a stacked deck. Hong Kong's own yards, Hongkong Shipyard and Chung Wah Shipbuilding and Engineering, were allowed to tender, but only for the last four hulls; the design and the first ship were reserved for a British builder from the start. Worse, the Hong Kong yards could not put their bids to the tender board themselves. They had to send them to the three competing British yards, Hall Russell, Brooke Marine and Thornycroft, who added a fair share of the design costs before passing them on. The Hong Kong bids came out more expensive. Hall Russell of Aberdeen was reported to have quoted lowest, and built all five. Peacock was the yard's ship No. 988, and her builder's half-hull model is in the Aberdeen Maritime Museum to this day.

What the colony got for its money was, at first, a ship with a snagging list. The superstructures were built of the aluminium and magnesium alloy whose reputation the Falklands War had just comprehensively wrecked, and the welding in them was defective. The engine mountings gave serious trouble. The hulls proved to be too stiff, which sounds like a compliment and is not: a stiff ship does not roll so much as snap upright, and bilge keels had to be retro-fitted as roll dampers to calm them down. And when the main gun was fired on trials, every window on the bridge popped out.

The gun was at least worth the glazing. The 76mm OTO Melara compact is the standard medium gun of small warships almost everywhere, carried by dozens of navies, and the five Peacocks are the only Royal Navy ships that have ever mounted one. Tonne for tonne it made them arguably the most heavily armed warships in the fleet, which is a curious distinction for a vessel whose day job was checking sampans.

Hong Kong's Own Little Squadron

As part of the Hong Kong Squadron, Peacock and her sister ships Plover, Starling, Swallow and Swift took on a job that mixed the mundane with the truly important. They flew the flag around the colony's waters, ran seamanship, navigation and gunnery training, and provided search-and-rescue cover, complete with diving teams and a decompression chamber for the inevitable mishaps of a busy, crowded harbour.

Alongside that came the sharper end of the work: patrolling with the Hong Kong Police Marine Department and Customs and Excise to intercept the steady traffic of illegal immigrants, narcotics and smuggled electronics moving through one of the busiest and most porous stretches of coastline in the world.

It was, in its way, as demanding a form of naval policing as anything the Royal Navy did anywhere, just conducted at considerably lower speed and closer to home than a destroyer chasing a Soviet submarine.

It was also an era in which Hong Kong's waters saw considerable small-boat traffic of every legal and illegal kind, from refugees to smugglers, and a small, manoeuvrable patrol vessel with a shallow enough draught to work close inshore was exactly the tool the Marine Police and Customs authorities needed a naval partner in.

Combined with the ordinary business of chasing down speedboats laden with contraband electronics or narcotics, it meant Peacock's crews worked in a remarkably varied and unpredictable operational environment, a world away from the set-piece exercises that occupied most of the Cold War-era fleet back in home waters.

The Deal of the Century That Was Not

There is a chapter in the Peacock story that only surfaced when the files reached the National Archives, and it is the most interesting thing about the class. In early 1995, with the handover two years off and everybody assuming the ships would be sold along with the rest of the garrison, the Ministry of Defence reopened the question. The First Sea Lord had raised it on a visit to Hong Kong; the Commander British Forces Hong Kong wrote to London to put the argument on record. Might the Royal Navy simply keep them?

The arithmetic was seductive. The three surviving ships had an agreed final value of £9.52 million, of which £7.14 million was owed to the Hong Kong government as its 75 per cent share of whatever they fetched, leaving the MOD a net receipt of £2.38 million if they went to a foreign buyer. But if the Navy paid Hong Kong its £7.14 million and gave up the £2.38 million it had been counting on, it would own three modern, fast, heavily armed patrol vessels outright for around nine million pounds. That is not much money for three warships. Selling was not painless either: leave it too late and the ships' stores, some sixty-five container loads of them, would already have been shipped home, and sending the whole supply chain back out to a buyer could easily cost more than the sale raised.

What happened next was a small masterclass in how a good idea dies. The naval planners worked through every job the ships might do and knocked each one down in turn. Fishery protection, releasing the Hunt class for mine countermeasures? No stated requirement, and the savings would have to come from somewhere else. Navigation training at Dartmouth? That role had only just been handed to HMS Orwell (M2011), which had the better bridge for it anyway. The Northern Ireland Squadron? Just standardised on the River class, and nobody wanted mixed hulls again. The Falklands or the West Indies? No flight deck, no long-range radar, no ability to work away from a support base and, at half the displacement of a Castle, not the ship for sustained operations in extreme weather. The University Royal Naval Units? One assessment noted drily that the receipts forgone would buy seven purpose-built training craft.

The real killer was the running cost. Buying the ships was cheap; owning them was not. Fleet headquarters costed each hull at £1.7 million a year: £700,000 for people, £450,000 for maintenance, £400,000 for refitting, £150,000 for stores and £90,000 for fuel. Three ships came to £5.3 million a year, or something like £46 million across the ten-year costing period, none of it in anybody's budget.

Not everybody rolled over. One directorate went and asked the Irish Naval Service, which had been operating the two ex-Peacocks Ciara and Orla since 1988, how they were getting on. The answer came back that they were doing fishery protection and drug interdiction up to fifty miles off the Irish coast in sea states six and seven, launching boats in a force six, that the Irish thought them thoroughly capable, and that there was interest in buying another one. The Director of Naval Staff Duties declined outright to support disposal, writing that he would need to see a great deal more evidence that losing that much small-ship flexibility was worth whatever marginal saving was going.

He lost. The verdict that settled it was that the Peacocks were capable and popular, but that there was no peacetime task at which they held any inherent advantage over something the Navy already owned, and that in a service this short of money there were higher priorities. The papers cheerfully conceded they would have been superb in wartime, guarding ports and anchorages and shepherding coastal convoys. The difficulty in 1995 was the conspicuous absence of a war. The disposal assumption stood, and the ships were sold.

Handover, and a New Flag

That mission had a built-in expiry date. As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China approached, the need for a dedicated Royal Navy patrol squadron in the colony evaporated along with British sovereignty itself, and the five Peacock-class ships were quietly but generously disposed of.

Two, Swallow and Swift, had already gone to the Irish Naval Service back in 1988 as LE Ciara and LE Orla, filling gaps in Ireland's own fishery protection fleet.

The remaining three, Peacock among them, were sold to the Philippines as a goodwill gesture and formally handed over to the Philippine Navy on 1 August 1997. They had sailed from Hong Kong as sovereignty passed to China on 1 July and reached Manila on the 3rd. HMS Peacock became BRP Emilio Jacinto (PS-35), named for a hero of the Philippine Revolution, and Plover and Starling followed her into Philippine service under equally patriotic new names.

A Long Second Life

Unlike so many Royal Navy vessels whose story ends in a breaker's yard, Peacock's did not end there at all. As BRP Emilio Jacinto she went on serving, and serving usefully, for decades afterwards, receiving upgrades from 2005 onward that added heavier 25mm and 20mm weaponry to keep her relevant to a navy with its own smuggling, piracy and territorial patrol concerns in the South China Sea.

A ship built for one very specific colonial policing job in the 1980s found herself, well into the twenty-first century, still doing recognisably similar work for a different flag entirely, patrolling waters not so very far from the ones she started out in.

There is a certain neatness to that continuity. The Peacock class had always been a slightly unusual proposition within the Royal Navy, small, regionally specialised ships built for a single colonial posting rather than for general fleet service, and their disposal in 1997 could easily have meant the scrapyard for all five.

Instead, two found new purpose protecting Irish fishing grounds and three carried on almost exactly the kind of coastal policing work they had always done, simply flying a different flag while they did it. Few classes of Royal Navy warship can claim quite such a tidy, useful afterlife.

A Small Ship's Outsized Legacy

HMS Peacock was never going to make headlines the way a battleship or an aircraft carrier does; she was built too small and too specialised for that. But in her fourteen years flying the White Ensign around Hong Kong, and in the many more she has since spent under a different one, she has done exactly what she was designed to do: keep watch over a stretch of water that never really stopped needing watching.

It is a modest kind of naval legacy, but a useful one, and rather a rare thing for a Royal Navy ship to still be earning her keep this long after she last wore British colours.