HMS Penelope (F127): The Frigate That Went to War Twice and Trials in Between

A Leander for the 1960s Fleet

HMS Penelope was one of the Royal Navy's Leander-class frigates, arguably the most successful post-war British warship design of all, prized for being adaptable enough to serve in roles from anti-submarine escort to trials ship without ever needing to be reinvented from scratch.

She was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Walker on Tyneside, laid down on 14 March 1961, launched on 17 August 1962, and commissioned on 31 October 1963 at a cost of £4.6 million, a very ordinary sum for a very versatile ship.

She joined the 20th Frigate Squadron out of Londonderry, and within her first year was sent further afield still, taking part in a South American goodwill cruise led by the cruiser HMS Tiger between September and December 1964, visiting ports the Royal Navy did not often trouble to reach.

The Ship She Was Named After Was Called the Pepperpot

She had a hard act to follow. The Penelope before her was an Arethusa-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1936, and for a few months in 1941 and 1942 she was one of the most talked-about ships in the fleet. Based on Malta as part of Captain Agnew's Force K, she and the cruiser Aurora and the destroyers Lance and Lively spent that winter taking apart the convoys carrying fuel and ammunition across to Rommel. On the night of 8 November 1941 the four of them found an Italian convoy at sea and sank all seven merchant ships in it and the destroyer Fulmine as well, damaging three more destroyers, for splinter damage to one British ship. There are not many one-sided naval actions on that scale in the whole war.

The Axis answer was to bomb Malta flat, and Penelope was in the middle of it. She was hit alongside Hamilton Wharf in March 1942, went into dry dock on the 27th, and spent the following week as the target of hundreds of bombs. When she came out she had hundreds of splinter holes stopped up with wooden blocks, which is how she became HMS Pepperpot, and when the plugs were long ones sticking out of her side, HMS Porcupine. She sailed for Gibraltar on 8 April 1942, was attacked from the air most of the way, and arrived on the 10th with more damage than she had started with.

C S Forester went to sea in her as an observer and got a novel out of it. The Ship, published in 1943, follows a light cruiser he called Artemis through a single Mediterranean convoy action from the boiler room to the bridge, and it is dedicated to Penelope's officers and ship's company. It is one of very few novels about the war at sea that were written while the war was still being fought.

Her luck ran out off Italy. On 18 February 1944, leaving Naples to go back to the Anzio beachhead, she took a torpedo from U-410 in the after engine room and, sixteen minutes later, a second in the after boiler room. She sank quickly. Four hundred and seventeen of her people went down with her, including her captain, George Belben; two hundred and six were picked up. That is the name the Leander inherited nineteen years later.

A Decade as the Fleet's Guinea Pig

Penelope's most unusual chapter began in the mid-1960s, when she was converted into a trials ship, her weapons removed or deactivated to make room for instrumentation.

She ran propeller design trials and hull noise experiments intended to make future Royal Navy ships quieter and harder for enemy sonar to detect, then in 1970 went into Devonport for a more formal conversion into the trials ship for the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, conducting hull and sonar work around Portland and Gibraltar.

A further refit in 1972 turned her into the dedicated trials ship for the new GWS25 Sea Wolf point-defence missile system, a role she was fully converted to by May 1973, testing the missile's experimental tracking radar against targets off Portland.

It was unglamorous, technical work, the kind that rarely makes headlines but which quietly shaped the weapons and sensors that later ships, and later sailors, would depend on in action.

The Falklands: Last Ship Standing

By 1982 Penelope was back in front-line service, and that April she was sent south as part of the Bristol group, sailing alongside sister ships Minerva and Andromeda to reinforce the task force fighting to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina. She arrived in theatre on 26 May 1982, in time to take part in the closing weeks of the campaign.

On 13 June, one of her Lynx helicopters struck the already grounded Argentine patrol boat Rio Iguazu with a Sea Skua missile, part of the mopping-up operations as Argentine resistance collapsed.

Penelope has since laid claim to a rather singular distinction: being the last British ship attacked by Argentine aircraft during the entire war, a fitting bookend for a ship that had spent the previous decade helping develop the very missile systems meant to stop such attacks succeeding.

The claim is worth examining, because it is a good story with a hole in it. What Penelope reported on the evening of 13 June, while escorting the requisitioned ferry Nordic Ferry, was an Exocet. She put the wheel over, fired chaff, opened up with everything that would bear, and the missile went past her. The difficulty is the arithmetic. Argentina went to war with five air-launched Exocets and an embargo that guaranteed there would be no more: two went at HMS Sheffield on 4 May, two into the Atlantic Conveyor on 25 May and the fifth on 30 May. The only other Exocets in the theatre were two ship-launched rounds stripped off the destroyer ARA Segui and mounted on an improvised trailer ashore, and those were fired on 12 June, one of them hitting HMS Glamorgan.

Which leaves nothing whatever to have been fired at Penelope the following evening, and the report was afterwards assessed as a false alarm. None of that reflects on the ship. A fast contact closing on the last full day of a war in which two ships had already been destroyed by precisely that weapon is not something any sensible officer of the watch treats as a radar ghost, and going through the drill instantly and correctly is exactly what the drill exists for. Argentina did fly its last air attack of the war that day, seven Skyhawks against 3 Commando Brigade's headquarters near Mount Kent, and most of their bombs failed to go off. The surrender came the following afternoon.

She returned home that September, and went on to further South Atlantic patrol deployments in 1983 and 1984 as the Royal Navy maintained a watchful presence around the islands it had just fought to keep.

An Expensive Bump in the Night

Not every incident in Penelope's later career involved the enemy. On 12 September 1988, during a routine replenishment at sea, she collided with the Canadian naval supply ship HMCS Preserver.

The Canadian vessel came away with a repair bill of around $260,000, but Penelope herself suffered damage estimated in the millions, a sharp reminder that the everyday business of refuelling and restocking at sea, conducted at close quarters between ships moving at speed, carries its own very real risks even without an enemy anywhere nearby.

A Second Career in Ecuador

Penelope was decommissioned from the Royal Navy in 1991 after nearly three decades of service and sold to Ecuador, where she was renamed Presidente Eloy Alfaro after the country's reforming nineteenth-century president.

Ecuador had done this before, with a Royal Navy ship. From 1955 to 1978 the Presidente Alfaro on the Ecuadorean list was a former Hunt-class escort destroyer, HMS Quantock (L58), sold to Quito in 1954 along with her sister Meynell. Penelope was therefore taking up a name that the Royal Navy had already supplied once.

Alfaro himself deserves a sentence, because reforming nineteenth-century president does not begin to cover it. He was president twice, from 1895 to 1901 and again from 1906 to 1911, and in that time he separated church from state, introduced civil marriage and divorce and free secular schooling, and finally drove the railway from Guayaquil up over the Andes to Quito, which nobody had managed before. On 28 January 1912 a mob broke into the penitentiary in Quito where he was being held, killed him, dragged his body through the streets and burned it in a park. Ecuadorean warships have carried his name ever since, which tells you which side of that argument the country eventually came down on.

She did not have to wait long to earn her new name's keep. When Ecuador and Peru went to war again in early 1995 over a disputed stretch of the Cenepa valley, Ecuador mobilised a naval task force to keep enemy units out of its waters for the five months of the conflict, and Presidente Eloy Alfaro, as the only ship then carrying that name, was part of it, giving a frigate that had already seen action off the Falklands in 1982 the unusual distinction of going to war twice, under two different flags, thirteen years apart.

She went on serving the Ecuadorean Navy for a further seventeen years, finally being decommissioned on 19 March 2008 and scrapped shortly afterwards, bringing to a close a working life that had stretched across forty-five years, two navies and, by her own reckoning, the very last shots fired at a British ship in the Falklands War.

A Frigate of Many Careers

Few ships manage to be a front-line escort, a weapons trials platform, a wartime combatant and a foreign navy's flagship-in-waiting all within one hull, but HMS Penelope pulled off exactly that.

It is a career that says a great deal about the sheer flexibility of the Leander design, and rather more about the willingness of the sailors who served aboard her to turn their hands to whatever the Navy needed next, whether that meant testing experimental radar or sailing eight thousand miles south to fight a war.