HMS Portland (F79): The Frigate That Broke a 400-Year Glass Ceiling

One of the Last of the Dukes

HMS Portland is a Type 23, or Duke-class, frigate, the fifteenth of sixteen ships in a class that has formed the backbone of the Royal Navy's frigate fleet since the end of the Cold War. She was launched in 1999, sponsored by Lady Brigstocke, accepted into service on 15 December 2000, and formally commissioned on 3 May 2001.

The Duke class name comes with a built-in irony. Portland is named for William Cavendish-Bentinck, the third Duke of Portland, who served two separate terms as Prime Minister, in 1783 and again from 1807 to 1809, on both occasions as little more than the nominal head of a government actually steered by stronger men around him. A warship named for the ultimate figurehead premier has, rather appropriately, spent her own career doing considerably more of the real work herself.

The joke is better than that, in fact, because the Duke holds a record no other prime minister has come near. His two terms were separated by twenty-six years, which is the longest gap between premierships in British history, and he spent the second of them failing to control two of the ablest and least governable men in his own cabinet.

George Canning, his foreign secretary, wanted Lord Castlereagh, his war secretary, sacked for the conduct of the war, and put the case to the King and to other ministers without telling Castlereagh anything about it. Portland, unable to face losing either of them, simply let the matter sit. When Castlereagh found out in the late summer of 1809 he challenged Canning, and on the morning of 21 September the war secretary and the foreign secretary of a country at war with Napoleon met on Putney Heath with pistols. Castlereagh put a ball through Canning's thigh.

Both men resigned. So did the Duke, who had already had a stroke, and he was dead on 30 October, twenty-six days after leaving office. It remains the only occasion on which two serving British cabinet ministers have shot at each other, and it happened because the prime minister could not bring himself to make a decision. A frigate named after him has since done rather more decisive things in a fortnight than he managed in two administrations.

During her early trials she recorded a top speed of 30.8 knots, faster than any other Type 23 had managed up to that point, an early sign that this was a ship built with plenty of capability in reserve.

Cocaine, Pirates and Hurricane Relief

Portland's operational career has taken in a remarkably broad spread of modern naval work, starting as early as 12 April 2005, when she was photographed from above making passage towards Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic, one of the small, remote staging posts Royal Navy ships heading south have relied on for generations.

During a 2007 Caribbean deployment she worked with the United States Coast Guard to intercept 3.5 tonnes of cocaine, a substantial dent in the transatlantic drug trade, and later that year turned to disaster relief, supporting Belize in the aftermath of Hurricane Dean.

In 2009 she intercepted ten suspected pirates off the Horn of Africa, though the men were released without prosecution, a reminder of just how legally complicated modern counter-piracy operations can be even when a warship does everything right operationally.

In April 2010 she relieved HMS York as the Atlantic Patrol Task (South) ship, a seven-month, 32,000-mile deployment taking in eleven countries: a four-day call at Rio de Janeiro, four months on station around the Falklands and South Georgia, a passage through the Magellan Strait and Chile's Patagonian canals, Valparaiso for Chile's bicentenary celebrations, and a final stop in Lima before the long haul home.

She took part in NATO's Exercise Joint Warrior and, in 2016, completed a nine-month patrol spanning the Middle East and South Atlantic; that December, back in Falklands waters, she ran an air defence exercise against two RAF Typhoons of 1435 Flight, which has held round-the-clock quick reaction alert over the islands since 1986.

A First for the Royal Navy

It is one particular milestone, though, that gives HMS Portland her most lasting claim to a place in naval history. On 22 May 2012, 40-year-old Commander Sarah West took command of the ship at Rosyth, becoming the first woman ever to command a major Royal Navy warship, a significant moment in an institution with a very long and, for most of its history, entirely male tradition of seagoing command. "Taking command of HMS Portland is definitely the highlight of my 16 years in the RN so far," she said at the time. "It is a challenge that I am fully trained for and ready to undertake."

It was the kind of change that naval historians will still be noting long after the details of any given patrol or drug bust have faded from memory, and it happened aboard this particular frigate.

The word major is doing necessary work in that claim, and the sequence is worth setting out properly, because three separate firsts are often muddled together. Women went to sea in Royal Navy warships from 1990. In April 2001, Lieutenant Commander Vanessa Spiller became the first female executive officer of a warship, aboard HMS Kent (F78). In January 2004, Lieutenant Charlotte Atkinson took command of the minehunter HMS Brecon (M29), the first woman to command an operational Royal Navy warship of any size.

Portland, at around 4,900 tonnes, was in a different category again: a front-line frigate with a ship's company of about 185, an embarked helicopter and a war role, and Commander West was the first woman ever given one. The Royal Navy got its first female admiral in 2022. Set out like that, the gap between the first woman going to sea in a warship and the first woman commanding a frigate is twenty-two years, which is either quick or slow depending entirely on how much of the four hundred years before 1990 you count.

Kept Modern Through Two Major Refits

Rather than being allowed to age quietly, Portland has been substantially modernised twice. A fifty-week refit at Rosyth in 2012, costing around £27 million, upgraded her sonar, information systems and crew accommodation.

A far more extensive Life Extension refit followed at Devonport between 2018 and 2021, fitting her with the new Sea Ceptor air defence missile system along with updated radar and sonar, effectively giving a twenty-year-old hull a thoroughly modern set of teeth.

In December 2024 she became only the second Royal Navy ship fitted with Naval Strike Missiles, her canisters shipped directly from the manufacturer's factory in Norway to replace the ageing Harpoon system entirely, part of a wider programme announced in November 2022 to fit the Norwegian-designed weapon across eleven Royal Navy frigates and destroyers. She carried the new missiles operationally in the North Atlantic through the middle of 2025, though the fleet's own first live firing of an NSM went instead to sister ship HMS Somerset, the first Type 23 to receive the system, off Norway in September 2025.

Still on the Front Line

Portland's recent record shows no sign of a ship winding down: participation in Halifax's international fleet week in 2023, NATO's Steadfast Defender exercise and Exercise Strike Warrior in the North Sea in 2024, and a steady rhythm of replenishment at sea and multinational exercises that keeps her busy.

An unplanned docking period took up much of 2025, an increasingly familiar rhythm for a Type 23 fleet being run well beyond its original design life, before she put back to sea from Devonport again in the summer of 2026.

She remains fully operational with the Royal Navy today, one of the smaller number of Type 23s still soldiering on as their eventual Type 26 and Type 31 replacements slowly enter service.

More Than Just Another Frigate

HMS Portland's operational record, drug seizures, disaster relief, counter-piracy work and modern weapons upgrades, would already make for a solid career on its own. But it is the ship's role in 2012, putting a woman in command of a major British warship for the first time in the Royal Navy's history, that ensures Portland's name will keep coming up in naval history long after her current commission ends.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.
Last checked for updates: 24 October 2026