HMS Puma (F34): The Frigate That Boarded a Ghost Ship, Then Left Her Name on a Road

A Frigate Built to Go the Distance

HMS Puma was a Leopard-class, or Type 41, anti-aircraft frigate, built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock.

Ordered in June 1951, laid down in November 1953, launched in June 1954 and commissioned in April 1957, she was fitted with diesel engines rather than steam turbines, giving her considerably greater range and endurance than many of her contemporaries, exactly the kind of quality a ship destined for a career of long, far-flung deployments would come to appreciate. She displaced 2,300 tons standard, carried four 4.5-inch guns, and could work up to 24 knots on eight diesel engines producing a combined 12,400 shaft horsepower, with a crew of around 205.

There were only four of them, and all four have articles here. The Type 41 was an odd corner of Royal Navy design: an air defence frigate built on the same hull as the anti-submarine Type 12s but with diesels instead of steam turbines, which cost her about four knots and bought her the range to sit on a distant station for months without a tanker. HMS Leopard (F14) took hers a thousand miles up the Amazon, HMS Lynx (F27) spent hers guarding the Falklands two decades early, and HMS Jaguar (F37) went round the world and then into two Cod Wars. Puma went everywhere else.

A Career Spent Far From Home

Puma's first commission set the pattern for almost everything that followed, sailing south from Plymouth to the South African and South Atlantic Station based at Simon's Town, and from there ranging widely across the Indian Ocean and across the Atlantic to South America.

She would spend remarkably little of her career in home waters compared with many of her sister frigates, instead becoming one of those quietly well-travelled ships whose logbooks read like a world atlas.

A Burning Tanker in the Gulf

Puma's finest hour came on 13 September 1958, during Persian Gulf operations, when the tankers Melika and Fernand Gilabert collided off the coast of Oman and both caught fire, a disaster that cost 21 lives. Abandoned by her own crew with her engines still running, Melika carried on under her own power for twenty miles on autopilot before a search aircraft finally spotted her, a genuine ghost ship steaming herself through the Gulf.

Working alongside the carrier HMS Bulwark, Puma sent a salvage party across onto the burning, unmanned tanker, a task that took real nerve given neither ship knew quite what state they would find her in. Bulwark went on to tow Melika to Muscat, where 20,000 tons of her cargo was pumped into a waiting Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker, while HMS Loch Killisport towed the Fernand Gilabert to Karachi; the operation was significant enough that 845 Naval Air Squadron later received the Boyd Trophy, naval aviation's own top annual honour, for its part in it.

The two ships that did the heavy lifting alongside her both have accounts of their own: HMS Bulwark (R08), who took Melika in tow, and HMS Loch Killisport (F628), who dragged the Fernand Gilabert to Karachi.

Sixty-four crew members were saved across both ships, a particularly dramatic piece of seamanship carried out not in battle but in the kind of maritime emergency that tested a crew's skill and nerve just as thoroughly.

The Road That Still Bears Her Name

Puma's most enduring legacy has nothing to do with combat at all. In October 1962, in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption that had forced the evacuation of the entire population of Tristan da Cunha the previous year, she visited the island to help prepare for the islanders' return, and her crew blasted a new access road from Garden Gate Beach up to the settlement.

Islanders christened it Puma Road, and it is still known by that name today, a small, permanent piece of Royal Navy engineering on one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth, considerably more lasting than most of the honours a frigate of her era ever earned.

There is a detail about that road worth putting in, because it explains why it mattered so much and it has a Hampshire address. When Puma's people were cutting it in October 1962, the islanders were not waiting anywhere near Tristan. All two hundred and sixty-four of them had been taken off on 10 October 1961, shipped to Cape Town and then to England, put up briefly in wooden huts in Surrey and then housed in a disused RAF camp at Calshot, on Southampton Water, where they spent an exceptionally cold English winter about as far from a volcano as it is possible to get.

They had not even voted on going home yet. The Royal Society sent an expedition out early in 1962 which reported the eruption finished; the Colonial Office put the question to the community that December, and they voted 148 to 5 to return to a volcanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic rather than stay in England. Most of them had sailed from Southampton by November 1963. A handful stayed, including three young women who had met and married Englishmen, and there are Tristan descendants living in Hampshire to this day.

So the road Puma's crew blasted out of the cliff at Garden Gate Beach was being built for people who were still living down the road from Southampton and had not yet been asked whether they wanted it. They did. The eruption itself and the evacuation are covered from her sister Leopard's side, whose crew helped get them off in 1961.

Less happily, on 11 June 1964 a fire broke out aboard, caused by molten metal from a welding rod igniting waste material, causing damage that cost around £40,000 to put right, a reminder that a working warship's day-to-day hazards could be just as real as anything the Cold War threw at her.

Enforcing the Embargo on Rhodesia

Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Puma took her turn on the Beira Patrol, the long-running Royal Navy operation enforcing the oil embargo against Ian Smith's breakaway government in Rhodesia by intercepting tankers in the Mozambique Channel bound for the port of Beira, slow and unglamorous work that nonetheless mattered enormously to British foreign policy.

She also served repeatedly as Gibraltar Guardship, a role that kept her busy at the other end of the Empire's shrinking map of commitments.

A Final Tour in Arctic Waters

Puma's last significant operational work came in 1971, when she conducted a fishery protection patrol in the Arctic and Barents Seas, operating out of Norwegian bases to police fishing activity in some of the coldest waters she had ever sailed, a considerable contrast to the tropical Gulf and South Atlantic postings that had defined so much of her earlier career.

The End of a Well-Travelled Ship

Puma paid off in early 1972 and moved to Chatham for care and maintenance, before finally being broken up at Blyth on 6 September 1976.

Few frigates of her generation could claim quite such a varied résumé: boarding a burning ghost ship in the Persian Gulf, years of embargo-enforcement patrol work, and blasting a South Atlantic access road that still carries her name today, all packed into a fifteen-year career that took her to almost every ocean the Royal Navy operated in.