HMS Richmond (F239): From Vladivostok to the Taiwan Strait

The Last Ship Swan Hunter Ever Built

HMS Richmond is a Duke-class, or Type 23, frigate launched by Swan Hunter Shipbuilders on 6 April 1993, the final warship the historic Tyneside yard would ever build before its closure, a properly significant milestone in the long story of British shipbuilding. She sailed from her builders in November 1994, joining a class that would go on to form the backbone of the Royal Navy's frigate force for decades to come.

It is worth knowing what yard that was. Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson of Wallsend built the Mauretania in 1906, which held the Blue Riband for twenty-two years, and the Carpathia four years before that, which is the ship that turned round in the dark and went to find Titanic's boats. In the First World War the Tyne yards between them turned out warships faster than almost anywhere on earth. By 1993 Swan Hunter had one order left on the books, and it was Richmond.

What happened next is the story of British shipbuilding in miniature. The company went into receivership almost immediately after she was launched, and was bought out of it by a Dutch businessman, Jaap Kroese, who kept the yard alive on repair work and then won a £160 million contract in 2000 to build two Bay-class landing ships for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. By July 2006 the cost had reached £309 million and only one of the two, Largs Bay, had been delivered; the second, Lyme Bay, was towed round to BAE Systems at Govan to be finished by somebody else. That November Kroese put the Wallsend cranes up for sale. The equipment went to India, and the firm turned itself into an engineering consultancy. Richmond really was the last warship, and she has outlived the yard by more than thirty years.

The class she joined was designed for a job she has almost never done. The Type 23 was conceived in the early 1980s as a cheap, quiet, single-purpose ship for towing a passive sonar array across the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap and listening for Soviet submarines heading into the Atlantic. It was supposed to be austere and it was supposed to last eighteen years. The first of them is here: HMS Norfolk (F230). Sixteen were built, the Soviet Union stopped existing before most of them were finished, and the class spent the next three decades doing drug interdiction, gunfire support, hurricane relief, carrier escort and shooting down drones, none of which was in the specification.

First to Vladivostok in a Century

Richmond's early career included a remarkably historic first, becoming the first Royal Navy vessel to visit Vladivostok in over a hundred years during the Ocean Wave 97 deployment to the Far East, a striking symbol of how far East-West relations had shifted since the Cold War's end.

That same deployment saw her escort the Royal Yacht Britannia on part of her final tour before decommissioning, one era of British naval life quietly making way for another.

That was not a routine escort job. Britannia was on her last overseas voyage, and it finished at Hong Kong: on the night of 30 June 1997 she took the last Governor, Chris Patten, and the Prince of Wales away from the handover of the territory to China, and sailed for home. She was decommissioned at Portsmouth that December after forty-four years. A four-year-old frigate escorting the Royal Yacht out of the Far East for the last time is about as neat a hinge between two eras as the Royal Navy has ever staged, and it was not staged at all.

Tragedy Off Virginia

Not every part of Richmond's service has been triumphant. On 12 June 2002, a Westland Lynx helicopter operating from the ship suffered a double engine failure and crashed into the Atlantic around 200 miles off the American eastern seaboard while returning from a missile-firing exercise. Lieutenants Rod Skidmore and Jenny Lewis, her pilot and observer, were killed; Lewis is believed to have been the first female Royal Navy pilot or observer to die in service. A third crewman, Petty Officer Paul Hanson, was rescued. The wreck and Skidmore's body were recovered in what became the deepest salvage operation the Ministry of Defence had ever undertaken, though Lewis herself was never found.

The salvage is worth explaining, because on the face of it recovering a wrecked helicopter from the middle of the Atlantic looks like an expensive gesture. She went down in about four thousand metres of water, which made it the deepest recovery of a crashed aircraft anyone had ever attempted. The wreckage was taken to the Flight Safety and Accident Investigation Centre at Yeovilton, and the investigators found a defect in it that was serious enough that the fix was applied immediately across the whole of the rest of the Lynx fleet. Two people died on that flight and the reason the Ministry of Defence went four thousand metres down to find out why is that other crews were still flying the same aircraft. It is the least consoling kind of consolation, and it is a real one.

Gunfire Support for the Marines at Al Faw

In 2003, Richmond deployed to the Persian Gulf on Armilla Patrol and, alongside HMS Chatham, HMS Marlborough and the Australian frigate HMAS Anzac, provided naval gunfire support during 40 Commando's amphibious assault on the Al Faw Peninsula at the start of the Iraq War, the first Royal Marines amphibious assault since the Falklands War of 1982. Between them the four ships fired seventeen missions and around 155 rounds of 4.5 and 5-inch shells at Iraqi positions, helping 40 Commando take more than 200 prisoners without a single British casualty, a truly significant combat role for a ship whose peacetime work more often involved patrol and diplomatic duties.

Two of the three other ships on that gun line are here as well: HMS Chatham (F87), whose own title records how rare naval gunfire in anger had become by then, and HMS Marlborough (F233), who is still at sea today under the Chilean flag. A hundred and fifty-five rounds between four ships is not a great deal of ammunition by the standards of any earlier war, and it was enough, which is rather the point of accurate gunfire.

Relief in Grenada

In 2004, Richmond's work took on a very different character when she provided substantial humanitarian assistance to Grenada in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, with the island's Prime Minister reportedly running the government temporarily from aboard the ship itself, an extraordinary illustration of just how central a single frigate's presence could become to a small nation in genuine crisis.

Shadowing the Russian Fleet

As Anglo-Russian relations cooled through the 2010s, Richmond found herself repeatedly called on to monitor Russian naval activity close to British waters, intercepting the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov's strike group in the English Channel in 2016, the first of several such shadowing operations she would carry out over the following decade.

A Rare Transit of the Taiwan Strait

In September 2021, detached from the HMS Queen Elizabeth Carrier Strike Group's deployment to the Indo-Pacific and en route to exercise with the Vietnam People's Navy, Richmond became the first Royal Navy warship in two years to transit the Taiwan Strait. Beijing's military dismissed the passage as a "publicity stunt", while the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, pointed out simply that the strait is international waters, open to any nation's shipping.

145 Days at Sea, Watching Russia Again

Richmond returned to Russia-watching duties in 2022, tracking the cruiser Marshal Ustinov and destroyer Vice-Admiral Kulakov past the British coast on a deployment that saw her spend 145 days at sea, the kind of sustained operational tempo that has defined much of her later career.

Defending Against Drones in the Red Sea

Richmond's most recent operational highlights came in 2024 and 2025. On 9 March 2024, while helping defend merchant and naval shipping against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, she used her Sea Ceptor missiles to shoot down two incoming attack drones overnight, part of a wider coordinated response alongside American and French forces during one of the most dangerous periods for shipping the region had seen in decades.

In 2025 she deployed to the Indo-Pacific as part of the Carrier Strike Group escorting HMS Prince of Wales on Operation Highmast, transiting the Taiwan Strait for a second time on 12 September, this time in company with the American destroyer USS Higgins. Chinese fighter jets responded with so-called "constructive kill" manoeuvres, simulated attack runs pulled up short of actually firing, which one officer on board described afterwards as "an info-war operation" rather than a genuine threat. Richmond went on to take part in Exercise Konkan with the Indian Navy and later called at Japan to help monitor sanctions against North Korea, a truly global final tour for a ship approaching the end of her service life.

A Long Career Nearing Its Close

A major refit at Devonport in 2017 and 2018 made Richmond the first Type 23 fitted with new MTU M53B diesel generators and an upgraded propulsion system, extending her useful life well beyond what many of her original sisters achieved, and she later received Naval Strike Missiles as part of continued modernisation.

With decommissioning scheduled for the end of 2026, HMS Richmond's more than three decades of service will close out having taken her from a historic first visit to Vladivostok, through combat support in Iraq and disaster relief in the Caribbean, to shooting down drones in the Red Sea and standing watch in the Taiwan Strait, as complete a tour of Britain's post-Cold War naval commitments as any single frigate is likely to make.

When she goes, there will be six frigates left in the Royal Navy. The Type 23 was meant to serve eighteen years and Richmond will have done thirty-two, which is a tribute to the hull and to the refits, and also a fairly blunt statement about how long the replacements have taken. She was the last ship built on the Tyne, she was the first British warship into Vladivostok since the nineteenth century, she has shot at Iraqi positions and at Houthi drones, and she has twice sailed up the middle of the Taiwan Strait with somebody simulating attack runs on her. Not many frigates get to be that many different things.