HMS Sheffield (F96): A Name Resurrected From the Falklands

Laid Down at Swan Hunter, Renamed With Purpose

HMS Sheffield was built by Swan Hunter on Tyneside, laid down on 29 March 1984, launched on 26 March 1986, and commissioned on 26 July 1988, one of six Type 22 Batch 2 frigates alongside Boxer, Beaver, Brave, London and Coventry.

She displaced around 4,800 tonnes and was armed with two sextuple Sea Wolf missile launchers for close-range air defence, four MM38 Exocet anti-ship missiles, torpedo tubes and an embarked Lynx helicopter, built primarily as an anti-submarine frigate, though like the rest of her class she took on broader general-purpose duties over her career.

There is one thing in that armament list that is more interesting for what is missing. Sheffield had no gun. Not a small gun, not an old gun: the Type 22 Batch 1 and Batch 2 frigates were completed without any medium-calibre gun at all, because the class had been designed as a pure anti-submarine ship for the Atlantic, built round the Sea Wolf missile and a very good sonar, and the Admiralty view was that a frigate whose job was to hunt Soviet submarines had no use for a four-and-a-half inch mounting. Then the Falklands happened, and it turned out that a warship without a gun cannot shell a shore position, cannot warn off a trawler and cannot do most of what warships actually spend their time doing. The Batch 3 ships were redesigned with a gun forward. Sheffield, laid down in 1984, was a Batch 2 and never got one.

The five sisters she is listed alongside all have accounts here, and their endings are a fair summary of what happened to the Royal Navy's escort fleet after the Cold War: HMS Boxer (F92), HMS Beaver (F93), HMS Brave (F94), HMS London (F95) and HMS Coventry (F98). Not one of the six was twenty years old when the Royal Navy let her go. Three of them went abroad rather than to the breakers: London and Coventry to Romania, Sheffield to Chile, and all three are still working. The class as a whole is set out in the Type 22 guide.

She was not originally going to be called Sheffield at all. Yard records show she was designated HMS Bruiser during early construction, a perfectly serviceable but rather workmanlike name that was set aside in favour of one carrying considerably more weight.

She was laid down barely two years after HMS Sheffield, a Type 42 destroyer, had been sunk by an Exocet missile during the Falklands War on 4 May 1982 with the loss of twenty lives, and this new frigate was deliberately renamed to carry the name forward, with survivors of that earlier ship reportedly present at her launch.

The Royal Navy's own account frames the naming as a resurrection, reflecting the city of Sheffield's enduring pride in the ships that have carried its name, and this Type 22 frigate stands as the third HMS Sheffield, following the Second World War Town-class cruiser that helped hunt down the Bismarck and later sank the Scharnhorst, and the destroyer lost in 1982, with a fourth Sheffield, a Type 26 frigate, now under construction.

The two ships whose name she took both have their own accounts, and they are worth reading in order. HMS Sheffield (C24) was the cruiser with the stainless steel fittings and twelve battle honours who was torpedoed by her own aircraft during the Bismarck chase and survived it; HMS Sheffield (D80) is the destroyer hit by an Exocet on 4 May 1982. That second one is why the yard's workmanlike HMS Bruiser became something else. A name is not usually given to a ship because of what happened to the last ship that carried it, and this one was.

A Career of Deployments Rather Than Dramatic Incidents

Sheffield's own service history, in contrast to the dramatic circumstances of her naming, was a steady and largely uneventful succession of deployments rather than headline-grabbing incidents, which is, on balance, exactly what most people would wish for any ship carrying this particular name.

In January 1991 she deployed with Task Group 323.2, operating alongside the United States Sixth Fleet during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and served on the Armilla Patrol covering the Gulf approaches.

She returned to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf in 1996, and in 1998 undertook a West Indies Guardship deployment during which she and HMS Ocean provided disaster relief in Central America and the Caribbean following Hurricanes Georges and Mitch, an effort formally named Operation Tellar that saw Sheffield call at St Kitts and help rescue a Honduran woman left stranded by Mitch's floodwaters, work for which both ships were awarded the Wilkinson Sword of Peace, a fitting acknowledgement of humanitarian service rather than combat.

The Central American deployment deserves its due, because the Wilkinson Sword of Peace is not handed out lightly and Mitch was not a small storm. It killed something over eleven thousand people across Honduras and Nicaragua in the last week of October 1998, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in two centuries, and the relief effort was mounted by whoever happened to be within reach. HMS Ocean (L12) was the other British ship there. A frigate designed to hunt Soviet submarines in the Denmark Strait spent that Christmas carrying water and clearing roads in Honduras, which is the single most typical thing about a modern warship's career and almost never the thing she is remembered for.

Further deployments followed: an eight-week Baltic cruise in May 2000 that took her to Kiel, Gdynia, St Petersburg, Kotka and Klaipeda for the BALTOPS exercise series, then six months back in the Caribbean from February 2001 under Commander Simon Williams, supporting anti-drug patrols and Exercise Tradewinds. Her final deployment came in February 2002 with NATO's Standing Naval Force Mediterranean, an anti-terrorism patrol monitoring merchant shipping that included, that same month, quietly supplying medicine to a sick sailor aboard the Spanish submarine Siroco during a joint exercise, exactly the sort of unglamorous, useful thing a navy is actually for. She made a final public visit to Hull, where she had originally been commissioned, that October, before sailing home to decommission.

Decommissioning and a New Flag

HMS Sheffield decommissioned that November, part of the reductions to the Royal Navy's frigate and destroyer fleet that followed the 1998 Strategic Defence Review and its subsequent update; sources give the exact date variously as the 4th, 5th or 15th, which probably says more about which particular ceremony or piece of paperwork each source happens to be counting than about any genuine mystery over when the ship actually stopped working.

Rather than being scrapped, she was sold to the Chilean Navy, raising her new flag at Devonport on 5 September 2003 and recommissioning as Almirante Williams, honouring Vice Admiral Juan Williams Rebolledo, a nineteenth-century Chilean fleet commander. The ship herself did not actually reach Chile until 25 January 2004, joining the National Squadron at Valparaiso three days later, a four-month voyage that goes some way towards explaining why sources also disagree about her "transfer date": several genuinely different dates are all correct, just for different stages of the same handover.

The Chilean end is a longer story than a sale. Project Puente bought four former Royal Navy frigates in all, Sheffield and three Type 23s, and the ships they were replacing were themselves largely British: Chile's County-class destroyers had been bought from the Royal Navy in the 1980s and her Leanders before that, and the previous Almirante Williams had been built on the Tyne in the 1950s. The Chilean Navy has been buying, and keeping, British warships for a century and a half, and tends to run them for a good deal longer than Britain does. Sheffield went out to Valparaiso in 2004, became the fleet flagship, and passed twenty years under the Chilean flag in January 2024, which is longer than she served under her own.

Her arrival was part of a wider fleet renewal effort the Chilean Navy calls Project Puente, which used former Royal Navy Type 22s like Sheffield, fitted out during a substantial 2008 refit with equipment salvaged from retiring County-class destroyers, to replace their own ageing County-class and Leander-class ships. She became the Chilean Navy's fleet flagship at Valparaiso, marked twenty years in Chilean service in January 2024, and by recent reporting remains in service there, a remarkably long and useful second career for a ship whose name alone carried enough history to fill several careers on its own.