HMS Somerset (F82): The Frigate Behind Britain's Biggest Class A Drug Bust

Built on the Clyde, With Battle Honours to Live Up To

HMS Somerset was ordered in January 1992 and built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, laid down that October, launched on 25 June 1994 by Lady Elspeth Layard and commissioned on 20 September 1996. As the fourth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, she inherited four battle honours from eighteenth-century predecessors, Vigo Bay, Velez Malaga, Louisbourg and Quebec, a considerable legacy for a modern Type 23 frigate to carry forward.

Standing By for Sierra Leone

Somerset's early career included standing by off Sierra Leone in November 1999 during a breakdown in peace talks, ready to support the evacuation of British nationals if needed, and in 2007 she completed the first at-sea firing trials of the 30mm DS30M Mark 2 gun system, an early sign of the technical trialling role she would go on to play throughout her career.

The Biggest Class A Drug Seizure in UK History

Somerset's most striking moment came on 23 April 2015, when, working with the Border Force cutter Valiant, she intercepted the Tanzanian-flagged tug Hamal around one hundred miles northeast of Aberdeen, resulting in the seizure of over three tons of cocaine, at the time the single largest seizure of a Class A drug in UK history, a genuinely extraordinary result for a Royal Navy frigate far closer to home waters than most of her drug interdiction work usually takes place.

Watching the Russians

Somerset earned the 2017 Fleet Frigate Effectiveness Trophy as the most successful and versatile of all the Royal Navy's frigates that year, and built a reputation for shadowing Russian naval activity close to British waters, intercepting the destroyer Vice-Admiral Kulakov and her accompanying vessels in March 2016 and monitoring the Kilo-class submarine Krasnodar transiting the English Channel in May 2017, exactly the kind of vigilant home-waters work that rarely makes the front pages but matters enormously.

The First Royal Navy Ship With Naval Strike Missiles

A major refit beginning in November 2018 proved a difficult one, with Somerset not fully returning to service until March 2022 and suffering further systems failures and dry-dock visits through 2023. But the refit brought a genuine first: from January 2023 she began receiving Naval Strike Missiles to replace her obsolete Harpoon system, becoming the first Royal Navy warship equipped with NSM, and in December 2023 the first to deploy with it operationally.

Still on Watch

In January 2025, Somerset was deployed to monitor the Russian research vessel Yantar as she passed through British waters in the North Sea, and that September she carried out the Royal Navy's first live firing of an NSM missile during Exercise Aegir 25 off Norway. Nearly three decades after her commissioning, HMS Somerset remains in active service at HMNB Devonport, still very much at the sharp end of the Royal Navy's most current operational priorities.