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 earned by three very different eighteenth-century predecessors, Vigo Bay, Velez Malaga, Louisbourg and Quebec, a considerable legacy for a modern Type 23 frigate to carry forward. She also adopted a motto of her own in 2005, Foy pour devoir, faith for duty, borrowed from the Duke of Somerset for whom she is named.

Three Earlier Somersets, and One Very Bad Night Off the Scillies

The first Somerset served as Admiral Sir George Rooke's own flagship at the Battle of Vigo Bay in 1702, one of the more devastating naval victories of the age, and fought again at Velez Malaga two years later. She was also lucky to survive at all: in 1707 she was one of the few ships to escape when Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet ran onto the rocks off the Isles of Scilly in thick fog, a disaster that cost upwards of two thousand sailors their lives and remains one of the worst peacetime losses in Royal Navy history.

The third Somerset, launched in 1748, is the most celebrated of the name, playing a key part in the capture of both Louisbourg and Quebec during the Seven Years War and later seeing action at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 with a young officer named Cuthbert Collingwood, the future Admiral and Nelson's own deputy at Trafalgar, among her ship's company. Her luck ran out three years later: chasing a French vessel off Cape Cod, she ran aground and foundered on 2 November 1778. Her wreck still occasionally resurfaces from the shifting sands, and since 1999 American history enthusiasts have taken to donning authentic period uniforms to bring her long-lost marines back to life for visitors, a rather more cheerful afterlife than most wrecked warships get.

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.

In 2014, to mark twenty years since her launch, she and her two seaboats, aptly named Phantom and Spitfire, spent the anniversary drawing the number twenty across the water in formation somewhere in the Mediterranean, a small, cheerful piece of showmanship for a ship not otherwise known for them.

The Biggest Class A Drug Seizure in UK History

Somerset's most striking moment came on 23 April 2015, when, acting on intelligence developed by the National Crime Agency with French customs and the UK's National Maritime Information Centre, she and the Border Force cutter Valiant intercepted the Tanzanian-flagged tug Hamal around one hundred miles northeast of Aberdeen. Over 3.2 tonnes of cocaine, worth an estimated 512 million pounds once cut for the street, was found hidden in the ballast tanks, reached through a cemented-over section of floor in the crew's own quarters, at the time the single largest seizure of a Class A drug in UK history and an extraordinary result for a Royal Navy frigate far closer to home waters than most of her drug interdiction work usually takes place.

Investigators later reconstructed the Hamal's real voyage from GPS data recovered off a laptop computer, tracing her from Tenerife across the Atlantic to Georgetown in Guyana, the likely loading point, and on towards the North Sea, backed up by a coded satellite phone message giving coordinates. Her captain and first officer were convicted of drug trafficking after a twelve-week trial at the High Court in Glasgow, while four other crew members received Scots law's distinctive "not proven" verdict and three more were acquitted outright.

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, one of several such wins that have made her, by the Royal Navy's own reckoning, the most decorated holder of that trophy in the fleet. She 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.

That first is worth explaining, because for a while the Royal Navy did not have an anti-ship missile at all. Harpoon had been in service since the 1980s, was long past its intended life and went out of service without a replacement lined up, which left the surface fleet in the faintly absurd position of being unable to sink a ship at any range beyond that of a 4.5-inch gun. The Naval Strike Missile, bought from Kongsberg in Norway, closed the gap: a sea-skimming, radar-evading weapon with a range of well over a hundred nautical miles that picks out its target by its shape rather than by radar return, so it cannot simply be jammed. Somerset was the first ship to carry one and the first to fire one in earnest.

Her sisters have followed. HMS Portland (F79) and HMS Richmond (F239) carry it now, and so does the Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender (D36). It is not often that a twenty-seven-year-old frigate is the ship that introduces a new weapon to a navy, and it happened here mostly because her long and difficult refit had her in the right dockyard at the right moment.

Still on Watch

In January 2025, Defence Secretary John Healey personally announced Somerset's deployment to monitor the Russian research vessel Yantar, widely suspected of being a spy ship tasked with mapping or even sabotaging undersea infrastructure, as she passed through British waters in the North Sea; her crew went on to keep an eight-day continuous watch on Yantar, which the Royal Navy said responded with laser incidents and GPS jamming aimed at RAF aircraft overhead. That September Somerset carried out the Royal Navy's first live firing of an NSM missile during Exercise Aegir 25 off Norway.

What the Yantar Is Actually For

Yantar is not really a research ship, whatever her paperwork says. She belongs to GUGI, the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, which sits outside the ordinary Russian navy and answers separately to the Ministry of Defence, and she carries manned and unmanned submersibles capable of working on the sea floor at depths of several thousand metres. There is nothing sinister about a ship that can do that. What is sinister is where she chooses to do it. Yantar has a consistent habit of loitering over the places where the cables are.

Those cables matter more than most people realise. Something like ninety-nine per cent of all intercontinental data moves through fibre optic cables lying on the sea bed, along with the interconnectors that carry a serious fraction of Britain's electricity from Norway, France and the Netherlands and the pipelines that bring in gas. They are unguarded, unarmoured, and mapped: their positions are published, because ships need to know where not to anchor. A vessel with a submersible can survey them, tap them, cut them, or leave something on them for later, and the difficulty for the country that owns them is that all four of those look identical from the surface.

That is why an eight-day watch by a frigate counts as a proportionate response. It has escalated steadily. In November 2024 a Royal Navy submarine was authorised to surface deliberately close to Yantar rather than stay hidden, a piece of theatre with a very specific message: we have been under you the whole time. In January 2025 the Defence Secretary told Parliament about it and changed the rules of engagement so that British warships could get closer to Russian vessels being tracked in home waters, which is when Somerset and HMS Tyne (P281) took her through the Channel and up the North Sea. In November 2025, sitting just outside territorial waters, Yantar pointed lasers at the RAF aircrew sent to look at her.

Nearly three decades after her commissioning, HMS Somerset remains in active service at HMNB Devonport under Commander Matt Millyard, who took command in July 2025, leading a crew of more than 175 officers and ratings drawn from across the UK and the Commonwealth, still very much at the sharp end of the Royal Navy's most current operational priorities.

Operation Ceto, 2026

Since redeploying on Operation Ceto in spring 2026, HMS Somerset intercepted the Russian destroyer Severomorsk and her escorting oiler Kama off Brittany on 31 March, shadowing them with a Merlin helicopter through the Channel and into the North Sea. That July she put in at Lerwick in Shetland, berthing at Holmsgarth, part of the same ongoing watch on Yantar and other Russian activity that has made her a familiar face in the northern North Sea. She completed four and a half months and more than 26,000 nautical miles at sea protecting the UK's submarine deterrent before returning to Devonport on 10 August 2026.

The last sentence of that paragraph is the whole reason the ship exists, and it is worth unpacking. Britain keeps one ballistic missile submarine at sea at all times, and has done without a break since 1969, which means that at every moment of every day there is one boat somewhere in the ocean whose entire value depends on nobody knowing where she is. The most dangerous few hours of any patrol are the ones spent leaving the Clyde, in relatively shallow, predictable water that an adversary would very much like to be sitting in. The Type 23 was designed, from the keel up, to make sure nobody is: a quiet hull, a towed sonar array streamed a mile astern, and the patience to spend months doing nothing visible at all.

Four and a half months and twenty-six thousand miles, with nothing to show for it in the newspapers, is what success looks like in that job. The boat she was covering, and what she was covering it from, is set out in HMS Vengeance (S31). Somerset has now been doing this for thirty years, through the Hamal, the Russians and the missiles, and the deterrent patrols are the part of it that will never make a headline and would be the only part anybody remembered if it ever went wrong.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.