HMS St Albans (F83): From Evacuating Beirut to Shadowing the Kuznetsov

The Last of the Type 23s

HMS St Albans was the sixteenth and final Type 23 Duke-class frigate built, ordered in February 1996 and built by Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow, laid down on 18 April 1999, launched on 6 May 2000 and commissioned on 6 June 2002.

She had a bruising introduction to Portsmouth harbour life when the P&O ferry Pride of Portsmouth struck her during gale-force winds that October, damaging her gun deck and bridge, though thankfully causing no crew injuries.

The Ship That Fought Under Four Flags

The Type 23s are the Duke class, named for British dukedoms, which is why the fleet contains a Lancaster, a Northumberland, a Somerset and a Montrose. St Albans is one of the more raffish entries on that list: the dukedom was created by Charles II for Charles Beauclerk, his son by the actress Nell Gwyn, which makes this the only frigate in the Royal Navy named, at one remove, after an orange seller from Hereford.

The previous holder of the name had a career that is difficult to believe. She was laid down in America in 1918 as the USS Thomas, a flush-decked four-funnelled destroyer of the sort the United States built in enormous numbers and then had no use for, and she was one of the fifty handed to Britain in 1940 in exchange for base rights in the Caribbean. Britain promptly handed her on to the Royal Norwegian Navy in April 1941, since Norway had crews and no ships and Britain had ships and no crews. Under the Norwegian flag she escorted the Arctic convoys.

On 2 May 1942, north of Norway, she and the minesweeper HMS Seagull attacked and sank a submarine they took for a U-boat. It was the Polish submarine Jastrzab, herself a former Royal Navy boat lent to the Polish Navy, and five of her people were killed. The court of inquiry found that Jastrzab had been a hundred miles out of her assigned position, in water where U-boats were expected, and attached no blame to anybody. In July 1944 St Albans changed flags again, going to the Soviet Union as the Dostoinyi, and she was not handed back until February 1949, whereupon she was scrapped in Fife within weeks. American, British, Norwegian, Soviet: four navies in thirty years, and the only shot she is remembered for was fired at an ally. HMS Churchill (I45) went the same way.

Rescuing 243 People from a War Zone

A six-month Gulf deployment protecting Iraqi oil platforms in 2006 turned into something far more dramatic when St Albans was redeployed to support Operation Highbrow, the evacuation of British citizens trapped by the outbreak of war in Lebanon, an operation that would go on to become Britain's largest evacuation since Dunkirk, moving some 4,500 people to safety with the support of RFA Fort Victoria. St Albans arrived off Beirut on 20 July and, the following day, carried 243 evacuees from the city to safety in Cyprus, a properly significant humanitarian mission carried out under real pressure; she was back home in Portsmouth by 18 August.

A Major Rebuild for Submarine Hunting

Between May 2007 and July 2008, St Albans underwent a fifteen-month, £15 million overhaul at Rosyth that installed Type 2087 sonar and adapted her to operate Merlin helicopters, substantially boosting her anti-submarine warfare capability ahead of a busy decade of Mediterranean and Gulf deployments.

What Type 2087 Actually Is

Fifteen million pounds and fifteen months for a sonar sounds excessive until you understand what it is. Type 2087 is a low frequency active towed array: two separate things streamed on a cable a mile or more astern of the ship, a transmitter that puts an enormous pulse of low frequency sound into the water and a long line of hydrophones that listens for what comes back. Because it is towed, it can be lowered below the thermocline, the layer where water temperature changes sharply and bends sound away, and modern submarines spend a great deal of their lives hiding underneath exactly that layer where a hull-mounted sonar cannot see them.

The result is that a Type 23 with 2087 can detect a submarine at ranges that were science fiction a generation ago, and that is why these ships, which were designed in the 1980s as cheap austere convoy escorts, ended up being regarded as the best anti-submarine frigates in NATO. It is also why St Albans keeps turning up in the Norwegian Sea and the Arctic rather than anywhere pleasant. The gap between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom is where Russian submarines have to pass to reach the Atlantic, and a ship that can hear them doing it is the most valuable thing the Royal Navy owns short of a submarine of its own. The next generation, HMS Glasgow (F88) and HMS Cardiff (F89), are being built around the same sonar.

Winching Sailors From a Sinking Tanker

During a Gulf deployment focused on counter-piracy and regional security, St Albans carried out a dramatic rescue on 1 July 2011, using her embarked Merlin helicopter to winch thirteen sailors to safety from the tanker MV Pavit, which had spent three days drifting powerless off the coast of Oman after losing power in a heavy storm; the rescued men were later transferred to her sister tanker, the MV Jag Pushpa, exactly the kind of high-stakes rescue work that rarely makes headlines outside the immediate area but matters enormously to those involved.

New Missiles and a Cocaine Haul

A £25 million mid-life refit completed in spring 2014 replaced her Sea Wolf missile system with modern Sea Ceptor and fitted a new electric 4.5-inch gun.

Deploying to the Middle East that November with a Merlin helicopter and ScanEagle drone embarked, she seized 320 kilograms of cocaine worth over £1 million while crossing the Mediterranean, before joining the French carrier Charles de Gaulle's task group for operations against Islamic State in early 2016.

Man-Marking the Russian Fleet

St Albans spent much of 2017 and 2018 closely tracking Russian naval activity around British waters, beginning in January 2017 when she escorted the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, the cruiser Pyotr Veliky and an accompanying salvage tug back through the Channel from Syria, working alongside RAF Typhoons and her own Culdrose-based Merlin. The mission was announced with characteristic bluntness by the Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, who described the Kuznetsov as "a ship of shame whose mission has only extended the suffering of the Syrian people," while St Albans's own commanding officer, Commander Chris Ansell, called it routine business for his 190-strong ship's company, "man-marking these vessels every step of the way around the UK." It was the second such escort in a matter of months, the Kuznetsov group having been shepherded the other way, out towards the Mediterranean, by HMS Duncan and HMS Richmond the previous autumn.

She shadowed the Kuznetsov again north of Scotland that August, and escorted the frigate Admiral Gorshkov during North Sea trials that December, exactly the kind of vigilant, unglamorous work that has defined much of the modern Royal Navy's home waters mission.

The Royal Navy's Most Advanced Frigate

An extensive refit beginning in July 2019 and requiring around 1.2 million working hours replaced all four diesel engines, fitted Type 997 Artisan radar and Type 2150 sonar, and completed her transition to Sea Ceptor, transforming St Albans into what has been described as the Royal Navy's most advanced frigate.

She returned to sea for trials in March 2024 and, as of 2025, remains in active service, still very much engaged in monitoring Russian vessels near UK waters.

Home After 150 Days at Sea

HMS St Albans returned to Plymouth on 22 August 2025 after nearly 150 days deployed to home waters, the North Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea and the Arctic, tracking the Russian frigate Admiral Golovko through the Channel and covering close to 30,000 nautical miles, refuelled ten times at sea by tankers including RFA Tideforce with enough fuel transferred to fill one and a quarter Olympic swimming pools. Her own Culdrose-based Merlin flew almost 170 hours of sorties, hunting submarines by sonobuoy and sonar and, on occasion, ferrying VIPs, including Norway's own Defence Minister. Around 500 family and friends greeted her 200-strong crew home with an eleven-gun salute off Plymouth Hoe, the ship's company personally thanked by Major General Rich Cantrill of the Royal Marines, the UK's Commander Maritime Operations.

Standing Watch on Russia's Shadow Fleet

On 29 August 2026, St Albans joined HMS Duncan and HMS Severn in a 72-hour operation tracking the Russian destroyer Admiral Levchenko as she escorted two sanctioned cargo vessels, General Skobelev and Sparta, through the North Sea and into the Channel, launching her own Merlin to extend surveillance as the group approached the Strait of Dover before handing over the watch to a NATO ally off Ushant. It came weeks after the Royal Navy's interception of the sanctioned tanker Smyrtos in the Channel that June, part of a wider campaign that has already helped push Russian oil and gas revenues down 24 per cent year-on-year. "As the Royal Navy's very high readiness frigate, this is our core business," said St Albans's commanding officer, Commander Oli Ayers, of an operation the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, said was forcing Moscow to divert warships "away from their core purpose."

The shadow fleet is worth defining, because it is the single largest change in what the Royal Navy does in home waters since the Cold War ended. When sanctions and a price cap were placed on Russian seaborne oil, the trade did not stop; it moved into a fleet of several hundred elderly tankers with opaque ownership, flags of convenience, uncertain insurance and a habit of switching off their transponders. Some are forty years old. Many would not be accepted by a mainstream insurer, which means that when one of them holes itself in the Channel there is nobody obvious to pay for the beaches. They also make convenient platforms for other things, which is why the vessels that loiter over cables and the vessels that carry the oil are increasingly the same conversation.

Watching them is now a standing task and it is shared right down the fleet, from frigates to the Gibraltar patrol boats: HMS Cutlass (P295) does it at the western end of the Mediterranean and HMS Sutherland (F81) is another Type 23 on the same beat. The point of it is not interception, which is legally fraught on the high seas, but attention: an escorted tanker is a tanker whose owners, insurers and charterers all know they have been photographed.

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