HMS Starling (P241): A Farewell Gift as Hong Kong Changed Hands

Built for the Colony's Waters

HMS Starling was the third of five Peacock-class patrol vessels built by Hall, Russell and Company of Aberdeen, commissioned into Royal Navy service between 1983 and 1984 and purpose-built for one specific job: patrolling the waters of Hong Kong as part of the Royal Navy's Hong Kong Squadron. At a modest 712 tonnes fully loaded and capable of 25 knots on her pair of APE-Crossley SEMT-Pielstick diesels, she carried a crew of just 35, small enough to slip into the colony's crowded inshore waters yet sturdy enough to stay on task for days at a time.

Policing Smugglers and Illegal Immigration

Starling and her sister ships spent their careers working closely with the Royal Hong Kong Police's own Marine Department and Customs and Excise to stem the constant flow of illegal immigrants, narcotics and electronic equipment into the colony, unglamorous but notably essential maritime policing work in one of the busiest and most complex stretches of water anywhere in the world. She embarked her own Fast Pursuit Craft, crewed by Royal Marines, to chase down the more manageable targets, though the real menace by the late 1980s was the so-called dai fei, purpose-built smuggling speedboats bristling with four or five outboard motors, steel-tipped bows for ramming police craft, and a genuine top speed north of 50 knots, running stolen-to-order luxury cars and container-loads of electronics out to the mainland. No naval patrol vessel could ever hope to outrun a dai fei in a straight race, so Starling's own part in that particular fight was one of presence and support for the police's own specialist high-speed units rather than the chase itself, a distinction the retired police officer who once ran that unit summed up rather more bluntly as simply "a deadly game."

The Boats That Could Not Be Caught

It is worth setting out the scale of what she was up against, because it was not a matter of the occasional smuggler. From the late 1980s the syndicates were sending armadas of dai fei into Hong Kong waters at night, sometimes thirty at a time, and there was nothing improvised about them: purpose-built hulls with four or five large outboards on the transom, steel-tipped bows specifically shaped for ramming a police launch out of the way, and a turn of speed that no official vessel in the territory could live with. One retired Marine Police officer described a dai fei as a death machine with the acceleration of a Ferrari, which is not the language of a man exaggerating for effect.

The cargo was the odd part. Electronics went out by the container load, but the trade that made the reputation was luxury cars. A buyer on the mainland placed an order specifying make, model and colour; a member of the syndicate in Hong Kong went out that day and stole exactly that car off the street; and it was over the water inside a few hours. A vehicle could be reported missing in Kowloon in the afternoon and be in Guangdong by dawn. It ran for years, it was worth a very great deal of money, and it was fought over on the water at night by boats doing fifty knots in the dark without lights.

So what use was a 712-tonne patrol vessel doing twenty-five knots? The answer is that catching the boat was never her job. Starling could stay out for days, see a long way with a radar mounted well above the sea, sit quietly in the dark off a known crossing point and put her own Royal Marines-crewed fast pursuit craft into the water at the right moment; and she could hold the picture and pass it to the police units that did have the speed. Presence, endurance and eyes are what a warship brings to a policing problem, and none of them require being the fastest thing afloat. The territory's own history of that fight records the Royal Navy patrol craft by name as part of it.

The Last Ships to Leave

As Britain's ninety-nine-year lease over the New Territories drew to its close, most of the Hong Kong Squadron's vessels were withdrawn or reassigned, but Starling, along with her sisters HMS Peacock and HMS Plover, remained on station right up until 1997, continuing their patrol duties through the final, historically charged years before the handover to China. Their other two sisters had already left Royal Navy service almost a decade earlier, transferred to the Irish Naval Service in 1988 to become LÉ Orla and LÉ Ciara, ships that went on to serve Ireland for over three decades in their own right.

All four of her sisters have their own accounts here and between them they make a complete set, which is unusual for any class. HMS Peacock (P239) explains why these ships existed at all and who paid for them, which turns out to be mostly the Hong Kong government rather than the Ministry of Defence. HMS Plover (P240) went to Manila alongside Starling. And the two that left early, HMS Swallow (P242) and HMS Swift (P243), went to Ireland in 1988 and promptly made the two largest drug seizures in Irish history. The class as a whole is covered in the guide to the Peacocks.

A Gift to the Philippines

When Hong Kong was formally ceded back to China on 1 July 1997, all three remaining Peacock-class vessels were sold to the Philippines as a gesture of goodwill, officially transferred to the Philippine Navy on 1 August that year.

Starling was redesignated BRP Artemio Ricarte (PS-37), named for the Filipino revolutionary general regarded as the father of the Philippine Army, a man who fought Spanish then American colonial rule in turn, refused ever to swear allegiance to Washington, and went into exile in Japan in 1915 vowing not to return home until, in his own words, "a bell for peace rings"; he died in the mountains of northern Luzon in 1945, just as that peace was finally being won. Continuing her working life patrolling entirely different waters under a new flag, the former Starling underwent a full combat, navigation and weapons systems modernisation completed in 2019 and remains in active Philippine Navy service today, a fitting continuation for a small ship that had spent her whole Royal Navy career doing precisely this kind of unglamorous, essential coastal work.

There is one thing worth adding about where she is now, because it has a certain symmetry to it. The Peacocks were designed and paid for to patrol the waters of a British colony on the Chinese coast. Thirty years on, the same hulls are in the Philippine Navy, operating in the South China Sea, in a dispute with China over reefs and fishing grounds several hundred miles from where they started. A ship built for one relationship with Beijing is now on the other side of a different one, and she is still doing the same job she always did: being present, in small waters, where somebody needs a grey hull to be.