HMS Triumph (S93): The Last Trafalgar-Class Boat Standing

The Build: Barrow

HMS Triumph was built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering, laid down in 1987, launched in February 1991 by Mrs Ann Hamilton, wife of the then Armed Forces Minister Archie Hamilton, and commissioned in October 1991, the final boat of the seven-strong Trafalgar class.

The dates can be given exactly: ordered on 3 January 1986, laid down at Barrow on 2 February 1987, launched on 16 February 1991 and commissioned that October. Four years on the slip and a further eight months fitting out is a long build, and by the time she was accepted the Soviet Union she had been ordered to hunt had about two months left to live. She would spend her entire career doing jobs nobody had designed her for.

The name has been carried by some conspicuous ships and one very unlucky submarine. HMS Triumph (A108) flew the first British carrier strikes of the Korean War and ended her days as a repair ship. The submarine HMS Triumph, a T-class boat, was lost in the Aegean in January 1942 with every man aboard, one of the many British submarines that simply did not come back from the Mediterranean and whose exact fate has never been established. The name was not used for a submarine again for nearly fifty years.

A Record-Breaking Voyage

In 1993, Triumph achieved a genuine record, sailing 41,000 miles submerged and entirely without support to Australia, the longest solo deployment ever undertaken by a Royal Navy nuclear submarine at that time, a formidable test of both boat and crew.

That figure is worth turning over. Forty-one thousand miles is one and a half times round the world, and she did it dived and unsupported, meaning no port visits for stores, no tanker alongside, no repair ship. A nuclear submarine can do this because her reactor does not need refuelling and she makes her own oxygen and fresh water from the sea around her. What she cannot make is food, so the limiting factor on a deployment like that is the store rooms and, rather more, the hundred and thirty people living in a space with no windows and no news. The submarine could have kept going. The record is really about the crew.

Two Wars, Two Sets of Tomahawks

Following the September 11 attacks, Triumph took part in Operation Veritas in 2001, launching Tomahawk missiles against targets in Afghanistan and returning home flying the Jolly Roger.

Look at a map and the oddity of that sentence becomes clear. Afghanistan is landlocked, roughly seven hundred miles from the nearest open water, and the nearest open water is the Arabian Sea. So a British nuclear submarine sat submerged off the coast of Pakistan and threw cruise missiles across an entire country to hit targets in another one. It is the clearest possible illustration of what the Tomahawk did to naval power: a weapon that turns a submarine, the most self-effacing thing a navy owns, into something that can reach a long way inland without anybody knowing where the shot came from.

A decade later, during Operation Ellamy in 2011, she fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libyan air defence targets on 19, 20 and 24 March, with analysts estimating she launched more than fifteen missiles across the campaign, a submarine called upon twice within a single decade to strike targets ashore.

Ellamy is worth a little more detail, because it is the last time a Royal Navy submarine fired a weapon in anger to date. The campaign opened on the evening of 19 March 2011 with a coordinated American and British salvo intended to take apart Libya's integrated air defence system before allied aircraft went anywhere near it, and Triumph was the British contribution to that opening night, firing from the Mediterranean. She fired again on the 20th and once more on the 24th. Among the targets struck was a command and control building inside Colonel Gaddafi's own presidential compound in Tripoli.

It is a peculiar thing to consider. A boat designed in the late 1970s to sit in the North Atlantic listening for Soviet ballistic missile submarines spent two of her three shooting wars putting cruise missiles into buildings in Afghanistan and North Africa. She returned from Afghanistan flying the Jolly Roger, the submariners' own way of announcing a successful patrol, a tradition that goes back to a First World War admiral calling submarine warfare underhand and no occupation for a gentleman. HMS Trafalgar was first of the British boats to strike Afghanistan and carries that part of the story.

Outlasting Her Sisters

Triumph underwent a £300 million nuclear refuel and refit between 2005 and 2010, and a further four-year refit after that, keeping her at sea long after several of her sister boats had already been retired.

Spending three hundred million pounds on a fifteen-year-old submarine, and then a further four years of work after that, is not something a navy does for sentiment. It happened because the Astute class meant to replace the Trafalgars ran badly late, and every year of that delay had to be absorbed by boats that were already old. So Triumph, the last of her class off the slip, became the last of her class at sea by simply being the one with the most life left in her. HMS Torbay was given a two-year reprieve for the same reason and went in 2017; HMS Trenchant and HMS Turbulent followed.

Even that was not the end of the extensions. The Integrated Review of 2020 added a further eighteen months to her service, pushing her out to 2025, and she came back to sea in December 2022 for post-refit trials after four years in dockyard hands. By then she was thirty-one years old and running on a design that had been drawn before most of her crew were born. Keeping a nuclear submarine going that long is not cheap and is not done by choice; it is done when the alternative is not having one.

She returned to her base at Devonport for the final time in late 2024 and was decommissioned on 18 July 2025, the very last of the seven Trafalgar-class submarines to leave service, closing out a class that had served the Royal Navy for well over four decades.

That homecoming was on 12 December 2024, and she came up the Hamoaze flying a decommissioning pennant after thirty-three years in commission. The formal ceremony followed the next summer. With her went the last of a class that had covered the whole span from the Cold War to the Libyan campaign, and with her also went the last Royal Navy submarine that had ever fired a shot in anger.

What happens to her now is the same slow queue every one of them joins. She sits at Devonport with the other decommissioned nuclear boats, waiting for defuelling and eventual dismantling, a process the Navy has only just started to get to grips with: HMS Swiftsure is the demonstrator boat being taken apart at Rosyth, and she paid off in 1992. Triumph may be alongside for rather longer than she was ever at sea.