The first of the Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigates to be disposed of, the former HMS Monmouth, was towed out of Portsmouth this morning to be scrapped in Turkey.
Conceived as a Cold War submarine hunter, HMS Monmouth was the sixth ship of the class and was built by Yarrow shipbuilders on the Clyde, commissioning in 1993. The ‘Black Duke’ served all over the world, from the North Atlantic to the Gulf and circumnavigated the globe in 2007.
Monmouth’s last major deployment was in 2018 when she accompanied HMS Queen Elizabeth on the Westlant deployment to the US. She sailed for the final time in April 2019 and was laid up, ahead of her planned LIFEX refit. This was eventually abandoned as a cost-saving measure and she is the only ship of her class never to have had a mid-life upgrade.
She languished in Devonport, briefly serving as a harbour training ship. She was used by the replacement crews preparing to take over the Type 23 frigate forward-deployed in the Gulf. There we briefly rumours she might be sold to Greece as part of a deal to sell the Hellenic Navy Type 31 frigates but this was always extremely unlikely, given her poor material state. She was subsequently towed to Portsmouth in 2021 and handed over to DSRO for the final stripping of equipment.
She never received a proper decommissioning ceremony and was officially withdrawn from RN service on 30 June 2021. The ship’s bell was handed over to the mayor of Monmouth in Wales for safekeeping, having been on board for the 28 years the ship was in commission, during which time she sailed more than half a million miles and visited over 200 ports. At least 2,000 sailors served on board this ship during its lifetime.
The long list of Royal Navy warships and RFAs that have been disposed of in the last two decades have mostly ended up at the Leyal scrapyard at Aliaga on Turkey’s Aegean coast, and Monmouth is no exception. The UK does not have a facility where ships can be dismantled, mainly due to health, safety and environmental regulations making it financially unviable, despite the rise in the price of scrap steel in the last decade.
Monmouth is the first of all the Type 23s to be scrapped (The 3 older Type 23s sold to Chile are still going strong). Disposing of a warship that is over 30 years old would not be at all remarkable if there was a replacement ready to take her place in the fleet. Ex-HMS Montrose, currently on the trots in Portsmouth harbour, will likely be next to the scrapyard, followed eventually by HMS Westminster, Argyll and Northumberland.
Main image: Portsmouth Proud
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