HMS Ambuscade

HMS Ambuscade: From 1746 to the Present Day

HMS Ambuscade is the name given to eight Royal Navy ships between 1746 and 1993. The Ambuscades were frigates and destroyers, the fleet's workhorses in almost every major naval conflict - from being the eyes of the fleet in the age of sail, to torpedo attacks at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, to shielding the carriers and transports in the Falklands War. They also patrolled the sea lanes and protected the convoys that fed the nation. This is the story of the ships and the seamen who crewed Ambuscade over nearly three centuries.

The last Ambuscade (a Type 21 frigate) was sold to Pakistan in 1993 and renamed PNS Tariq. In 2023, the Pakistan Navy kindly agreed to donate the ship to the charity Clyde Naval Heritage. The charity aims to bring her back to the Clyde, where she was built, within a museum focusing on the Falklands War. That project inspires this book, and all the profits will be donated to Clyde Naval Heritage.

Click on shop (below) to buy a copy direct from the publisher (UK only) who makes no marketing charge, maximising the proceeds to the charity. The book is also available through your local bookshop (including many countries worldwide), and the Kindle version is available from Amazon.

HMS Ambuscade: From 1746 to the Present Day

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Paperback: 978-1-80443-074-3 Ebook: 978-1-80443-075-0 117 Pages. Size = 6" x 9"

The book launch presentation on YouTube

Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: The First HMS Ambuscade
Chapter Two: The First British-built HMS Ambuscade
Chapter Three: The First World War
Chapter Four: The Second World War
Chapter Five: Today’s HMS Ambuscade
Chapter Six: Conclusion
Appendix 1 - Captains of HMS Ambuscade
Appendix 2: Shipbuilding on the River Clyde
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author

Extract - Introduction

HMS Ambuscade is the name given to a number of Royal Navy ships between 1746 and 1993. The final ship of that name (a Type 21 frigate) was sold to Pakistan in 1993 and renamed PNS Tariq. In 2023, the Pakistan Navy (Pākistān Bahrí’a) kindly agreed to donate the ship to the charity Clyde Naval Heritage. The charity plans to bring the ship back to the Clyde, where it was built, as a museum, with a focus on the Falklands War due to its service in that conflict. That plan inspires this book, and all the profits from the book will be donated to the Clyde Naval Heritage.

The aim of this book is to describe the ships named Ambuscade and their operational history. There were five substantive ships of that name, although matters were more complex during the Napoleonic Wars when one Dutch and two French warships were renamed Ambuscade after being captured by the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy’s first steam-powered frigate was laid down in 1830 and was initially named Ambuscade. However, it was renamed HMS Amphion when launched in 1846.

While not a Royal Navy ship, there was an earlier British fighting ship named Ambuscade. She was a privateer, authorised by the British government to attack enemy ships during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). She was armed with 30 guns and had a crew of 140. This was a profitable business, as can be seen from the court records, for both the owners (Portsmouth and London merchants) and the government. For example, in 1711, Ambuscade captured the French ship Excellent (master Stephen Raffin), laden on the banks of Newfoundland with 4,300 fish, bound for a port in France.

The word ambuscade is typically defined as ‘an ambush’ (noun) or ‘to ambush or lie in ambush’ (verb). The English language adopted ambuscade in the late 16th century, borrowing it from Middle French, whose speakers had raided Old Italian to acquire it. The French had made embuscade from imboscata, which was from imboscare, ‘to place in ambush.’ Evidence of ambush functioning as a verb can be found as far back as the dawn of the fourteenth century. It arrived not from Middle French (French as spoken in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) but from Anglo-French, the French spoken in medieval England. Its second syllable is from the Old French busc, meaning ‘forest, grove.’ The first known use of ambuscade was in 1588.

It was the French Navy that first named its ships Embuscade, and the name entered the Royal Navy through the capture of a French frigate in 1745. Throughout its history in the Royal Navy, the name has been given to frigates or destroyers, whose design and role included ambushing enemy ships. The frigate in the age of sail was the Royal Navy’s glamour ship, big enough to carry significant firepower but fast enough to evade larger enemies. They were the light cavalry of the seas, patrolling, scouting and above all, fighting. As Admiral Nelson said, they were ‘the eyes of the fleet’. They often fought ship-to-ship actions, which made frigate captains famous through contemporary press coverage and even today through the fictional stories of Hornblower and others. They often operated alone, while the larger ships of the line typically operated in squadrons or fleets to blockade enemy ports.

An introductory word on language. Royal Navy ships are given the prefix HMS (Her or His Majesty’s Ship), while the French Navy does not use prefixes for its ships. Naval guns were typically described by the weight in pounds of the solid projectile (cannon balls in the age of sail)
fired from the ship’s guns; hence, ‘pdr’ (pounder) is used in the text. The number of guns on a ship is often put in brackets after the name, e.g. HMS Ambuscade (40). Ship dimensions usually include its overall length, the length of the keel (base of the ship), and the beam (width).
Royal Navy ranks will be referenced throughout the book. In the age of sail, HMS Ambuscade was commanded by an officer with the rank of Captain. In the Royal Navy, any officer in command of a ship was accorded the honorific ‘Captain’, but only a post-captain could command a ship of one of the six major rates like Ambuscade. This was the highest rank in the Royal Navy below that of rear-admiral, except that for detached duty, a captain could be temporarily given the rank of commodore and would then rank above all other captains in the squadron. After rear-admiral, an officer could be promoted to vice-admiral. A full admiral usually commanded one of the three squadrons into which a British fleet was divided. The squadrons were distinguished by colour, with the order of precedence being red, white, and blue; the admirals commanding the squadrons flew corresponding coloured ensigns. All levels of admiral are described as flag ranks.

BATTLE HONOURS
FINISTERRE 1747 - LAGOS 1759 - JUTLAND 1916 -
ATLANTIC 1940-44 - ARCTIC 1942 - FALKLANDS 1982.

Here is a video of the ship in Pakistan Navy service. Last of the Amazons.

About the Author

Dave Watson was born in Liverpool but has lived in Scotland for the past 34 years. He lives with his wife, Liz, in Ayrshire.

He is the author of The Frontier Sea: The Napoleonic Wars in the Adriatic (BMH, 2023), Chasing the Soft Underbelly: Turkey and the Second World War (Helion, 2023), Ripped Apart, Cyprus Crisis, 1963-1974 (Helion, 2023). He is a contributing author to the books 'What Would Keir Hardie Say?' (2015), ‘Keir Hardie and the 21st Century Socialist Revival’ (2019), A New Scotland (2022) and several other current affairs books and publications.

Dave is a graduate in Scots Law from the University of Strathclyde, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He retired in 2018 from his post as Head of Policy and Public Affairs at UNISON Scotland and now works part-time as a policy consultant and Director of the Scottish think tank The Jimmy Reid Foundation. He is the secretary of Glasgow and District Wargaming Society – one of the UK’s longest-running wargame clubs.

He is a Clyde Naval Heritage Advisory Group member, and the charity plans to bring HMS Ambuscade/PNS Tariq back to the River Clyde.