Celebrating the brilliant career of Royal Navy ship HMS Pembroke in pictures, after finding "a new home"

HMS Pembroke was renamed Căpitan Constantin Dumitrescu at a ceremony in Rosyth, Scotland, on August 4. Commissioned into the Royal Navy in October 1998, the Sandown-class minehunter was the second ship in the second batch of minehunters - receiving various upgrades to the previous batch.

She was a regular fixture to military forces in the Middle East, being deployed to the Persian Gulf between 2009 and 2012. The ship returned to HMNB Clyde and received a rousing reception from families and well-wishers. One of her many duties - alongside clearing unexploded ordnances - was protecting merchant ships in an area known for piracy.

Both HMS Pembroke and HMS Middleton assisted the Delhi Express cargo ship which lost power in the Gulf of Aden. Another memorable moment was when she destroyed a 300lb mine which was dredged up by a fishing boat off the coast of Falmouth in Cornwall. She used her Seafox system to detonate it in 2014.

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As well as duties far away from home, HMS Pembroke was also involved in exercises off the coast of Scotland as part of the First Mine Counter Measures Squadron (MCM1) - practicing fire and flooding drills, salvaging, medical training, gunnery, and mine hunting. She also has vast in working alongside international forces.

HMS Pembroke spent four months in 2015 co-operating with German, Polish, Belgian and Royal Dutch navies, where they located nine Second World War bombs and destroyed them. One of them was a 500lb explosi8ve in the North Sea.

The ship was decommissioned in 2023, with an announcement of her and HMS Blyth being sold in the same year. Major General Rich Cantrill previously said: “We are pleased to see former HMS Pembroke commissioned into the Romanian Naval Forces. She will play a key role in Black Sea security going forward and this demonstrates the strengthening bond between our two Nations’ militaries.”