HMS Blackpool (F77): Sailing Into One of the Cold War's Deadliest Naval Accidents

A Frigate Squadron Leader

HMS Blackpool was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, ordered on 6 March 1951 though construction did not begin until December 1954, launched on 14 February 1957, and entering active service on 14 August 1958.

A Whitby-class frigate displacing 2,560 tons at full load and capable of 30 knots, she carried a crew that grew from 152 to 225 over her career, and led the 6th Frigate Squadron between 1958 and 1960 and the 28th Escort Squadron between 1964 and 1966, with a Far East deployment as part of the 25th Escort Squadron between 1962 and 1964.

That Far East commission was not a quiet one. She came out of a refit at Chatham in 1962, worked up off the south coast and sailed for Singapore, and almost immediately found herself running troops across to Labuan in North Borneo. The rising she was helping to put down was the Brunei Revolt, which is described in the article on HMS Brighton (F106), and it was the opening move of the four-year undeclared war between Indonesia and the new Malaysia.

Brighton was in the same squadron, as it happens. The 25th Escort Squadron in those years was HMS Rothesay as leader with Cavendish, Brighton, Llandaff and Blackpool, and Rothesay in 1962 and 1963 was commanded by Captain Godfrey Place. Nineteen years earlier, as a lieutenant, Place had taken the midget submarine X7 through the nets in Kaafjord and laid charges under the battleship Tirpitz, an operation that put her out of action for months and for which he and Donald Cameron of X6 were both given the Victoria Cross. He received it from the King in June 1945, after the best part of two years as a prisoner of war. In 1962 he was a squadron commander in the Far East, and one of the ships taking his orders was Blackpool.

The Whitby class was Britain's first anti-submarine frigate designed entirely from the keel up since the Second World War, built specifically to counter a new generation of fast Soviet submarines, the Whiskey class, capable of over 20 knots submerged. Even her funnel was part of the Cold War brief, built broad and angled to resist the blast of a nuclear detonation, though in practice it proved rather better at surviving nuclear war than at clearing its own exhaust smoke.

The funnel was not the half of it. The Type 12 was the first generation of British warship designed on the assumption that the next war would involve nuclear weapons going off somewhere in the vicinity, and the design reflects it throughout. The upper deck was fitted with a pre-wetting system, a ring main of spray nozzles that could wash radioactive fallout over the side before it settled. The interior was arranged as a sealed citadel that could be closed down and held at slightly higher pressure than the outside air, so that contaminated air could not leak in, with airlocks at the access points. The bridge was enclosed rather than open. The whole idea was that the ship could keep fighting with every hatch shut and nobody on the upper deck at all, which is a very 1950s way of thinking about a war and was, in the event, never needed.

Five Years Under New Zealand's Flag

HMS Blackpool was leased to the Royal New Zealand Navy, commissioning into New Zealand service at Chatham on 16 June 1966 under Commander J.I. Quinn as HMNZS Blackpool, and went on to serve for close to five years under three further commanding officers in turn: Commander D.J. Cheney from March 1968, Commander I.H.D. Tyler from October 1969, and Commander R.E. Lawry from July 1970.

The reason New Zealand wanted her comes down to a piece of arithmetic that any small navy will recognise. To keep three frigates available at any one time you need four, because one of them is always in refit. New Zealand had been running six wartime Loch-class frigates and had begun replacing them in 1957, but the money would not stretch: by 1963 the order for the second pair had been cut from two ships to one. That left a hole, and no prospect of filling it for years.

So in 1965 the Royal New Zealand Navy arranged to hire a frigate from the Royal Navy to stand in the fourth billet until HMNZS Canterbury could be built. HMS Whitby, the name ship of the class, was offered first; in the end it was Blackpool, the last of the class and the newest of them, taken on a five-year lease. It was a straightforward transaction and it worked, which is the sort of arrangement that never gets written about.

It ended exactly as planned, too. She left Auckland on 22 April 1971 for the passage home, and her ship's company did not disperse: they went straight across into Canterbury, the ship they had been keeping the place warm for. Five years of New Zealand sea time, and the people who had accumulated it stayed together.

Her New Zealand career included Far East Station postings in 1966 and 1967 and again in 1968 and 1969, participation in exercises including FOTEX 67, CONVEX 3/68 and Coral Sands, and a medical evacuation mission to Raoul Island in 1967.

August 1968 brought a far more serious call. A fire had broken out in the officers' smoking room aboard the liner SS Gothic, steaming into a Pacific gale, and burned through three decks, destroying her bridge and radio room, before the crew brought it under control three and a half hours later. Seven people died, four passengers and three of her crew. Blackpool was despatched with an emergency medical team embarked to escort the crippled liner home, while Gothic's own master, Captain Brian Agnew, somehow steered her back to Wellington from an auxiliary position at the stern, relaying helm orders to the engine room by messenger since the bridge no longer existed to give them from, a feat that earned him an OBE and Gothic a one-way trip to the breakers the following year.

Gothic deserves rather more than a mention in passing, because she had been a famous ship. In 1953 the royal yacht Britannia was not yet ready, so Gothic, a Shaw Savill cargo liner, was converted to carry the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on the Commonwealth tour: they joined her at Kingston, went through the Panama Canal in her, and she took them across the Pacific to Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand. The cruiser HMNZS Black Prince took over her escort for the last leg. Fifteen years later a New Zealand frigate met the same ship again, burnt out from the bridge down and steering from the stern, and brought her home.

What Captain Agnew did is worth spelling out, because it is one of the finest pieces of seamanship in the post-war merchant service. The fire took the bridge, the wheelhouse, the chartroom and the radio room, which is to say every instrument, chart and means of communication the ship possessed and the place from which she was conned. He took her back four hundred miles to Wellington from the emergency steering position at the stern, where there is a wheel and very little else, with no view forward worth the name, passing engine orders by runner because the telegraphs had gone, in a Pacific gale, with dead and injured aboard and a burnt-out ship under him. She never carried a paying passenger again.

A Deployment Cut Short by Disaster

In 1969, HMS Blackpool was en route to the Philippines for Exercise Sea Spirit, sailing in company with HMS Cleopatra as part of the same exercise formation, when the deployment was curtailed by one of the era's most notorious peacetime naval disasters: the collision between the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne and the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans, which cut the American ship in two and killed 74 of her crew.

HMS Blackpool subsequently took passage back to Auckland, arriving on 30 June 1969, her own exercise abandoned in the wake of a tragedy that shook the wider Commonwealth and American naval community and prompted lasting changes to fleet exercise safety procedures.

The collision itself is worth understanding, because it was not simple carelessness. During flying operations a destroyer is stationed as plane guard, close astern of the carrier, ready to pick aircrew out of the water if an aircraft goes into the sea, and ships are constantly ordered between screening stations ahead of the carrier and that position behind her. Moving from one to the other means crossing the carrier's track, in the dark, judging the turn against a ship that cannot manoeuvre freely because she is flying aircraft. At three in the morning on 3 June 1969, Frank E. Evans was ordered from ahead to astern, turned the wrong way, and went under Melbourne's bow. The carrier cut her in half. The forward section, with most of the sleeping watch below in it, sank in about three minutes, and seventy-four American sailors died.

And this had happened to the same carrier before. On the night of 10 February 1964, twenty miles off Jervis Bay, Melbourne had collided with the Australian destroyer HMAS Voyager in exactly the same circumstances, cut her in two and lost eighty-two men. Two carrier and destroyer collisions, five years apart, in the same ship, with a hundred and fifty-six dead between them. In both cases the inquiries put the primary blame on the destroyer that turned across her bow, and in both cases that made remarkably little difference to how Melbourne's people were treated afterwards. Blackpool was a few miles away in the same exercise formation on the second occasion, and the exercise was abandoned.

What happened afterwards, to the seventy-four Americans who died and to the Australian officers held responsible, is set out in the article on HMS Cleopatra (F28), who was another of the five ships in the screen that night. It is not a comfortable read, and it is still not finished.

A Return Home, and the Scrapyard

HMS Blackpool returned to Portsmouth in June 1971, her loan to New Zealand complete, and rather than slip quietly into retirement she spent her final years as a target ship in the Firth of Forth, fitted with trials equipment to help measure the effects of weapons fired at her by her own former service. She was eventually sold for breaking up in 1978, closing out a career that had taken her from leading Royal Navy escort squadrons to a front-row seat, at one remove, on one of the Cold War's most sobering peacetime naval accidents, and finally to a rather more literal kind of target practice.

The target ship years sound like an indignity and were in fact rather useful. Nobody can calculate reliably what a warhead does to a real ship: what shock does to machinery seatings, how fire spreads through cable runs, where the smoke goes, which bulkheads hold. The only way to find out is to instrument a real hull and hit it, and a paid-off frigate of known construction is exactly the right subject. The damage control practice and the design changes that came out of trials like hers were what a later generation of ships took to the South Atlantic in 1982, where several of them found out the answers the hard way.