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.

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.

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.

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.

That August 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 passengers died. 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.

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.

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.