HMS Blackwood (F78): The Cut-Price Frigate That Gave Her Name to a Class

A Frigate Built to a Budget

HMS Blackwood was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company, her keel laid down on 14 September 1953, launched on 4 October 1955, and commissioned on 22 August 1957.

She was the name ship of the Blackwood class, also known as the Type 14, a design conceived as a deliberately cheaper and smaller alternative to the Royal Navy's more capable Type 12 frigates, at a time when the Admiralty needed to field a large enough anti-submarine fleet to counter the growing Soviet submarine threat without the budget to build a dozen full-sized ships to do it.

There is a further reason for the design that is easy to miss, and it explains almost everything about her. The Admiralty of the early 1950s was not simply short of money; it was planning for a war it expected to be a rerun of the Atlantic. In 1939 Britain had needed hundreds of escorts in a hurry and had improvised them out of whale catcher designs and small commercial yards. The assumption in 1950 was that the same thing would happen again against a very much larger Soviet submarine fleet, and that what would be needed was not a handful of superb ships but an enormous number of adequate ones, buildable by yards that had never seen a warship. The Type 14 was that design. The twelve that were actually built were, in effect, a working prototype for a class that would have been ordered by the hundred on the outbreak of war, and the reason she looks austere is that she was meant to be reproducible.

HMS Blackwood displaced 1,456 tons at full load, a modest figure that reflected the class's economical origins, and her crew handled a specialist fit that included three single 40mm Bofors guns, two Limbo Mark 10 triple-barrelled anti-submarine mortars, and twin 21-inch torpedo tubes (removed in the early 1960s as the class's role narrowed further towards pure submarine hunting), backed by an advanced sonar suite of Type 174, Type 162 and Type 170 sets. She cost the Admiralty just £1,769,000 to build, against roughly £3.5 million for a single Type 12, and as the class leader she was actually rather better equipped than most of her own sisters, one of only four Blackwood-class ships, alongside Exmouth, Malcolm and Palliser, to be fitted with the full pair of twin torpedo tube mounts rather than none at all, the other eight having lost even that in the name of economy.

The armament is worth staring at for a moment, because it is genuinely radical. A frigate of 1955 with no gun larger than a 40mm Bofors is not under-armed by accident; it is a deliberate refusal to spend weight, money and men on anything except the one job. She could not fight a surface ship. She could not usefully defend a convoy against aircraft. What she could do was find a submarine and kill it, and with two Limbo mortars she carried more ahead-throwing anti-submarine firepower than a good many ships costing twice as much, including some of the Type 12s she was supposed to be the poor relation of. Specialisation is a bargain right up to the point where somebody asks the ship to do something else.

A Bargain That Punched Above Its Weight

She was named, as the class leader traditionally was, for a genuine naval hero rather than a place or virtue: Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Blackwood, who as a young frigate captain commanded HMS Euryalus in 1805, shadowed the combined French and Spanish fleet out of Cadiz, rode overland to deliver the news to Nelson in person, and was given command of the inshore watching squadron that kept Nelson informed of the enemy's every move in the days before Trafalgar. He was aboard Victory on the morning of the battle itself, one of the witnesses to the codicil Nelson added to his will in favour of Emma Hamilton, and it was Euryalus that later carried the defeated French commander, Admiral Villeneuve, home to England as a prisoner.

What HMS Blackwood and her sister ships lacked in size and gun power, the class made up for in specialisation.

Despite carrying no gun armament worth the name, the Blackwood class's anti-submarine fit of Limbo mortars, homing torpedoes and sonar equalled that of the far larger and more expensive Type 12 frigates, and crews who spent their careers practising nothing but anti-submarine tactics made the class, by most accounts, among the most effective anti-submarine frigates in Royal Navy exercises right through to the mid-1960s.

It was a genuine case of a cut-price design outperforming its budget, at least in the one job it had been built to do.

The economy was not without cost.

The class's low, flush-decked profile, chosen partly to present a smaller target and confuse attacking aircraft, left little internal space to spare, and the hulls proved less robust than hoped when several ships of the class were sent on fishery protection duty in the heavy seas around Iceland during the Cod Wars of the 1950s to 1970s, requiring structural strengthening after the pounding they took.

The Cod Wars deserve rather more than a passing reference, because of what fishery protection actually involved by then. Icelandic gunboats towed a cutter designed to sever a trawler's warps and part her from her nets, and the Royal Navy's counter was to put a frigate physically between the gunboat and the trawler. That means deliberate close-quarters manoeuvring at speed in a heavy North Atlantic sea by two ships whose captains are each daring the other to give way, and the predictable result was a long series of collisions: HMS Andromeda was rammed three separate times. For a thin-plated fifteen-hundred-ton frigate built to a budget for a completely different job, being shouldered by a purpose-built ice-strengthened gunboat off Iceland in February was not what the drawings had allowed for, and the class needed strengthening as a result.

The class's small 310-foot hull, adequate for the job it was designed around, left little room for the kind of modernisation that kept other frigate classes relevant into the 1970s and beyond.

And the reason her class died young can be stated in one word: helicopter. By the middle of the 1960s the decisive change in anti-submarine warfare was that the escort no longer attacked the submarine herself. She found it and sent an aircraft, which could reach twenty miles in the time a ship takes to travel two and could drop a homing torpedo on a contact the ship would never have got near. A frigate without a flight deck was, from that moment, a ship that could only fight the submarine that came to her. Blackwood was three hundred and ten feet long and flush-decked with a Limbo well aft. There was nowhere to put a hangar, nowhere to put a landing spot, and no realistic way of finding either. Her sonar was as good as anybody's to the end. It no longer mattered.

An Early End

Detailed accounts of HMS Blackwood's individual deployments, ship by ship, have proven difficult to trace in the sources available, a common enough situation for a class whose ships spent most of their careers on unglamorous but essential anti-submarine training and patrol work rather than the kind of dramatic single actions that make for well-documented histories.

What is clear is that HMS Blackwood was broken up in 1976, a relatively early retirement for a ship not yet twenty years old, consistent with the wider fate of her class: all twelve Royal Navy Blackwood-class frigates were decommissioned during the 1970s, their small hulls and specialist Cold War role having simply run out of road, with only HMS Exmouth and HMS Hardy lasting into 1977, the latter just long enough to attend Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review.

One of them, though, made a mark on naval engineering out of all proportion to the class. HMS Exmouth was taken in hand in 1966, had her steam plant removed entirely, and rejoined the fleet on 5 June 1968 with an Olympus gas turbine for high speed and two Proteus turbines for cruising, making her the first major warship anywhere in the world to be powered by gas turbines alone. Not gas turbines and steam, which several navies had tried, but nothing else at all. The trials were not without incident, an entire ring of turbine blades failing after sixty-four hours of running, and they went on for years, and the answers they produced are the reason every major British warship built since has been gas turbine powered. The cheapest frigate design of the era turned out to be the ideal thing to conduct the single most consequential propulsion experiment in modern British naval history in.

HMS Blackwood's legacy rests less on any single action than on what her class as a whole demonstrated: that a comparatively small, austere design, built to a tight budget and a single purpose, could hold its own against the Royal Navy's best-equipped anti-submarine frigates for the best part of a decade, even if the same economy that made that possible ultimately limited how long she could serve.