HMS Blake (1889): The Fastest Cruiser in the World, Reinvented as a Destroyer's Nursemaid

A Record-Breaking Design

HMS Blake was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 23 November 1889 and completed on 2 February 1892, the name ship of the two-strong Blake class of protected cruisers, alongside her sister HMS Blenheim.

The man she was named for deserves to be a great deal better known than he is. Robert Blake was a Somerset merchant's son from Bridgwater who spent his first fifty years as a trader, a Member of Parliament and then a rather good soldier for Parliament in the Civil War, and who was given command at sea in 1649 at an age when most officers are thinking about retiring. He then turned out to be one of the finest commanders in British history: he hunted Prince Rupert's royalist squadron out of European waters, fought the formidable Dutch admiral Tromp to a standstill, took an English battle fleet into the Mediterranean for the first time, and in April 1657 sailed into the fortified harbour of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, destroyed a Spanish treasure fleet under the guns of its own batteries and came out again without losing a ship. He died of his old wounds on the way home, within sight of Plymouth. He is generally reckoned the father of the Royal Navy, and the reason he is not a household name is largely that the Restoration had his body dug out of Westminster Abbey and put in a common grave.

She was armed with two BL 9.2-inch guns and ten QF 6-inch guns, backed by sixteen 3-pounder guns and four 14-inch torpedo tubes, driven by four triple-expansion steam engines, two for main power and two for cruising, feeding six boilers across twin screws.

At the time of her completion HMS Blake and HMS Blenheim were among the largest and fastest cruisers in the world, embodying the Admiralty's push in the late 1880s for cruisers capable of both hunting down enemy commerce raiders and outrunning anything they could not outfight.

The push in question had a name and a date. The Naval Defence Act received royal assent on 31 May 1889, six months before Blake went down the ways, and it committed twenty-one and a half million pounds over five years to seventy new warships: ten battleships, forty-two protected cruisers and eighteen torpedo gunboats. More importantly it wrote the two-power standard into law, the principle that the Royal Navy should be at least equal to the next two navies in the world combined. Before 1889 naval strength was a matter of annual estimates and quiet argument inside the Admiralty. After 1889 it was a statute, a public commitment and a number that foreign governments could read. It is the beginning of the naval arms race that ends, twenty years later, in the dreadnought.

Protected cruiser is a term worth unpacking, because it does not mean what it sounds like. She had no armour belt on her sides at all. What she had was an armoured deck, flat over the machinery spaces and curving down at the edges to meet the hull below the waterline, so that a shell arriving near the waterline would either be deflected by the slope or would burst above the deck, where the damage could be contained. The space between the deck and the ship's side was filled with coal bunkers, on the reasoning, more or less correct, that several feet of packed coal will stop a good many splinters. It was a cheap way of buying protection without paying the weight penalty of a proper belt, and it bought speed instead. It was also obsolete within about fifteen years, once armoured cruisers with real side armour arrived.

Her 1,800 tons of coal bunkerage was meant to buy her 15,000 nautical miles of range at a steady 10 knots, enough to chase a commerce raider halfway round the globe. In practice she barely managed 10,000, a shortfall the Admiralty seemed quietly willing to live with in exchange for the speed.

It is worth knowing what eighteen hundred tons of coal actually meant, because bunker capacity is only half of an endurance figure. Coal did not arrive by pipeline. It came alongside in a collier and was moved aboard by the ship's own company, shovelled into sacks, hoisted across, tipped down chutes and trimmed level in the bunkers by hand, by men working in the dark in a hold full of coal dust. A full load took the better part of a day and a night with almost everybody aboard turned to, officers included, and afterwards the entire ship, the men, the mess decks, the paintwork and anything left uncovered, was black. A cruiser's real range was limited as much by how often her people could face doing that as by the size of her bunkers.

Flagship on Two Continents

HMS Blake spent her early commissioned years as flagship of the North America and West Indies Squadron between 1892 and 1895, a prestigious posting that put her at the centre of British naval presence across the western Atlantic and Caribbean, before returning home to serve with the Channel Fleet.

Her later peacetime service included a spell as a temporary trooper: in October 1900 she was employed transporting personnel, in January 1901 she carried home the relieved crew of HMS Empress of India, and shortly afterwards she was sent all the way to Australia to relieve the crew of HMS Royal Arthur, not returning to home waters until June that year.

Not every moment of that glamorous first half was so easy. On 24 June 1896, off the Lizard on the Cornish coast, one of her boilers exploded, killing stoker George William Evill, a stark reminder that even a showpiece cruiser's engine room could be as dangerous as any enemy.

The stokehold was, in fact, statistically the most dangerous place aboard a Victorian warship. The 1890s were pushing steam pressures higher than anything the previous generation had used, in confined spaces, with cylindrical boilers whose failure modes were violent and instantaneous, and a great many more peacetime sailors were killed by machinery than by any enemy. Naval boiler design was one of the fiercest technical arguments of the decade, fought out in the press and in Parliament as well as in the Admiralty. George William Evill, killed off the Lizard on 24 June 1896, is one name attached to a problem that filled a good deal of the professional literature at the time and is now almost entirely forgotten.

She was paid off on 15 July 1901 for a refit, closing out the first, more glamorous half of her career.

From Cruiser to Depot Ship

In 1907, HMS Blake's career took a very different turn when she was converted into a destroyer depot ship, her original cruiser armament stripped back to four 6-inch guns and two 4-inch guns to make way for the workshops, stores and accommodation needed to support a flotilla of destroyers at sea, a role considerably less glamorous than flagship duty but no less essential to a navy increasingly reliant on its torpedo craft.

The depot ship deserves a proper description, because the phrase gives no idea of the scale of the job. A destroyer of 1910 was, in effect, a hull, a set of engines and some torpedo tubes with a crew squeezed into whatever was left. She had no workshop worth the name, almost no stores, no bakery, no laundry, no sick bay and no room to carry spares for anything substantial. Life aboard at sea was genuinely appalling: wet, cold, violently uncomfortable and short of everything. The depot ship was the answer to all of it. She was the flotilla's machine shop and foundry, its hospital, its bakery, its laundry, its canteen, its post office, its store and its hotel, and when the destroyers came in their people moved aboard her to sleep, eat properly and get clean. Blake's second career was as a small floating town for several hundred men whose own ships could not house them.

She recommissioned in her new role at Chatham on 6 August 1908 and spent the pre-war years attached to the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla. For a few weeks in the summer of 1913 that flotilla, and Blake along with it, was commanded by a young Captain Reginald Tyrwhitt, who a year later would take the Harwich Force to war and make his name at the Battle of Heligoland Bight, the Cuxhaven Raid and the Battle of Dogger Bank, ending his career an Admiral of the Fleet. Blake herself was rather more sedentary company than the man briefly in charge of her.

It was in this guise that HMS Blake spent the First World War, taking on the 11th Destroyer Flotilla of the Grand Fleet as a second charge in September 1915 alongside the 2nd, briefly a third, the 12th, that November, before finally handing the 2nd over in April 1916 and seeing out the war as depot ship to the 11th alone, the unglamorous but vital work of keeping smaller, faster ships fuelled, armed, repaired and crewed continuing largely out of the historical spotlight that fell on the Grand Fleet's battleships and battlecruisers.

A Quiet End

HMS Blake survived the war in her support role, took on the newly formed 5th Destroyer Flotilla in March 1919, and was eventually sold for scrapping on 9 June 1922, bringing to a close a career that had begun as one of the fastest cruisers afloat and ended tending to the needs of the destroyer flotillas that had, in many ways, come to define naval warfare by the time she was broken up.

Her legacy lies less in any single dramatic action than in the two very different lives she led: one as a showpiece of late-Victorian cruiser design, the other as the patient, practical backbone that kept a modern destroyer flotilla fighting fit through four years of war.