HMS Blake (C99): The Cruiser That Took Nineteen Years to Build

A Wartime Order, Shelved

HMS Blake was laid down at the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company yard at Govan on 17 August 1942, originally ordered as part of the Minotaur class of light cruisers.

Wartime priorities intervened almost immediately: with anti-submarine escorts and landing craft far more urgently needed than another cruiser, HMS Blake's construction was given low priority, and though she was launched on 20 December 1945, work on her was suspended entirely the following year, leaving her laid up, unfinished, at Gareloch on the Clyde for the best part of a decade.

She was the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry the name of Admiral Robert Blake, the 17th-century Commonwealth naval commander so admired that Nelson himself once wrote he did not reckon himself equal to him, a fairly high bar for a ship to live up to, let alone one that could not even manage to get herself finished on schedule.

Redesigned Twice Before She Ever Put to Sea

Rather than complete HMS Blake to her original wartime specification, the Admiralty chose in 1951 to approve an entirely new design for her, resuming construction to build what became, in effect, a modern cruiser inside a hull begun a decade earlier, prompted largely by the appearance of the Soviet Union's new Sverdlov-class cruisers, which suddenly made a half-finished wartime hull look like an opportunity rather than an embarrassment.

The Sverdlovs frightened the Admiralty rather badly, and one of them did it in person. In June 1953 the cruiser Sverdlov herself came to Spithead for the Coronation Review, the first visit by a Soviet warship to a British port since the war, and proceeded to impress everybody who watched her: twelve 6-inch guns, immaculate turnout and a piece of ship-handling coming to her buoy that professional observers talked about for years. Fourteen of the class were built. Britain, having spent the post-war years scrapping cruisers, suddenly had nothing comparable and three unfinished hulls lying in a Scottish sea loch, and within a year the welders were back aboard. There is a postscript, too. In April 1956 another cruiser of the same class, the Ordzhonikidze, brought Khrushchev on a state visit to Portsmouth, and Commander Lionel Crabb went into the harbour on the 19th to have a look at her underwater and never came back. It remains one of the strangest unsolved stories of the Cold War.

The revised HMS Blake, as a Tiger-class light cruiser, was fitted with fully automatic 6-inch guns in twin high-angle mounts capable of firing twenty rounds per minute per gun, alongside similarly automatic 3-inch guns firing up to ninety rounds per minute, backed by modern fire control and, notably for the era, air conditioning throughout the ship.

Fitting-out was itself interrupted by tragedy: on 10 September 1957, an explosion aboard HMS Blake at Govan injured twenty people, adding further delay and cost to a construction programme that was already, by any normal standard, extraordinarily protracted.

HMS Blake finally commissioned on 18 March 1961, nineteen years after her keel was first laid down, displacing 11,560 tons and armed with four 6-inch guns in two twin mounts and six 3-inch guns in three twin mounts.

Even among her own two sisters she was something of an outlier: HMS Tiger's guns ran on all-hydraulic control and HMS Lion's on a mix of the two, while Blake alone was fitted all-electric throughout. Between them, her four 6-inch barrels could put out around 80 shells a minute, against just 54 from the nine older guns of the wartime Minotaur-class cruisers her own design had started out as.

The honest verdict on those guns is less flattering than the arithmetic. The Mark 26 twin mounting was a hundred and fifty-two tons of extraordinarily complicated machinery, with a three-part feed tray, tilting buckets, scuttles and a recoil-driven power system, all of it required to work in perfect sequence twenty times a minute per barrel. In service it jammed. It jammed often enough that the mountings could rarely manage the sustained thirty-second burst that was their basic design requirement, and the automatic 3-inch guns were much the same story. On paper the Tigers were the most heavily automated gun cruisers in the world. In practice they were ships whose main armament could not be depended on, which goes a long way towards explaining why two of the three were rebuilt as helicopter carriers within a decade of commissioning.

Flag-Flying in the Mediterranean and Beyond

Once in service, HMS Blake carried out the kind of flag-flying and crisis-response duties expected of a modern cruiser.

In 1969 she was deployed to Gibraltar in response to heightened Spanish hostility following the closure of the border with the colony, a deployment that also saw an RAF Harrier jump jet land on her deck, a striking demonstration of the new aircraft's capabilities performed on a ship that had begun life as a conventional wartime cruiser design.

The Gibraltar deployment had a hard edge to it. Gibraltarians had voted in a referendum in 1967 to remain British by something like twelve thousand votes to forty-four, and Franco's response, in June 1969, was to close the frontier completely: families divided, Spanish workers cut off from their jobs on the Rock, the telephone lines severed, and the only way in or out by sea or air. It stayed shut for sixteen years. Sending a cruiser to sit in the harbour was not a courtesy call.

And the Harrier on her deck was rather more significant than a photo opportunity. The whole point of the aircraft was that it needed no catapult, no arrester wires and no angled deck, which meant it could operate from ships very much smaller than a fleet carrier. With CVA-01 cancelled three years earlier, that was precisely the argument the Navy needed to be able to make, and it made it. Within a decade the argument had produced the Sea Harrier and the through-deck cruiser that became HMS Invincible, and in 1982 those two things went to the South Atlantic and won the air war over the Falklands. A jump jet standing on the quarterdeck of a cruiser laid down in 1942 is one of the places that thread starts.

In 1971 she supported the British withdrawal from Malta, and in 1977 she took part in Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead, one of the great set-piece gatherings of the postwar Royal Navy.

Reborn as a Helicopter Cruiser

Between 1965 and 1969, HMS Blake underwent a major conversion into a helicopter and command cruiser, her aft gun mounts removed entirely to make way for a flight deck and hangar, leaving her with a reduced armament of two 6-inch guns, two 3-inch guns and two quadruple Seacat missile launchers, but a notably useful new capability.

From June 1969 she carried Westland Wessex helicopters, replaced from December 1972 by the more capable Sea King, a role that suited her far better than her original cruiser design ever could have and that kept her relevant into the late 1970s, even as her sister ships and most of the rest of the wartime-generation cruiser fleet were retired around her.

The conversion happened for a specific reason and it was not affection for the ship. In 1966 the government cancelled CVA-01, the new fleet carrier the Navy had been planning its whole future around, and the fleet was suddenly facing the prospect of having nowhere to operate the large anti-submarine helicopters that had become the centre of its anti-submarine tactics. Blake and Tiger had hulls big enough to take a hangar and a flight deck, and they were there. The rebuilds were expensive, ran well over their estimates, and were criticised at the time and since on the fair grounds that the result was a ship with half her guns, only four helicopters and a very large bill. What is also true is that they kept a proper helicopter platform at sea through the awkward decade between the fleet carriers going and the Invincible class arriving, and the Navy had nothing else that could have done it.

The Final Chapter

HMS Blake was decommissioned at Portsmouth on 6 December 1979, running her guns one last time before she paid off, a shoot that turned out to be the final "big gun" salvo the Royal Navy has ever fired. She very nearly got one more chance to fire them for real. When Argentina invaded the Falklands in April 1982, Blake and her sister Tiger were both hauled out of reserve and put into round-the-clock reactivation work, Blake at Chatham and Tiger at Portsmouth, on the theory that their rapid-firing 6-inch guns could support troops equipped with nothing heavier than light 105mm artillery, while their hangars turned them into useful floating bases for helicopters and thirsty Harriers. By mid-May it was clear neither ship could be made ready in time, and the work was abandoned. Chile then made a serious bid to buy both ships that June and July, but that deal fell through too, and HMS Blake was finally sold for scrap on 25 August 1982 to Shipbreaking (Queenborough) Ltd for £210,000, towed to Cairnryan in Scotland that October to be broken up.

The reactivation was not a fanciful idea either. British troops went ashore in the Falklands with 105mm light guns and a chronic shortage of ammunition for them, and an enormous proportion of the artillery support they got came from the sea: destroyers and frigates closing the coast at night to fire thousands of 4.5-inch shells at targets called in from the hills. Two cruisers with rapid-firing 6-inch guns and hangars big enough for helicopters would have been genuinely valuable, if the guns had worked and if a pair of ships stripped for disposal could have been made seaworthy, stored, armed and crewed inside six weeks. Neither was ever likely. But somebody in Whitehall thought it worth trying, which is its own comment on how thin the fleet had become.

Her career, spanning barely two decades of active service after almost twenty years on the stocks and in reserve, stands as one of the more remarkable construction stories in the Royal Navy's twentieth-century history, a ship that began as a wartime cruiser and ended her days as a remarkably modern helicopter command ship, having been rebuilt almost as thoroughly on paper as she was on the slipway. She was, in a strange sort of way, present for three of Britain's wars, the Second World War as an unfinished hull, Korea as a ship still waiting for her final design, and the Falklands as a nearly-reactivated veteran, without ever once firing a shot in anger in any of them.