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.

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. 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 twin mounts and six 3-inch guns in triple mounts.

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. 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 genuinely 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 Final Chapter

HMS Blake was decommissioned in December 1979 and 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. 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 genuinely modern helicopter command ship, having been rebuilt almost as thoroughly on paper as she was on the slipway.