HMS Effingham (D98): Eight Years Building, Fifteen at Sea, Lost to a Pencil Line

A Long Time Building

HMS Effingham was ordered in the middle of the Great War as one of the Hawkins Class, five large cruisers designed to hunt down German raiders on the trade routes. With a speed of 30 knots and seven 7.5 inch guns, they were meant to catch and outgun anything the enemy could send out.

She was laid down in Portsmouth Dockyard on 2 April 1917, and named after Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral who commanded the English fleet against the Armada in 1588. She was the first ship of the Royal Navy to carry his name.

Then the war ended. Work on her slowed to a crawl, and she was not launched until 8 June 1921, by which time the Washington Treaty was about to fix a limit of 10,000 tons and 8 inch guns for all future cruisers, a limit drawn largely around her own class.

She was completed on 9 July 1925, more than eight years after she was laid down, the last of the five, and built from the start to burn oil only. The photograph at the top of this page shows her that year, at anchor, newly finished, with her two funnels and her heavy tripod foremast.

The East Indies

She went straight out to the East Indies Station with the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron and served two commissions there, sometimes flying an admiral's flag. In 1929 she was given a new captain, Bruce Fraser, a gunnery officer who would command the Home Fleet when it sank the Scharnhorst in 1943 and end his career as First Sea Lord.

In November 1930 a party from the ship, with her Royal Marine band, represented the Navy at the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa.

She came home to Portsmouth and was reduced to reserve in 1935, in time to take her place at King George V's Silver Jubilee Review of the Fleet at Spithead that July, and spent the next four years as flagship of the Reserve Fleet.

Rebuilt

The London Naval Treaty of 1930 had defined two kinds of cruiser, those with guns over 6.1 inches and those with smaller, and Britain had agreed to a limit on how many of the first kind it would keep. The Hawkins Class, with their 7.5 inch guns, counted against it, and Effingham was chosen to be the first of them converted to a light cruiser.

Between 1937 and 1938 she was rebuilt almost from the upper deck. Her old guns and her torpedo tubes came out, and she was given nine 6 inch guns, all on the centreline, and a much stronger anti-aircraft armament.

Two of her boilers were removed, which cost her some speed but gave her a greater range, and her two funnels were trunked into one large one. Her new appearance can be seen in the 1938 photograph above, taken soon after she recommissioned that June.

She was the only one of her class to be rebuilt in this way; the war came before the others could follow.

The First Winter of the War

She was in reserve with a crew of reservists when she took part in the King's review of the Reserve Fleet in Weymouth Bay on 9 August 1939, and when war came a month later she became flagship of the 5th and 12th Cruiser Squadrons on the Northern Patrol, watching the waters between Scotland, Iceland and Norway for German merchant ships trying to get home and raiders trying to get out.

In October she was moved to Atlantic convoy work, bringing a convoy home from the West Indies, and on 7 November she embarked gold bullion at Devonport and carried it across to Halifax, part of the gold and securities Britain was shipping to North America to pay for the war. The story of that traffic is told in the article on HMS Emerald, which carried one of the largest of the cargoes.

From Halifax she went south as senior officer of the West Indies patrol, working with the Australian cruiser Perth from Bermuda to intercept German merchant ships sheltering in American ports. Trouble with her condensers put her into dockyard hands at Bermuda in December, and after bringing another convoy home from Halifax she spent the first three months of 1940 under repair at Portsmouth.

Narvik

She came out of dockyard hands just as Germany invaded Norway, and was sent north to join the campaign around Narvik, where the British, French and Polish forces were trying to retake the port from General Dietl's mountain troops. On 19 April, off the Lofoten Islands, the submarine U-38 fired four torpedoes at her; none hit, the German torpedoes of 1940 being notoriously unreliable.

The next day she became the anti-aircraft guardship at Harstad, flying the flag of Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery, the commander of the naval forces in Norway.

On 24 April she was one of the ships, with the battleship Warspite, the cruisers Aurora and Enterprise and the destroyer Zulu, that bombarded the German positions around Narvik. In the harbour she sank the British merchant ship Riverton, which the Germans had captured.

On 1 May she bombarded Ankenes across the fjord from the town, with Lord Cork watching from her bridge, and again on 3 May, and on 13 May she carried men of the French Foreign Legion for the landing at Bjerkvik, north of Narvik, and supported it with her guns. It is often described as the first successful opposed landing of the war.

The Last Passage

By the middle of May the German advance through Norway from the south had to be checked before it reached Narvik, and troops were sent to hold Bodø. On 16 May, the day of the photograph above, Effingham lay at anchor in the fjords.

She then embarked the 2nd Battalion of the South Wales Borderers with their Bren gun carriers and stores, and sailed for Bodø with the anti-aircraft cruisers Coventry and Cairo and the destroyers Matabele and Echo.

To save time and keep clear of the German aircraft, her captain, Captain John Howson, took her outside the usual inshore route through the Leads, at 23 knots. On the evening of 18 May, about an hour from Bodø, she ran at full speed on to the Faksen Shoal near Bliksvær. The rock was marked on the chart.

The usual explanation, and it has been told ever since as a lesson to navigators, is that it was hidden under the thick pencil line of the track that had been drawn across it.

She was impaled on the rock and flooding, and could not be got off. No one was killed. Echo took the soldiers across to Coventry, which carried them on to Bodø, but their carriers and much of their equipment were lost with the ship.

Matabele, following astern, struck the same shoal and was damaged badly enough to be sent home for three months of repairs. Over the next three days what could be salvaged was taken off, and on 21 May Matabele destroyed the wreck with gunfire and a torpedo so that the Germans could make no use of her.

What Became of Her Sisters

She was not the first of her class to be lost on a rock. Her sister HMS Raleigh had run aground in fog on the coast of Labrador in 1922 and was blown up where she lay. HMS Frobisher and HMS Hawkins survived the war, both bombarding the Normandy beaches in 1944, and Vindictive, completed as an aircraft carrier in 1918, had been turned back into a cruiser in the 1920s.

A week after Effingham was lost, Curlew was sunk by bombers off Narvik, and the whole Allied force was withdrawn from Norway early in June.

All three photographs on this page are sold as prints, from the new ship of 1925 to the last photograph of her afloat, and the rest of her class are in the Hawkins Class cruisers collection. HMS Cardiff, one of the small C Class cruisers that sailed with her on the Northern Patrol, has her own article on these pages.