HMS Lion (C34): Eighteen Years From Keel to Commission

A Wartime Cruiser Called Defence

HMS Lion began life under an entirely different name and for an entirely different war. Ordered in 1942 as a Minotaur-class cruiser and laid down as HMS Defence at Scotts Shipbuilding in Greenock on 6 June that year, she was launched by Lady Edelson on 2 September 1944, only for work on her to be suspended in 1946 as the postwar Royal Navy scaled back its shipbuilding programme, leaving a launched but entirely unfinished hull sitting idle for the better part of a decade.

Redesigned and Renamed

HMS Lion's fortunes changed in 1954, when Admiralty officials assessed the dormant, half-built hulls of Defence and her sister ships Blake and Tiger and concluded that all three could still be completed, fitted with new and considerably more modern armament, within three years at a cost of £6 million. The decision was taken to redesign the ship as a Tiger-class air-defence cruiser, equipped with advanced Mark 26 twin 6-inch gun turrets, and she was renamed Lion in 1957, with construction resuming at Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson in Wallsend, a genuinely unusual second act for a hull that had already sat idle for longer than most warships spend in active service.

Finally Commissioned

HMS Lion finally commissioned on 20 July 1960, some eighteen years after her construction had first begun, though even then her troubles were not quite over: her initial trials were disrupted by severe rotor, turbine and vibration problems, requiring a further three months of work at Portsmouth Dockyard before she became fully operational in February 1961, a frustrating final delay for a ship that had already waited so long to see active service.

A Busy Decade at Sea

HMS Lion's first commission included a Mediterranean deployment covering some 20,500 miles in 1961, followed by service in South American waters, and she recommissioned in July 1962 for a further round of NATO exercises. She attended Malta's independence celebrations in September 1964, and served as the Swedish goodwill flagship in 1965. Along the way she suffered a rather less dignified moment in early 1964, when she was rammed by the frigate HMS Lowestoft while passing under the Forth Road Bridge, requiring emergency repairs before she could depart for Malta.

Stripped for Parts and Scrapped

HMS Lion was placed into reserve and eventually decommissioned in December 1972; a proposed conversion to a helicopter carrier, following the pattern used for some of her sister ships, was judged too expensive to pursue. From 1973 she was stripped of parts and equipment to help keep her sister ships HMS Tiger and HMS Blake running, before being sold for breaking up on 12 February 1975 for £262,500 and scrapped at Inverkeithing by Thos. W. Ward by April that year, closing out the career of a cruiser whose most remarkable feature was arguably not anything she did at sea, but the extraordinary eighteen-year gap between the laying of her keel and the day she finally sailed as a commissioned warship.