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.

The name she was laid down under is worth a moment. HMS Defence, in 1942, was a name the Royal Navy had not used since 1916, and for a reason. The previous Defence was an armoured cruiser of, as it happens, the previous Minotaur class, and at Jutland on 31 May 1916 she came under the guns of the German battle line at close range, blew up and went down with every man aboard her. That afternoon is set out in the article on HMS Hampshire (1903). A Minotaur-class Defence had already been lost with all hands, and here was a Minotaur-class Defence going down the ways at Greenock.

She was not the only one left standing about at the end of the war, either. The 1942 programme had begun a good many cruisers and finished very few. Swiftsure got to sea in 1944 and Superb just after the war. The name ship, Minotaur herself, was handed to Canada before she was finished and commissioned as HMCS Ontario. Mars, Hawke and Bellerophon were cancelled outright and their steel taken back apart. And Tiger, Lion and Blake sat in the water, launched and empty, for nine years while nobody decided anything.

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.

What broke the deadlock in 1954 was not sentiment about three good hulls. It was the Sverdlovs. The Soviet Union had begun building a large class of conventional gun cruisers, and the Royal Navy looked at its own cruiser strength and did not much like the comparison. Three launched hulls already paid for looked like the quick answer, and the assessment that produced the six million pound figure was made in that light.

It was not six million pounds. Tiger completed in 1959, Lion in 1960 and Blake in 1961, and the average cost of a Tiger-class cruiser came out at something in the order of fourteen million pounds apiece. More than double the estimate, for a ship type that the guided missile was in the process of making pointless while the money was being spent.

The armament is the reason for both the delay and the bill. The Mark 26 twin 6-inch was an automatic mounting of a hundred and fifty-two tons that was meant to put twenty rounds a minute down each barrel and, in service, jammed with dispiriting regularity. That story belongs to HMS Blake (C99), and the years of trials that went into trying to make it work belong to HMS Cumberland (57), the old cruiser that carried the prototypes.

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 alongside six 3-inch anti-aircraft guns in three further twin mounts, capable of 31.5 knots, and she was renamed Lion in 1957, with construction resuming at Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson in Wallsend, a particularly 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 on 4 September 1964, the very day the Queen opened the Forth Road Bridge, when fog thick enough to cancel the ceremony's own RAF flypast saw her rammed by the frigate HMS Lowestoft in full view of the 50,000-strong crowd gathered for the occasion. Emergency repairs at Rosyth left her only hours to spare before departing for Malta, and that October a court martial found Lowestoft's officer of the watch, Lieutenant Wykeham, responsible for the collision.

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.

There is a bleak arithmetic in how she ended. Laid down in 1942, launched in 1944, left empty until 1954, finished in 1960, fully operational in February 1961, in reserve by the end of the decade and formally paid off in December 1972. Twelve years commissioned out of thirty in existence, and the last three of those spent being taken to pieces to keep her two sisters at sea.

She is a fair monument to the whole business. Three cruisers built to fight a war that had finished, redesigned to fight a Soviet cruiser force that never came out, armed with a gun mounting nobody could make work, at more than twice the estimated price, and finished just as the missile made all of it beside the point. Lion, so far as the record shows, never fired her guns at anybody.