HMS Perseus (R51): The Carrier That Gave the World's Navies the Steam Catapult

From Edgar to Perseus

HMS Perseus was laid down by Vickers-Armstrongs at Newcastle upon Tyne on 1 June 1942 as one of the Colossus Class light fleet carriers, the quick-built, merchant-standard carriers designed to give the Navy carriers in numbers, whose story is told in the article on the name ship, HMS Colossus, and in the Colossus Class guide. She was to have been called Edgar, and was launched on 26 March 1944.

By then the Admiralty had realised that a fleet operating thousands of miles from any British dockyard, as the British Pacific Fleet would have to, needed floating workshops to repair and maintain its aircraft. In July 1944 she was renamed Perseus and completed as an aircraft maintenance carrier, like her sister Pioneer.

The after part of her flight deck was given over to workshops and stores, so that she could not operate aircraft herself, and she was built without catapults. The photograph at the top of this page shows her in 1945, newly finished, with her deckhouses and workshops along the flight deck.

She was commissioned on 19 October 1945, the sixth ship of the name.

A Voyage to Australia

The war was over by the time she was ready, but the British Pacific Fleet still needed its aircraft. On 16 November 1945 she sailed on her maiden voyage to Sydney, by way of Trincomalee, Singapore and Fremantle, with a load of Seafires and Fireflies, and arrived three days before Christmas.

On 14 January 1946 she relieved Pioneer as the fleet's maintenance carrier, and the Commodore Air Train, who ran the fleet's aircraft supply and repair organisation, hoisted his broad pennant in her. There was not much left for the air train to do.

Her work now was largely to carry airframes, engines and stores, and to dump the American aircraft supplied under Lend-Lease over the side at sea, as the terms of the agreement required, rather than pay for them.

The air train was wound up at the end of February 1946, and in March she sailed for home, carrying food donated by the people of Australia for rationed Britain and men going home to be demobilised. She reached Rosyth on 17 May 1946 and went into reserve.

The Steam Catapult

By the late 1940s the coming of jet aircraft had created a problem. The hydraulic catapults then in use could not give a heavy jet enough speed to fly off in the length of a carrier's deck, and they were near the limit of their development.

Commander Colin Mitchell, a naval engineer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, had a better idea, which the Edinburgh engineering firm of Brown Brothers, where he later became a director, developed and built: a catapult driven by steam from the ship's own boilers, with a piston running in a slotted cylinder beneath the deck, and with no practical limit on its power.

In the absence of a dedicated trials carrier, Perseus was taken in hand at Rosyth in 1949 and fitted with the prototype, known as the BXS.1, at the forward end of her flight deck.

The trials began in the spring of 1951 under Captain H. A. Traill. The catapult worked on low-pressure steam and needed twenty minutes to build up pressure between launches. She began alongside, firing wheeled dead loads of steadily increasing weight off the bow, and then went out into the Firth of Forth.

The next step was six surplus Seafire 47 fighters, launched without pilots, with their wings removed at the fold and only enough fuel to start, warm up and go. One of them is said to have climbed away, turned and headed back towards the ship before crashing into the sea short of her.

Then, when the engineers were satisfied, came manned aircraft, a Seafire 47 and two Sea Furies. In all the catapult made some fifteen hundred launches during its trials.

America

The United States Navy, which was facing the same problem with its own new jets, was keenly interested. In January 1952 Perseus crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, and from 11 February she was at Norfolk, Virginia, where American pilots flew their own aircraft off her deck, among them Panther and Banshee jet fighters and Skyknight night fighters.

Between them the British and American pilots made 127 manned launches. The steam catapult launched a Skyknight with a ten knot wind blowing from astern; the American hydraulic catapults needed a thirty knot wind from ahead to launch an aircraft of the same weight.

To prove that the British design would work with the higher steam pressures used in American ships, the destroyer Eugene A. Greene was moored alongside and fed her boilers' steam into the catapult. It did.

In April 1952 the United States Navy announced that it would adopt the steam catapult for its carriers, beginning with the USS Hancock. For the next seventy years almost every catapult carrier in the world used it, and it made possible the generation of heavy jet aircraft that followed.

The first British carrier completed with it was Ark Royal, and Eagle was later rebuilt to take it. Few ships have done so much for naval aviation without ever operating an air group of their own.

The Ferry Carrier

Perseus came home to Portsmouth on 21 March 1952, and her catapult was taken out. She was converted to an aircraft ferry carrier, and in December 1952 she took over from Unicorn the task of carrying aircraft between Britain and the Far East.

Her first load included ten Whirlwind helicopters of 848 Squadron, the Navy's first helicopter squadron formed to carry troops, bound for Sembawang in Singapore and the jungle war in Malaya, where they were to fly soldiers in and out of jungle clearings. She landed them on 8 January 1953.

Over the next eighteen months she carried Skyraiders, Avengers and Sea Furies on further voyages to Singapore, and in July 1954 brought home the last reserve aircraft from Iwakuni in Japan, a Commonwealth air base during the Korean War.

The End

After a refit in 1955 she went into reserve. There was a plan to convert her into a depot ship for submarines, but it was dropped in 1957, and on 6 May 1958 she was sold to Smith and Houston and broken up at Port Glasgow.

She had served for less than thirteen years, much of it in reserve, but her place in the history of naval aviation is secure.