Royal Navy Blackwood Class Frigates: A Comprehensive Guide

The Blackwood class frigates, also known as Type 14, were small, economical anti-submarine warfare (ASW) escorts built for the Royal Navy during the 1950s. Designed at the height of the Cold War to counter the growing Soviet submarine threat, these ships were a practical response to the need for a large number of simple, effective ASW vessels that could be constructed quickly and affordably.

Though lightly armed and limited in versatility, the Blackwood class played a significant role in training, patrol, and NATO exercises, bridging the gap between larger frigates and coastal escort ships.

Origins and Design Development

By the early 1950s, the Royal Navy required a rapid increase in ASW capability. Larger ships such as the Type 12 Whitby class were effective but expensive and time-consuming to build. The Type 14 Blackwood class was conceived as a “second-rate” frigate: simple, cost-effective, and specialised for anti-submarine duties.

These ships were smaller, single-shaft vessels with steam machinery, one half of the Type 12 plant on a single shaft, and were intended primarily for North Atlantic convoy escort, training, and support roles. Their hull design was based on destroyer escort principles, prioritising sonar performance and seakeeping over firepower.

The Frigate With No Gun

That last phrase understates a genuinely radical decision, and it is the thing to understand about these ships. The Type 14 did not carry a small gun. It carried no main gun whatever.

The reasoning was ruthless and, on its own terms, correct. Britain expected a war in which hundreds of Soviet submarines would attack the Atlantic convoys, and it needed escorts in numbers it could not possibly afford if each one were a proper warship. So the Admiralty asked what an anti-submarine escort actually requires, and the answer was sonar, a weapon to attack a submarine with, enough speed to keep up with a convoy and enough sea-keeping to stay out there. A four-and-a-half-inch gun and its director, magazine, handling room and crew are expensive, heavy and of no use whatever against a submerged submarine.

So they left it out. What went to sea was three single 40mm Bofors for self defence, two Limbo mortars, and in four of the ships a pair of twin 21-inch torpedo tubes which were taken out again in the early 1960s. The after Bofors was later removed as well, because in any sort of sea it could not be worked.

A Limbo Mark 10 is worth describing since it was the whole point of the ship. It is a three-barrelled mortar mounted aft that throws depth charges ahead of the ship, so that the submarine is attacked while the sonar still holds contact rather than after the ship has passed over it and lost the trace. Two of them, well handled, made a Type 14 a genuinely dangerous opponent for a 1950s submarine.

Twelve ships were built, all named after Royal Navy officers and admirals.

All twelve have an article on this site, which is unusual for a class this obscure. They were HMS Blackwood, HMS Dundas, HMS Duncan, HMS Exmouth, HMS Grafton, HMS Hardy, HMS Keppel, HMS Malcolm, HMS Murray, HMS Palliser, HMS Pellew and HMS Russell.

The names are a deliberate set. Blackwood commanded the frigate Euryalus at Trafalgar and brought Nelson the news that the combined fleet was coming out. Hardy was Nelson's flag captain in Victory and the man he spoke to as he died. Keppel, Duncan and Pellew were admirals of the Georgian navy. Giving that set of names to the cheapest and least impressive ships in the fleet was either a compliment or a joke, and the Navy has never said which.

Design and Technical Features

Displacement: 1,180 tonnes standard, 1,450 tonnes full load

Length: 310 feet

Propulsion: 1 × steam turbine (single shaft), 15,000 shp, 27 knots

Armament: no main gun. Three single 40mm Bofors, later reduced to two, two Limbo Mark 10 anti-submarine mortars, and twin 21-inch torpedo tubes in four ships, removed in the early 1960s

Sensors: Type 170 and Type 174 sonar, Type 293 and 974 radar systems

Crew: Around 140

Service and Operations

Commissioned in the late 1950s, the Blackwood class ships served primarily in UK waters, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Their main duties included:

ASW training for officers and sonar operators

Convoy escort simulations during NATO exercises

Fisheries protection and coastal patrols

That third item turned out to be the one that mattered. These ships were designed for the North Atlantic in wartime and what they mostly did was the Cod Wars, three long confrontations with Iceland between the 1950s and the 1970s over fishing limits, in which Royal Navy frigates physically placed themselves between Icelandic gunboats and British trawlers.

It was a bruising job for a cheap ship. The seas around Iceland punished them so badly that the class required structural strengthening, and the ships spent weeks at a time being thrown about while trying to shepherd trawlers that did not always want shepherding. HMS Palliser put herself between a trawler and a gunboat. HMS Russell went as far as threatening to sink one. HMS Malcolm spent the better part of two decades at it.

It is worth appreciating the irony. A class built with no gun, on the reasoning that guns were irrelevant to its job, spent its career in a confrontation where the entire point was to threaten a small armed ship without actually shooting at it.

Royal Naval Reserve training duties

Although the class was never involved in combat, they were valued for their low operating cost and ability to relieve larger ships from basic patrol and training tasks.

By the late 1960s, improvements in submarine technology and the arrival of more capable ships like the Leander class meant the Blackwoods were increasingly obsolete. Most were retired by the early 1970s.

One Ship That Nearly Was One

Note: HMS Falmouth was originally laid down as a Type 14 but was reordered and completed as a Type 61 (Salisbury class).

That note is worth expanding, because on its own it is baffling. Britain ordered a great many escorts in the early 1950s across several designs at once, and hulls were shuffled between them as priorities changed while the ships were still on the slip. HMS Falmouth began as a Type 14 and was completed as something else entirely.

She then went on to have a considerably more eventful career than any of the ships she was nearly one of, including ramming an Icelandic gunboat at twenty-two knots during the Cod Wars, which rather makes the point about where these ships ended up.

What the Class Was Actually For

The Blackwood class frigates were never glamorous ships, but they filled an essential role in Royal Navy operations during the Cold War. As cost-effective anti-submarine escorts, they allowed more advanced ships to focus on front-line duties.

It is worth being blunt about the limits as well. The Type 14 was slow, it was wet, it had no gun, it could not defend itself against aircraft and it had no capacity for growth. When the threat changed, and it changed fast, there was nothing to modernise: HMS Whitby and the Type 12s that followed her had the size and the margin to absorb new equipment for decades, and the Type 14s did not.

That is what a utility ship is, and the trade was made deliberately and with open eyes. The Navy bought twelve escorts for something like the price of six proper frigates, used them hard for twenty years in the job nobody else wanted, and got a world first in marine engineering out of one of them.

Their contribution to ASW training and maritime security helped maintain Britain's naval readiness at a time of intense underwater threat.

While all were retired by the late 1970s, the lessons learned from their design and service influenced the development of more advanced frigates in the decades that followed.

The Most Important Thing These Ships Ever Did

One of them changed how every warship in the Royal Navy is powered, and it is the least remembered thing about the class.

In 1966 HMS Exmouth was taken in hand and had her steam plant removed entirely. She rejoined the fleet on 5 June 1968 with an Olympus gas turbine for full power and two Proteus gas turbines for cruising, all geared to the same single shaft. She was the first major warship anywhere in the world to be powered by gas turbines alone.

The advantages are enormous and they are why every subsequent British warship went the same way. A steam plant needs boilers, which need hours to raise steam, a large engine room and a great many people to run it. A gas turbine is an aircraft engine on a bedplate: it can be started in minutes, it can be lifted out through a hatch and replaced rather than repaired in place, and it needs a fraction of the engine room staff.

That is what the Type 42, the Type 22, the Type 23 and the Type 45 all inherited, and the trial was run in a cut-price anti-submarine escort that had been built without a gun to save money. It is the best possible argument for the class: the cheapest frigates in the fleet produced the single most consequential engineering experiment of the post-war Royal Navy.

The end of the story is bleaker. HMS Hardy was expended in 1983 as a target, hit by an Exocet and then by Sea Skua missiles in trials, which is how a number of these hulls finished and is a reminder of how completely obsolete a 1950s escort had become by then.