The Hawkins class consisted of five heavy cruisers built for the Royal Navy during the First World War, although none of them saw service during the war. The first ship to be completed, , was renamed from HMS Cavendish and converted into an aircraft carrier while under construction. All ships were named after Elizabethan sea captains. The three ships remaining as cruisers in 1939 served in the Second World War, with Effingham being an early war loss through wreck; Raleigh had been lost in a similar shipwreck on uncharted rocks in 1922 (and Vindictive was nearly lost to grounding in 1919). Vindictive, though no longer a cruiser, also served throughout the War. This class formed the basis for the definition of the maximum cruiser type under the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.
Design
Although the Hawkins class are sometimes named as the "Improved Birminghams", referring to the Birmingham sub-class of the Town-class light cruisers, their design was based on a proposal by the Director of Naval Construction, Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, in 1912–1913. Reacting to rumors of large German cruisers armed with guns for overseas service and the need to replace the elderly armoured cruisers deployed abroad, d'Eyncourt proposed an oil-fuelled and lightly armoured ship of capable of and armed with guns in turrets. Referring the design as a "Light Cruiser for Atlantic Service", he optimized the design for good seakeeping performance for hunting down commerce raiders by giving it a deep draught and high freeboard.
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, objected to the size and cost of the ship and asked for a smaller and faster design armed with a mix of and 7.5-inch guns, capable of using oil and a version of the new design using a mix of coal and oil as in the Birminghams in August 1913. The oil-fuelled design was estimated to cost £550,000, compared to the original's £700,000, while the mixed-fuel ship was priced at £590,000. Nothing further was done with the designs as the naval construction budget was already badly stretched.
In the early months of the First World War, German commerce-raiding warships and armed merchant cruisers seriously disrupted British seaborne trade as the need to form convoys or re-route ships to avoid areas that the raiders in which were operating seriously delayed sailings or lengthened voyages. Furthermore, the need to escort the convoys and to search for the raiders required large numbers of warships that were needed elsewhere, far out of proportion to numbers of raiders. On 12 October 1914 d'Eyncourt reiterated the arguments behind his "Atlantic Cruiser" proposal in a memo to the Board of Admiralty, adding that a fast mixed-fuel design with a large steaming radius would be very helpful for operations in remote areas where oil might not be available.
By early 1915 the threat had been neutralized or sunk, but the Royal Navy believed that further commerce-raiding operations were likely. On 9 June the board met to consider specifications for a large light cruiser capable of hunting down commerce raiders anywhere in the world. D'Eyncourt was subsequently requested to submit designs for a ship capable of with at least one-fifth power from coal-fired boilers and an armament of at least ten 6-inch guns. He submitted six sketch designs armed with various mixes of 6-, 7.5- and guns using and hulls. Based on several encounters where the raiders had attempted to flee as soon as they had spotted the cruisers, the board believed that the ship's armament needed to be able to reach out to the visible horizon and be powerful enough to cripple the raider with a single hit. It therefore rejected the 6-inch gun as too short-ranged and lacking in power and the 9.2-inch gun as too few could be mounted on the hull; settling on the 7.5-inch gun in a new mount capable of 30° of elevation to maximise its range and carried on the larger of the two hulls proposed.
Description
The ships had an overall length of , a beam of and a draught of at deep load. They displaced at standard load and at deep load. The shape of the hull was based on that of the large light cruiser with anti-torpedo bulges covering the engine and boiler rooms. Amidships, the hull had 10° of tumblehome, although the forward portion of the forecastle deck flared outwards to improve seakeeping. The ships had a metacentric height of at deep load. D'Eyncourt claimed that they were so subdivided that they could survive the flooding of two adjacent compartments. Their crew numbered 37 officers and 672 ratings.