H.M.S. LONDON.

Hokitika Guardian, 16 April 1926, Page 3

H.M.S. LONDON.

The Admiralty decision to call one of the latest batch of cruisers H.M.S. London is practically an announcement that no more battleships are to he laid down, writes a correspondent in a London daily. liver since battleships came into our Fleet “London” has been a battleship name, and it would not have been bestowed on a cruiser now if there were any prospect of its ever being required for iv battleship again. Warships’ names are largely hereditary. They are handed down from one ship to another for hundreds of years often, but always in a conventional way. Some are regarded as battleship names, some of them cruiser names, and so on. For this grouping I system there are practical as well as sentimental reasons. The last London was one of the earliest of our £1.000,000 battleships. Completed in 1992. she displaced 15,000 tons and had a speed of only 18 knots sturdy but slow, one of the mastiff type. The new Loudon will be a long. lean greyhound, two-thirds the weight of her predecessor, but twice as fast and more than twice as costly, with loud speakers on every deck. Modern requirements have added so enormously to the expense of building inen-of-war that the £58.000,000 of the coming Navy Estimates, if spent on battleships would provide only half a dozen vessels. For battleships of the modern sort cost nearly £1(1,000,000 apiece There have been Londons in the Royal Navy almost without brrtik ever since the 16th. century, and they have a great record. A London fought off the North Foreland in 1653. and again in the battle of Lowestoft in 1605. How she ended Ik uncertain, Out in 1666 a hired ship called London took part in the St. James’s light. The next London had her baptism of fire at Solobav in 1672. In the same year she fought til Barlleur ami La Hogue. There was a London in Graves’s action off the ChesiipcLke in • 781, and in the BridporLs fight off Groix in 1795. A London captured the ■ -Marengo in 18()(i. and a London parti- ’ cipated in the Crimean War of 1854. Tito last London formed one of the old brigades during the Lite war and has since boon broken up.