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