For a Seafire piece OP wants a very brief intro dealing with the obvious Q: “why did RN wait till 1941 before buying a no load, no endurance jouster?” Just to present the Q like this tells the A. Illustrii, very expensively procured in 1936, would go nowhere near land-based, heavy-load, accurate bombers. They would carry 60 aircraft whose job was to scatter the Imperial Japanese Navy. So, Swordfish to deliver our utterly useless aerial torpedo, needimg precise, slow insertion (an autogiro would have been good, but payload was not yet available), protected against Japanese fighters by multi-role combat Barracuda/Skua types to such Specs as 3 seat torpedo-fighter. Their Lordships did not believe that Air could find, then hit, capital ships. It took the loss to Air of much of the Kriegsmarine in Norway, 4/40, for ideas to begin to change. So, Westland+Cunliffe-Owen to do a quick and dirty fold on Spitfire, pending a proper load-carrying fighter to match land-based aggressors.

That RN had to wait until 1969 to get such a thing was a legacy from 1930s, when RN had 1 carrier. Industry did not bother with such uninteresting volume, so proper firms bid to RAF. So RN must settle for second-rate teams like Blackburn.