HMS Delphinium: Rescuer at Sea, Then Investigator of Slavery in Africa

Built at Glasgow

HMS Delphinium was built by Napier and Miller of Glasgow, laid down on 1 July 1915 and launched on 23 December that year, an Arabis-class sloop displacing 1,200 tons, measuring 267 feet 9 inches in length, and capable of 16 knots on a four-cylinder triple expansion engine, part of a class built specifically to meet the urgent wartime demand for minesweeping and convoy escort vessels.

Napier and Miller is worth a paragraph, and not only because it built her. The firm was registered in 1898 with thirty thousand pounds of capital and took over an existing yard at Yoker; in 1906 the Clyde Navigation Trust bought the site out from under it to build what became Rothesay Dock, so the whole business moved a few miles downriver to Old Kilpatrick and carried on. It built sloops and minesweepers through the First World War, and, in one of those details that shows how improvised the whole effort was, assembled aeroplanes as well. Through the 1920s it turned out passenger ships and Great Lakes traders for American, Canadian and Norwegian owners, twenty-six vessels between 1923 and 1930. Then it stopped, and the way it stopped is the point.

In 1930 Napier and Miller became the first shipyard in Britain bought up by National Shipbuilders Security. That organisation was set up by the industry itself, with government blessing, to deal with the collapse in orders after 1929 by purchasing yards, closing them permanently and imposing covenants forbidding shipbuilding on the site ever again. It was not a rescue. It was deliberate destruction of capacity, intended to keep the survivors afloat by removing the competition, and it worked precisely as designed: Napier and Miller's contents were auctioned off and the yard was pulled down in 1931. The most notorious case came a little later, when the same body bought and closed Palmers of Jarrow, which took the town's only employer with it and produced the Jarrow March of 1936. Delphinium outlived the yard that built her by two years.

She was one of thirty-six Arabis-class sloops ordered in a single batch in July 1915, part of the wider Flower-class minesweeper programme the Navy itself nicknamed the "Herbaceous Borders", every ship in it being named after a plant; thirty-one of the thirty-six survived the war, and each carried a peacetime complement of around seventy-nine.

The Admiralty liked that naming scheme enough to use it again. When it needed several hundred cheap escorts in a hurry in 1939 it went back to the flowerbed and produced the Flower-class corvettes of the Second World War, whose story is set out in the article on HMS Clematis. Two world wars, two emergency escort programmes, and both of them named out of a seed catalogue.

Minesweeping and Rescue on the Irish Sea

HMS Delphinium was stationed at Queenstown, serving initially with the 3rd Sloop Flotilla before reassignment in December 1918 to the 23rd Fleet Sweeping Flotilla operating from Buncrana, spending the war performing minesweeping and merchant escort duties in some of the most heavily contested waters around the British Isles.

On 1 April 1917, she escorted the tanker RFA Boxleaf through the Irish Sea, and on 28 April that year, rescued the crew of the merchant ship Anne Marie after the German submarine SM U-70 sank her, a reminder of just how constant and immediate the U-boat threat remained around British coastal waters throughout the war.

On 31 August 1917, HMS Delphinium towed the damaged American tanker SS Albert Watts into Lough Swilly, and on 2 October that year, assisted in evacuating the crew of the armoured cruiser HMS Drake after she was torpedoed under her second funnel by the German submarine U-79 while returning from escort duty. Her captain judged a run for repairs at Belfast too risky and beached her instead at Church Bay on Rathlin Island, where she sank with the loss of eighteen lives, one of three ships U-79 sent to the bottom of the North Channel that same day.

A League of Nations Inquiry Into Slavery

HMS Delphinium paid off on 23 July 1919, but was recommissioned on 18 December 1928 for service on the Africa Station, a posting that lasted until 1932.

The phrase Africa Station carries more than it looks, and knowing what stands behind it changes the shape of everything the Christy Commission did on her deck. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, and in 1808 the Royal Navy put a squadron on the West African coast to stop it: not to police British ships, which had already stopped, but to intercept everybody else's. It stayed there for the better part of sixty years. Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron took nearly sixteen hundred slave ships and freed something like a hundred and fifty thousand people, and by the 1850s it had twenty-five ships and two thousand officers on the station. The cost is the part that is usually left out. At its height the campaign is reckoned to have consumed around two per cent of British national income, which has led at least two historians to call it the most expensive international moral action in modern history, and almost sixteen hundred British sailors died on that coast between 1830 and 1865, overwhelmingly of fever rather than fighting: roughly one dead sailor for every nine people freed.

None of which was a clean story, and it is worth saying so. The squadron intercepted perhaps six to ten per cent of the traffic, the rest got through, and a great many of the people taken out of captured ships were landed at Freetown or Liberia rather than returned home, because there was nowhere to return them to. Liberia itself had been founded in the 1820s as a settlement for freed and freeborn Black Americans, and by the 1920s it was governed by the descendants of those settlers. So when a Royal Navy sloop of the Africa Station lay off Monrovia in 1929 with three commissioners aboard, taking evidence about forced labour in a republic created by freed slaves, from a government run by settler descendants, on behalf of a League of Nations that had no other way of getting there, she was riding at anchor on top of a hundred and twenty years of extremely complicated history. Delphinium was a 1915 minesweeping sloop with a triple expansion engine. She was also, for a few months, the only piece of international machinery that existed.

In 1929 and into 1930, she hosted the League of Nations Commission of Enquiry investigating allegations of slavery and forced labour in Liberia, remembered afterwards as the Christy Commission after its British chairman, Dr Cuthbert Christy, a doctor and naturalist with decades of African fieldwork already behind him. His two fellow commissioners were the former Liberian president Arthur Barclay and the American sociologist Charles S. Johnson, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance and future first Black president of Fisk University, an unusually distinguished panel for a First World War-era sloop to be hosting. Monrovia had no proper harbour at the time, so the commission simply worked from Delphinium's own deck while she lay at anchor in the open roadstead offshore.

The detail about the anchorage is worth dwelling on, because it says a great deal about the League of Nations. The League had no navy, no police force and no means whatever of conducting an inquiry inside a sovereign member state except by asking another member to lend it something. So when it wanted to investigate Liberia, it borrowed a fourteen-year-old British minesweeping sloop, and because Monrovia had no harbour that could take her alongside, three commissioners of international standing spent months at anchor in an open roadstead off the Liberian coast, taking evidence on the deck of a Royal Navy warship because there was nowhere else to take it. Every witness who gave evidence to the commission had to be brought out to them by boat.

The man at the top of what they found is worth knowing about. Charles D. B. King had been President of Liberia since 1920, and his re-election in 1927 is still cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the most fraudulent election ever reported: he was recorded as winning by around 234,000 votes in a country with roughly 15,000 registered voters. The man he had beaten, Thomas Faulkner, went to the League with allegations that the government was shipping its own citizens abroad as forced labour, and it was Faulkner's complaint that put Christy, Barclay and Johnson on Delphinium's deck.

The commission's report, delivered in 1930, found that outright chattel slavery of the historic kind had largely disappeared, but that the recruitment of labourers for Fernando Po and French Gabon was being carried out under conditions its own authors judged scarcely distinguishable from slave-raiding, findings serious enough to implicate senior figures in the Liberian government and to contribute directly to President Charles King's resignation later that year.

What followed was quick and unusually complete. The report named Vice-President Allen Yancy directly, and found that forced labour had been used for public works, for shipping men overseas, and as a deliberate instrument for humiliating chiefs who would not cooperate. The Liberian House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings; King resigned in December 1930 before they could finish, and Yancy went with him. President Hoover suspended American diplomatic relations to keep the pressure on, and there was serious discussion in Geneva of placing Liberia under League trusteeship, which would have made Africa's oldest republic a mandated territory. It did not happen, but it was discussed, and the discussion started on the deck of this ship.

The End of Service

HMS Delphinium was sold for scrap to Rees Metals Ltd on 13 October 1933, closing out a career that had carried her from wartime convoy escort and rescue work in the Irish Sea to a remarkably distinctive final chapter supporting international efforts against slavery off the African coast, a career considerably more varied than her relatively modest wartime origins might otherwise suggest.