HMS Flintham (M2628): A Quarter Century Teaching Seamanship to Boy Sailors

One of Ninety-Three Sister Ships

HMS Flintham was one of 93 vessels of the Ham-class of inshore minesweepers, small, purpose-built craft that gave the postwar Royal Navy a properly useful capability for clearing mines from Britain's own coastal and harbour waters, a legacy of the vast quantities of mines laid during the Second World War that remained a hazard for years afterwards.

She displaced a modest 120 tons standard, rising to 164 tons at full load, and was powered by twin Paxman diesel engines producing 1,100 brake horsepower.

Like every ship of her class, she took her name from a small English village whose name ended in 'ham', in her case Flintham in Nottinghamshire, a naming convention that gave the Ham class its distinctive and rather charmingly parochial identity. She was built by J. Bolson at Poole and launched on 1 November 1955.

J. Bolson and Son were not a naval shipyard in any ordinary sense, and that is the point of them. They were Poole boatbuilders, in business from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the shipbuilding side of the firm only came into existence during the Second World War because the Admiralty suddenly needed enormous quantities of small wooden craft and did not much mind who built them. Before and after the war they made barges, hoppers, dredgers, sludge craft and excursion ferries, and later on sand dredgers, coasters and two tankers for Esso. The Ham class went to yards like that precisely because of what the ships were made of. A timber hull on light alloy frames is a boatbuilder's job rather than a shipbuilder's, and in 1955 there were still a great many firms round the British coast who could do it properly, which is the only reason ninety-three of them could be produced at once. Bolson gave up shipbuilding in 1973 and carried on as a repairer; the last hull off their slip was a harbour tug.

Ninety-three of anything is a great many, and the reason for that number is worth setting out. In 1950 the Admiralty's planners credited the Soviet Union with the ability to lay something in the order of four to five thousand mines a month in British waters, against a working assumption that every twenty-five or thirty mines laid would eventually put a ship on the bottom. A campaign on that scale would have closed the Thames, the Mersey, the Clyde and the Channel ports within weeks, and it would have been fought not out in the ocean but in estuaries and harbour approaches where a big ship cannot work. So Britain built, under a NATO programme, a very large number of very small sweepers: 107 feet long, 164 tons, one gun, built of wood and non-ferrous metal so that a magnetic mine would not notice them going over. The Soviet mining campaign never came. The boats were built anyway, and most of them, Flintham included, went almost straight into reserve and stayed there.

Reserve, Then Training

HMS Flintham spent her first years, from 1955 to 1964, in operational reserve at Hythe, the fairly common fate for a good many Ham-class vessels built in numbers well beyond what the Royal Navy needed in immediate active service during the relatively quiet years of the Cold War's middle decades.

The establishment she was working for deserves explaining, because it is one of the vanished institutions of British life. HMS Ganges at Shotley took boys, not men: more than 160,000 of them passed through between 1905 and 1976, many arriving at fifteen, a good number from difficult homes, and they were made into sailors by a regime that would be entirely illegal now. Its symbol was the mast, 142 feet of it above ground with another eighteen buried in concrete, which every boy had to climb, and on ceremonial occasions one of them stood upright on the cap at the very top with nothing to hold on to. He was called the button boy. Whatever else is said about the place, and a great deal has been, the men who went through it are almost universally proud of having done so.

What a boat like Flintham gave those boys is something a big ship cannot. On a 164-ton minesweeper there is nowhere to hide and nothing to be a spectator of: a fifteen-year-old handling a heaving line on her forecastle can see the bridge, the engine room hatch and the whole of the ship at once, feels every movement of the sea directly, and finds out within a morning whether he is going to be seasick for the rest of his life. Everything happens at a scale a boy can take in. It is why navies have always kept small craft for the purpose, and why Flintham and Dittisham did more useful work at Shotley than most of their ninety-one sisters managed sweeping mines.

From 1968 to 1973, she took on a considerably more active role as a training vessel based at HMS Ganges, the Royal Navy's boys' training establishment, working alongside her sister ship HMS Dittisham to give young recruits genuine hands-on experience of seamanship before they ever set foot on a larger warship.

Among the base staff who joined around this time was a young Petty Officer named Richard Walters, who came aboard in November 1970. His previous commanding officer on an earlier posting had been a young Lieutenant Commander named J.J. Blackham, who went on to command the minesweeper HMS Beachampton, the frigate HMS Ashanti and the destroyer HMS Nottingham, and eventually the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, before retiring in 2002 as Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham KCB and Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, proof that even the humblest corners of the training fleet occasionally crossed paths with officers destined for the very top.

Following the closure of HMS Ganges in 1976, HMS Flintham continued her training role at HMS Raleigh in Plymouth from 1974 to 1981, extending her career as a floating classroom for well over a decade beyond her original construction, considerably longer than many of her sister ships managed in more conventional operational roles.

Ganges closed in 1976, the white ensign coming down on 28 October, and its training moved to HMS Raleigh at Torpoint. Flintham followed the boys west and carried on doing the same thing there until 1981. It is a rather neat career for a ship built for a war that never happened: two years of building, nine years tied up in reserve at Hythe waiting for Soviet mines, and then thirteen years teaching teenagers how to handle a rope. She was sold in 1982, by which point she had spent more of her life as a classroom than as a warship, and had almost certainly been of more use that way.

Most of her ninety-two sisters have stories like that, and hardly any of them involve mines. Once it became clear the Soviet mining campaign was not coming, the Navy found other work for the class: diving tenders, torpedo recovery craft, degaussing vessels, survey boats, anything small, cheap and already paid for. HMS Bassingham went out to the Mediterranean for Suez in 1956 and was afterwards handed over to the Royal East African Navy at Mombasa. HMS Polsham was sold to the Port of London Authority in 1967 and spent the rest of her working life surveying the Thames. A good many others were passed to navies that wanted something small they could afford, and a fair number simply became houseboats. Several are still advertised now and then as conversion projects, seventy years on, which is an odd fate for a warship and an entirely sensible one for a well-built wooden boat.

A Grounding on the Rhine

HMS Flintham's most memorable single incident came during a training deployment to Germany, in which she travelled up the Rhine alongside HMS Dittisham, an unusual destination for a pair of small coastal minesweepers, and both boats ran aground on the very same trip. Handily, a propeller modification had already been pencilled in for the pair of them, so the base staff at Chatham who carried out the work afterwards could quietly fold the repair into planned maintenance rather than anyone having to write up a formal grounding report, a rare bit of good fortune for all concerned.

It stands as the kind of small, human-scale mishap that so often characterises the real, day-to-day life of a training vessel, a world away from dramatic combat action but notably memorable to the young sailors who experienced it firsthand.

The End

HMS Flintham was sold in 1982, closing out a career that, while lacking any dramatic wartime action of her own, given her postwar construction, had nonetheless given a genuine and lasting service to the Royal Navy by training successive generations of young sailors in the fundamentals of seamanship, work every bit as essential, in its own quiet way, as the mine-clearing duties her class had originally been designed for.

One of them, at least, is on the national register. HMS Ledsham came off the same slip at Poole a year before Flintham, was sold for breaking in 1971, and was taken on as a preservation project in 1997 instead of being cut up. She lies at Deptford today, on the National Register of Historic Vessels, described as the last triple carvel-built vessel on the Thames and one of the very few Ham class left anywhere. That is the whole story of the class in a single hull: designed in a hurry for a mine war that never arrived, built by boatbuilders rather than shipbuilders, sent off to do other people's odd jobs, nearly scrapped, and finally preserved not for anything she ever did but for the way she was put together. Flintham did rather better than most of them, and all it took was thirteen years of teenagers.