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.

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.

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.

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.