HMS Sesame (H35): The Destroyer That Arrived Just as the War Ended

Built Across Two Yards

HMS Sesame was laid down by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton in March 1918 and launched there on 30 December 1918, before being completed by John Brown and Company at Clydebank on 28 March 1919, a common enough wartime arrangement of splitting construction and fitting-out between two yards to keep the Emergency War Programme moving. She was one of some sixty-seven Admiralty S-class destroyers ordered in 1917, displacing around 1,000 tons normal and armed with three 4-inch guns, a single 2-pounder anti-aircraft gun, a Maxim machine gun and torpedo tubes, capable of a brisk 36 knots. It is worth being precise about her era here, since the S-class name was reused for an entirely separate group of destroyers built for the Second World War, and this is very much the earlier, First World War vintage design, commissioning into the Reserve Fleet at Devonport just as the war she was built to fight in was ending.

Four Pennant Numbers and a Trip to the Baltic

Sesame's pennant number changed no fewer than four times in her first three years, from F5A on completion in 1919, to D98 later that year, to F63 in January 1921, before finally settling on H35 in January 1922, the identity she would carry for the rest of her career. Her one genuine taste of active deployment came in 1919, when she was sent to the Baltic as part of the British intervention supporting Latvia's War of Independence, arriving with her sister ships just as the fighting there was winding down, a case of a brand new destroyer showing up to a conflict that had largely already been decided without her.

Nanny to HMS Argus

The 1920s brought a quieter, more domestic sort of service, reserve duty at Devonport, a spell in Irish waters, and reduced complement status from 1926, before reserve service at Portsmouth from 1932. From 1929 she was stripped of her armament and reassigned as a plane guard and target-towing attendant to the aircraft carrier HMS Argus with the Home Fleet, a role considerably less glamorous than hunting enemy shipping but a genuinely useful one, since plane guard destroyers existed to fish downed aircrew out of the sea during flying operations. She did exactly that on 1 November 1930, rescuing the three-man crew of a crashed Fairey IIIF floatplane, arguably the single most consequential thing HMS Sesame ever did in her entire career, and a reminder that not every ship's most important moment involves firing a shot in anger.

A Quiet End

HMS Sesame was sold to shipbreakers Cashmore of Newport in Wales and broken up from 4 May 1934, a full five years before the Second World War began, meaning she saw none of the Atlantic convoy escort work or Far Eastern service sometimes associated with S-class destroyers more generally. It is also worth noting, for anyone researching the name further, that there was a separate and entirely unrelated HMS Sesame, an Assurance-class rescue tug bearing the pennant W144, which was torpedoed and sunk off Normandy in June 1944, a different vessel that happens to share this destroyer's name and is easily confused with her in a quick search. This Sesame, the H35 destroyer, had a rather less dramatic but no less honourable career, doing the unglamorous work of reserve fleet duty and plane guard service that kept the Royal Navy's aviators safe between the wars.