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.

That precision about which S class is worth taking further, because the same sixty-seven ships turn up all over this site. Only eleven of them were still in the Royal Navy in 1939, the rest sold in the 1930s to bring Britain under the destroyer tonnage limit of the London Naval Treaty, and Sesame went in that cull. The eleven that were spared went on to have extraordinary second wars: HMS Scimitar (H21) was at Dunkirk and Slapton Sands, HMS Sardonyx (H26) escorted twenty-one convoys without losing a ship, and HMS Scout (H51) put commandos ashore in the Straits of Malacca and got out of Singapore as it fell. Sesame was launched eight months after Scout and had been broken up for five years before the war those three fought in even began. There is nothing wrong with her that a different serial number would not have fixed.

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 Latvian naval base at Liepaja alongside sister ships Shamrock, Strenuous and Torbay, part of the wider British intervention supporting Latvia's War of Independence against Bolshevik Russia, a rotating commitment that eventually saw some 238 Royal Navy vessels pass through the Baltic in total. Sesame arrived 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.

The Baltic deserves better than a clause, because it is the least known campaign the Royal Navy has ever fought and it produced two countries. When Germany collapsed in November 1918 the eastern Baltic did not become peaceful, it became a free-for-all between Bolshevik forces, White Russians, German Freikorps units who declined to go home, and the newly declared republics of Estonia and Latvia, which had almost no armed forces and no navies at all. Britain sent a squadron in, and over two years something like 238 Royal Navy vessels passed through those waters. Men were killed, ships were mined and sunk, and almost nobody in Britain has heard of any of it. The campaign is set out at length in HMS Inverness (M102), whose Estonian namesake is named after the admiral who commanded it.

Sesame's share of it was a rotation to Liepaja with three sisters in a year when the shooting was already tailing off, which is the recurring shape of her whole career: sent to the right place at very nearly the wrong time. It is worth saying that this was not nothing. A squadron in being, sitting in a foreign port, is what allows a government with no navy to negotiate as though it has one, and the Latvians remembered it long enough to still be marking it a century later.

Nanny to HMS Argus

The 1920s brought a quieter, more domestic sort of service: reduced to reserve at Devonport in September 1920, recommissioned in March 1923 for a spell in Irish waters, then reduced to three-fifths complement on 16 January 1926, before reserve service at Portsmouth from 1932.

Eleven different commanding officers passed through Sesame between 1919 and 1932, a proper reminder that even a ship spending most of her career at reduced readiness was still somebody's actual command. Her very first, Lieutenant John Hassard-Short, held the post for just ten days in March 1919 before handing over to his successor, not the last time a Sesame posting would prove a brief one.

From 1929 she was stripped of her armament and reassigned as a plane guard and target-towing attendant to the aircraft carrier HMS Argus, recommissioning for the role on 9 April that year with what was then still called the Atlantic Fleet, a role considerably less glamorous than hunting enemy shipping but a properly useful one, since plane guard destroyers existed to fish downed aircrew out of the sea during flying operations.

The plane-guard job sounds sedate and was not, because of when it was. Landing an aeroplane on a moving ship in 1929 was still a substantially unsolved problem: there were no mirror sights, no angled decks and no arrester systems worth the name by later standards, and HMS Argus (I49) was the ship on which the Fleet Air Arm had been working out how to do it since 1918. Aircraft went over the side regularly. The plane guard's entire job was to be steaming a few hundred yards astern, at readiness, with a boat turned out and a scrambling net over the side, so that when one of them did there was somebody in the water inside a couple of minutes rather than a couple of hours.

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.

Which is why 1 November 1930 is not a minor entry. Three men went into the sea in a Fairey IIIF and three men came out of it, and the reason they came out of it is that a stripped-down eleven-year-old destroyer with no guns had been following the carrier around all morning waiting for exactly that. The Royal Navy stopped doing this with obsolete destroyers eventually and started doing it with helicopters, which are better at it, and the job has not changed at all.

The Atlantic Fleet she had recommissioned into was itself renamed the Home Fleet in March 1932, in the aftermath of the previous September's Invergordon Mutiny over pay cuts, just a few months before Sesame's own spell with it came to an end, meaning she actually served under both fleet names in the space of a single, otherwise uneventful posting.

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, torpedoed by a German E-boat off Normandy on 11 June 1944, five days after D-Day, while helping recover shipping supporting the Omaha Beach build-up, a different vessel that happens to share this destroyer's name and is easily confused with her in a quick search.

The tug is worth two more sentences, because she was a real ship with a real crew. HMS Sesame the rescue tug was 157 feet long, 1,350 horsepower, thirteen knots, a 3-inch gun and a 20mm and two machine guns, with thirty-one men aboard, and she had been launched in January 1944. She was three months old. In the small hours of 11 June, E-boats came out of Le Havre after the shipping bringing supplies and replacements in for the American troops pushing inland from Omaha, and one of them put a torpedo into her starboard side amidships. She lies off Normandy and is dived regularly. Two ships of the same name, twenty-five years apart, and the one that never fired a shot outlived the one that did.

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, a destroyer that changed pennant number four times, commanding officer eleven times and fleet name once, all without ever firing a shot at an enemy.