Flower-class sloop
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The Flower class comprised five sub-classes of sloops built under the Emergency War Programme for the Royal Navy during World War I, all of which were named after various flowers. They were popularly known as the "herbaceous borders", in humorous reference to a well-known adage about the Royal Navy ("Britain's best bulwarks are her wooden walls"), as well as to a type of garden arrangement popular in the United Kingdom.
Fleet minesweepers
The Flowers were designed to be built at merchant shipyards, to ease the pressure on yards specializing in warships. The initial three groups were the first purpose-built fleet
- Acacia-class sloop: first group to be built, in 1915. 24 vessels built in two batches of 12. Two sunk during the war.
- Azalea-class sloop: 12 vessels built in 1915. Slightly modified Acacias; two sunk during the war.
- Arabis-class sloop: 36 vessels built 1915, a further eight for the French Navy. Five British, and one French vessel sunk.
Gentian and Myrtle were both lost to mines in the Baltic Sea on 16 July 1919.[1]
Submarine decoys (warship-Qs)
The latter two groups, the Aubrietias and Anchusas, were designed as submarine decoys, or Q-ships, with hidden guns and a distinctive "merchant marine" appearance. These "warship-Qs" were thus the first purpose-built anti-submarine fighting ships, and their successor types were the anti-submarine sloops of World War II , which evolved into the modern anti-submarine warfare frigate during the 1939–45 Battle of the Atlantic.
- Aubrietia-class sloop: 12 vessels built 1916; two sunk.
- Anchusa-class sloop: 28 vessels built 1917. Saw service as Q-ships; six sunk.
Service
Some 112 Flower-class vessel in total were built for the Royal Navy, and a further eight for the French Marine Militaire. Of these, 17 British and one French Flowers were sunk.
Some members of the class served as patrol vessels throughout the world during the peacetime years between the wars, but almost all were disposed of by World War II. This allowed the majority of the class names to be revived for the new, smaller Flower-class corvettes.
Survivors
Two members of the final Anchusa group,
References
- ^ Admiralty Estimates for 1919 (appendix) accessed 25 October 2016
External links
Media related to Flower class sloop at Wikimedia Commons