Object

In 2017 a Shincliffe resident, who happened to be going on holiday via Portsmouth, chanced upon the bell of HMS Shincliffe in an antique shop specialising in nautical memorabilia. He paid a deposit to reserve the bell and a village appeal raised just over £4,000 within five weeks!

The bell will be permanently displayed within the Church in Shincliffe Village and it will be rung on Armistice Day 11 November 2018 and on other special occasions.

The information below was kindly provided by John Charters:

HMS Shincliffe and the Minesweeping War

Rather like the war in France, the war at sea soon settled into an uneasy stand-off. Although the British battlefleet outnumbered the German, it was felt to be too valuable to risk in a major battle unless the Germans were at a serious disadvantage. The Royal Navy concentrated its effort on maintaining a blockade of the German coast in order to starve their enemy of food and raw materials.

The German Navy was all too aware that it was seriously outnumbered so decided to risk a major fleet action only when it was sure that it would face only a smaller part of the British Grand Fleet. This led to the series of “raids” on east Coast towns, such as the famous bombardment of Hartlepool, in the hope of luring a smaller British force into an unequal battle. This tactic proved unworkable so the Germans concentrated their naval efforts on disrupting the British North Sea trade through the use of mines and submarines.

A naval mine is a device designed to explode under water to sink an enemy ship. They were first used by the Americans during the War of Independence in 1776 but without damaging any British ship. More sophisticated mines were made by the British navy against Napoleon’s fleet but the Royal Navy considered mines to be an unethical-“dastardly”-weapon which was only used by weaker opponents. The Russo-Japanese war of 1905, in which Japanese mines sank 15 major Russian warships, finally convinced the British Admiralty that mines were a serious danger and the Royal Naval Minesweeping Reserve (RNMR) was formed in 1907 with the purchase of several fishing trawlers for conversion to minesweepers.

Commercial fishermen were felt to be the most effective crews as they were used to handling heavy gear at sea together with the most extensive knowledge of the British coastline. It took six years for a boy who went to sea on a trawler to qualify as a regular seaman so that the level of seamanship and ship handling skills was extremely high. (Nearly all North Sea fishermen were said to be able to find their way around without the use of any instruments at all). Most of the minesweeping was done by steel-hulled steam trawlers, each around 200-300 tons and around 110 feet long. They fished as far away as the Arctic and were used to working in all sorts of weather. They were usually fitted with a 6-pounder gun to sink mines and worked in groups of six to twelve ships under the control of a Royal navy officer. Flotillas of these minesweeping trawlers were eventually based in all the British Ports. By 1918, 550 trawlers and drifters were being used in minesweeping and harbour patrols.

The need for more minesweepers was critical from the start of the war. The fishing trawlers were too slow and had too deep a draft. The admiralty began to hire paddle driven steamers which had been used for peacetime pleasure trips around the coast. These ships were usually faster than the fishing boats, had a shallow draft and needed only a small crew. They proved to be so successful that it was decided to build a new class of purpose-built paddle minesweepers and the first of 32 paddlers joined the fleet in April 1916.

They were all named after Racecourses and carried a crew of 7 officers and 43 men. Each ship displaced 810 tons and was 245 feet long, divided into watertight sections to improve survivability. They were armed with a couple of 12-pounder guns. Being relatively simple and cheap to build at around £55,000 each, the building contracts went to small shipbuilders and engineers. Despite their shortcomings – they were impossible to operate in bad weather and had an alarming habit of trapping mines in the paddle box – they soon gained a reputation as tough little ships. Only 5 were lost during the war.

HMS Shincliffe was built in Dundee and was the last of the Racecourse class to enter service. In June 1918, she joined the 16th Fast Sweeping Flotilla, based in Granton. She continued minesweeping after the Armistice until December 1919 during which time two crew members were lost overboard.* She was eventually decommissioned in early 1920 and sold to shipbreakers in March 1922.

By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, the Naval Minesweeping service totalled 726 vessels. Wartime losses were 214 sweepers, an average of 1 sweeper and half their crew every week. In 1914, a minesweeping vessel was lost for every 2 mines swept but by the summer of 1918, 85 mines were being destroyed for every lost minesweeper.

Although almost all were scrapped in the early 1920s, a few of the Racecourse sweepers were sold to excursion companies where, after very slight modification, they operated day trips to France and around the Thames Estuary. Two of them, Atherstone and Melton, returned to Royal Naval service in 1939 as anti-aircraft ships. HMS Melton, under her peacetime name of Queen of Thanet, rescued soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk.

The work of minesweeping never stopped as the German Navy laid more and more mines as the war progressed. During the second half of 1915, their mines sank 103 British vessels, including a hospital ship which was carrying wounded from France. In June 1916, a mine, laid by a submarine, sank HMS Hampshire off the Orkney Islands and Lord Kitchener, the British Minister of War, was drowned.

The Royal Navy began its own mine-laying offensive in October 1914 in order to protect the cross-channel sea routes to France. Despite the poor quality of early British mines, a complete and effective mine barrier was laid across the Dover Straits which both protected the supply routes to France and prevented German submarines from reaching their hunting grounds in the Atlantic. Another British mine barrier was eventually laid across the Northern approaches to the North Sea.

By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, British minesweeping and minelaying had evolved from a neglected naval activity into a key area of the Royal Navy’s strategy. Around 130,000 mines were laid which sank 150 German warships, including 40 U-Boats. The Germans had also laid 43,000 mines of which only 11,000 had been cleared by the Armistice. Since mines remain just as deadly in peacetime, the mine clearing efforts continued until late 1919. Eleven Royal Navy sailors were lost ( including the two men from HMS Shincliffe), and twenty three ships were seriously damaged during these operations.

Despite the years of effort and danger, mines played another major role in the Second World War, when they were also dropped from aircraft. The North Vietnamese used Russian mines made before the First World War and the Iraqis seriously damaged three American warships with similar ancient mines during the First Gulf war. Mine hunting still remains a critical part of naval warfare.

* Leading trimmer Philip Lynch on 4th May 1919 and Ordinary Seaman Albert Swindle on 15th May 1919. Both of them were from Tyneside.


Royal Museums Greenwich
Scale model of a paddle sloop used as a minesweeper representing, amongst others, HMS Shincliffe (1918):
http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/67397.html

Contributed by John Charters and Bill Clatworthy