Very Special Ships: Abdiel Class Fast Minelayers of World War Two

INTRODUCTION

ON 13 August 1940, as the Luftwaffe was unleashing the Blitz on Britain, Captain Edward Pleydell-Bouverie RN sat down to write a letter to his wife Pearl to tell her of his appointment to HMS Abdiel, the name ship of a new class of warship that was then fitting out at J S Stephens & Co at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Unable to contain himself, he wrote in part:¹

All well. I’ve been very busy here … I go to a ship, it is signed + sealed. Name is ‘Abdiel’ and she is brand new, won’t be ready for a little while in fact. More than that I can’t say but she’s of a new type and can (or will) go like the very devil. I’ve very pleased I must say to get things settled a bit and … this outfit will, I think, be a most independent command in many ways and with every chance of a bit of excitement. You must contain yourself for the rest until Friday.

The Captain had his new ship and his new command perfectly pegged. The Abdiel would indeed ‘go like the very devil’, he was often to have a ‘most independent command’ and he and the crew of the new Abdiel were to experience much more than a ‘bit of excitement’. The very same things could well be said of the other ships of the Abdiel class.

To many, the term ‘minelayer’ is hardly exciting and to some the term ‘fast minelayer’ might sound like an oxymoron. Certainly Norman Goodwin was not expecting much when in March of 1941, as a sixteen-year-old midshipman, he was ordered to report to a new ship, the Abdiel. Having no idea what sort of ship she might be, he was sent to look for her at Gourock on the River Clyde. Upon his arrival there, he was told that she was a fast minelayer, but only the ‘minelayer’ part of the name registered with him. Surveying the ships, he later recalled, ‘There was nothing that looked anything like my conception of a minelayer. I imagined that she would look more like a merchant ship than a warship. I felt a little disappointed. Mine-laying sounded rather a dull occupation.’ All the way in the launch out to the ship, ‘I kept wondering which ship we were going to. It was something of a shock when I realised we were going alongside a grey threefunnelled ship, too big for a destroyer and too small for a cruiser.’ Once aboard, he quickly realised that she was a unique ship and that he had joined an exclusive and elite club that was manned almost completely by regular Royal Navy personnel.²

The fast minelayers were indeed unique, and in that way alone theirs was a bold design. No other ship in any other navy combined their high speed with their capacity to carry not only a useful mine load but much, much more. In the heat of battle and arduous service, their captains and crews turned out to be extraordinary. And, contrary to what Midshipman Goodwin had assumed, minelaying did not turn out to be such a dull occupation, at least not in the fast minelayers.

The Admiralty had high hopes for the fast minelayers and their hopes would be more than fulfilled. The Abdiels were not only fully capable of fulfilling the mission they were designed for, offensive minelaying, but they could also perform many other tasks their designers could have scarcely imagined, such as blockade running, transporting VIPs and more, tasks that mining expert Captain John Cowie would refer to as ‘extraneous’. They would carry out the arduous tasks assigned to them in every ocean and in many of the seas, at storied places like Crete, Tobruk and Malta, in the English Channel, off Normandy and Norway and in the Pacific. In short, the Abdiel class fast minelayers were a brilliant success.

This is their story and the story of the men who sailed in them.

CHAPTER 1

MINES, MINELAYING AND MINELAYERS

Origins to the Eve of the Second World War

THE Abdiel class fast minelayers were extraordinarily versatile ships, which could do much more than lay mines, but it is safe to say they would not have been built if not for the existence of the naval mine. Like its cousin the landmine and unlike its cousin, the torpedo, the naval mine has never been considered a glamorous weapon. At times, some powers have even thought of the naval mine as a downright ungentlemanly or wicked way of waging war. Others, however, embraced it immediately and those who at first despised it then came to embrace it.

Although the popular image of a naval mine as a sphere with deadly horns is sometimes accurate, the subject is much more complicated than that and can be extremely technical. The terminology of naval mines can be rather involved. A naval mine is a ‘submarine mine’, an underwater explosive device set off by a ship that touches it (in the case of a contact mine) or that activates it by the ship’s magnetic field (in the case of a magnetic mine), the noise of the ship (in the case of an acoustic mine) or the pressure created by a passing ship (a pressure mine). Magnetic, acoustic and pressure mines are ‘influence’ mines, as opposed to ‘contact’ ones. ‘Moored mines’ are connected by a ‘sinker’ to the seabed, while ‘ground mines’ lie themselves on the seabed and ‘drifting mines’ – well – drift on or just below the surface of the water. ‘Controlled mines’ are set off by someone on dry land, as opposed to ‘independent mines’ which explode when they receive the necessary stimulus (such as contact, noise, magnetic signature or pressure) from a passing ship. For the sake of completeness, explosive devices attached by someone to or placed on the seabed under the hull of a ship are sometimes called ‘mines’, such as the devices used by the Italians and the limpet mines by the British.

To make matters even more confusing, mines were once called ‘torpedoes’, but what is now called a torpedo or more properly a ‘locomotive’ torpedo, is a device that is launched from a surface ship, aircraft, submarine or shore battery and that uses steam, electricity or oxygen to propel itself against a ship (with a contact exploder) or under a ship (in the case of a magnetic exploder).

As it involves British fast minelayers, the terminology is not quite so complicated. The Abdiels laid ‘mines’, as in independent, submarine mines, both of the contact and the influence (magnetic and acoustic) variety and of the moored (contact or magnetic) and ground (magnetic or acoustic) variety.

Whatever it is called, the naval mine is a relatively recent development in naval warfare. Putting aside explosives placed on the surface of the water and pointed in the direction of a ship, which date back to the Dutch in 1585, and concentrating just on those designed to attack a ship below the waterline, the first real pioneer in naval mining was an American, David Bushnell. Bushnell designed a one-man submarine with an explosive charge to be placed against the underwater hull of a warship. On 7 September 1776 Bushnell’s American Turtle, manned by a Sergeant Ezra Lee, attacked the frigate HMS Eagle off New York. The submarine’s drill was unable to penetrate the ship’s copper bottom to attach the explosive and Lee had to give up the attempt, but the explosion of the charge caused some excitement among the British observers. For purposes of contemporary naval mining, Bushnell’s main contribution was to be the first to set off gunpowder underwater.¹

The first real moored contact mine was designed by another American, the inventor Robert Fulton, in about 1810, after he had tried to peddle various mine-like devices first to Napoleon and then to the British, both of whom were horrified by the weapons, and then to the Americans. Fulton’s intentions were pure enough – he wanted to make war too horrible to pursue – but he only succeeded in furthering the development of a weapon that just made it worse. He may have coined an early name for the mine – the ‘torpedo.

Enter yet another American inventor, Colonel Samuel Colt, who was born in 1814 and as early as 1829 conceived an idea for a system of controlled mining called a ‘harbor defense battery’ while he was studying in a laboratory in Massachusetts. After patenting his revolver, Colt returned to his ‘torpedo’ idea, one of his favourites. In spite of the vehement opposition of ex-President John Quincy Adams, Colt eventually obtained US Government funding for a series of mine demonstrations on a series of unfortunate vessels. The first one took place on 4 July 1842 and the fourth and last one, on 13 April 1844, shattered a 500-ton ship under full sail. All of the demonstrations were successful and were well attended by dignitaries. Colonel Colt thus proved his mining idea, but by 1844 the US Government had little need of the weapon and did not adopt it. Colt instead made a fortune from his revolvers and passed away in 1862.²

Other nations, however, began to take some interest in the weapon, notably Imperial Russia. During the Crimean War of 1854–5, the Russians employed mines developed by a Professor Jacobi and by the Nobel family to defend the ports of Kronstadt in the Baltic and Sevastopol in the Black Sea. While nosing around the defences off Kronstadt on 9 June 1855, the British paddle warship Merlin struck first one and then another mine, giving her the dubious distinction of being the first warship damaged by enemy mines. HMS Firefly came to her assistance after the first explosion, only to strike a mine herself. The Merlin’s only leak came from a fractured drainpipe, but eight sheets of copper were blown off her hull and inside she suffered considerable shock damage, with ‘almost everything moveable in the ship displaced’. The Firefly’s hull was undamaged, but inside bulkheads were ‘thrown down’ or displaced and every bit of crockery broken. When HMS Vulcan struck a mine on 20 June, the Royal Navy had had enough, and the next day began carrying out the first minesweeping operation in history, recovering thirty-three ‘infernal machines,’ the standard British term of the day for sea mines.³

Colonel Samuel Colt, a pioneer of the naval submarine mine. (Robert Swartz)

It was their use in the American Civil War that provided the real spur to the development of mines as a viable weapon of naval war. The Confederates used mines in great numbers to defend their harbours against the Union blockade. Confederate mines were called ‘torpedoes’ and when Admiral David Farragut shouted, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!’ during the battle of Mobile Bay, he was referring to Confederate naval mines. In December 1862, Confederate mines accounted for the first warship to be sunk by such weapons, the Union ironclad Cairo. In all, thirtyseven Union and Confederate ships were sunk or disabled by mines during the war.

An engraving depicting the mining of the Merlin and Firefly off Kronstadt in 1855. (Author’s collection)

The successful use of naval mines by the Russians and the Confederacy led to increased international interest in the weapon, but the United States lost the lead in the field to other nations. Advances in mine design were greatly assisted by the introduction of guncotton in 1870, long after its invention by a Swiss chemist in 1846.⁴

This new form of warfare was not at first welcomed by the Royal Navy, as it threatened its freedom of movement and its command of the seas. Nevertheless, in 1876 the Royal Navy commissioned its Naval Torpedo School at the old HMS Vernon, where, despite British aversion to the very idea of mines, the Royal Navy began to develop its own mines. In an important innovation, the Royal Navy invented the ‘plummet’ version of the ‘automatic sinker’, which allowed mines to be laid in varying depths of water but to rest at a pre-set distance under the water.

The Royal Navy’s bias against mines changed considerably with the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, which marked the first use of independent mines as offensive tactical weapons.⁵ On April 13, 1904, Japanese mines laid near Port Arthur by the 745-ton Koryo Maru⁶ sank the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk, with 652 dead, including the Russians’ best naval commander Admiral Makarov. Just a month later, on 15 May, mines from the Russian minelayer Amur accounted for two Japanese battleships, the Hatsuse and the Yashima, also off Port Arthur, with the loss of 493 lives in the Hatsuse.⁷ The 15,000-ton Hatsuse was a serious loss; built by Armstrong in Britain, she was armed with four 12in and sixteen 6in guns and was one of the newest battleships in the Japanese fleet.⁸ Before the war ended in 1905, enough Russian and Japanese warships had been sunk or damaged by mines to impress every naval power, including Great Britain.

The naval mine had truly arrived, but its success also led to efforts to regulate this abhorrent (to some) weapon. Questions about the employment of this relatively new weapon caused the major maritime powers to attend a Hague Conference on the subject in 1907, but the resulting ‘Convention Relative to the Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact Mines (No. VIII)’⁹ was not strong enough or well enough observed, to stem the use of the weapon.

The Japanese battleship Hatsuse, sunk by a Russian mine in May 1904. (IWM Q 41327)

The Royal Navy finally began taking steps toward a minelaying capability. Beginning in 1907, it converted to minelayers seven old Apollo class cruisers, two of which were named the Apollo and the Latona. They could make about 20 knots, were armed with 4.7in guns and could carry 100 mines. They constituted the ‘Minelaying Squadron’ commanded by a ‘Captain-in-Charge Minelayers’ and operated directly under the orders of the Admiralty. The Navy also developed a ‘Service’ type mine with a charge of 325lbs.¹⁰

At the beginning of the First World War, the Royal Navy was galvanised into action by almost immediate use of offensive minelaying by the Imperial Germany Navy, which had enthusiastically embraced the relatively new form of warfare. Shortly after a state of war broke out between Britain and Germany, the Germans wasted no time and sent the former pleasure steamer Königin Luise across the Channel into waters off the English coast to lay her 200 mines. On the morning of 5 August, she was sighted by HMS Amphion, a scout cruiser of 3440 tons armed with 4in guns,¹¹ and the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla. She hurriedly laid her mines 30 miles off the coast of Suffolk before her pursuers opened fire.

The Königin Luise fled at her maximum speed of 21 knots and fought back gamely with her light guns, as her 3.4in guns had not yet been fitted. A truly fast minelayer might have escaped, but this one was pounded to pieces after Captain Biermann refused to strike her colours. She finally sank, with much of her crew still aboard and the survivors were picked up by her British pursuers. The next morning, the same British ships unwittingly sailed over part of the minefield and the Amphion struck a mine. After another massive explosion, she foundered in just minutes, taking with her more than 150 of her officers and men and many of the German survivors aboard.

The naval mining war was on. The first British minelaying operation was carried out on the night of 2 October in the Channel to the north of Ostende by the old minelayers Apollo, Intrepid, Andromache and Iphegenia, who were escorted by destroyers. Two more fields were laid on succeeding nights, with a total of 1064 mines laid. As it turned out, the field interfered with the route to Zeebrugge and part of the first minefield had to be swept.¹² It was a learning experience.

The cruiser Amphion after hitting a German mine, 6 August 1914. (IWM Q 57066)

The battleship Audacious sinking after hitting a German mine, 27 October 1914. (IWM Q 48342)

The first major victim of German minelaying after the Amphion was the British dreadnought battleship Audacious. On 27 October 1914, she was sailing off the coast of Ireland for a gunnery exercise when she struck a single mine laid by the former passenger liner Berlin. After a twelve-hour battle to keep her afloat and tow her to safety, she finally sank by the stern, her magazines exploding as she went down. Unlike the Königin Luise, the Berlin evaded notice for some time, until she finally entered Norwegian waters to evade British ships and was interned.¹³

Shortly afterwards, naval mines achieved one of their greatest successes. During the Gallipoli campaign, a Turkish steamer named the Nousret laid a mere twenty mines in the path of an Anglo-French naval effort to force the Narrows on 18 March 1915. This seemingly meagre minefield was cleverly laid and caused the sinking of the French pre-dreadnought battleship Bouvet and the British predreadnoughts Irresistible and Ocean. The mines caused the attempt to force the Narrows with warships alone to be abandoned.¹⁴ As a result, Allied and Anzac troops had to be sent in and in the end the campaign in Gallipoli eventually failed miserably. Revenge for the destruction wrought by the humble Nousret was a long time coming, but it did come. In January 1918, mines laid by the Latona sank the once-German-then-Turkish light cruiser Breslau and severely damaged the battlecruiser Goeben in the Aegean.

The Royal Navy was encouraged by the possible use of mines against the emerging threat from German U-boats. During the War, the Royal Navy did not design or build any new minelayers, but employed a number of ships converted into minelayers. The most unusual conversion took shape when a ‘Clapham Junction’ maze of mine rails was fitted to the quarterdeck of the ‘large light cruiser’ Courageous, a white-elephant project of First Sea Lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher. At 18,600 tons, she was the largest minelayer ever, with her four 15in guns, she was certainly the most heavily-armed minelayer ever and with a speed of 32 knots, she was one the fastest of any era.¹⁵ Unfortunately, perhaps, she never laid a mine operationally. A few years after the end of the First World War, she and her sister Glorious were converted into aircraft carriers and served as such into the Second World War until their untimely ends.

The minelayer Latona in 1916. (Imperial War Museum SP 333)

The most prodigious minelayers in the Royal Navy in the Great War were converted merchant ships, which laid many thousands of mines in defensive minefields designed to entrap U-boats venturing out to attack merchant shipping. Of course, they were too slow for offensive minelaying. The Royal Navy eventually found a different sort of ship for that.

In 1916 the Royal Navy began to convert destroyers into minelayers and by far the best known and most successful was undoubtedly the Abdiel, a Marksman class flotilla leader. Ordered as part of the 1914 war programme, she was laid down in 1915 and was converted before her completion in 1916 to carry eighty mines. Essentially a large destroyer for her day, she was 324ft overall and displaced about 1600 tons and was armed with 4in guns. She had four funnels and her turbines could generate 36,000 horsepower. She could make 34 knots, much faster than any other minelayer conversion up to that time.¹⁶ She did not have an enclosed mining deck and when carrying mines on the rails on her deck she would erect a screen to hide them, painted to depict the torpedo tubes she would otherwise have been carrying.

The large light cruiserminelayer Courageous. (Constance Keogh via Hermione Alcock)

Shortly after her completion, the Abdiel was attached to the Fleet. On 4 May 1916, she laid one offensive minefield off the Vyl lightship. Under Commander Berwick Curtis, she then played a unique part in the battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June. After the rival battlecruiser squadrons and then the two rival battle fleets encountered each other on the afternoon and evening of the 31st, the German High Seas Fleet turned away and the fleets lost contact with each other in the fading light. Admiral Jellicoe sought to cut off the escape routes of the High Seas Fleet and, as one precaution, at 21.32 he ordered the Abdiel to lay a minefield 15 miles off the Vyl lightship,¹⁷ an area through which the German High Seas Fleet would have to pass if it attempted to escape via the Horns Reef.

It had been intended for the Abdiel to lay this minefield anyway, even before the British knew the High Seas Fleet was at sea and the Abdiel duly laid the new minefield, in two lines of forty mines each, between 01.24 and 02.04 the morning of 1 June. As it turned out, the High Seas Fleet did use that route for its retirement. German minesweepers sent out to meet the returning ships failed to discover the Abdiel’s minefields,¹⁸ and at 05.30 the German dreadnought battleship Ostfriesland hit a mine laid by the Abdiel, though it was likely one from the field she had laid on 4 May. Like other German dreadnought battleships, the Ostfriesland was tough. While she lost one man killed and ten wounded, her torpedo bulkhead held and she only shipped 400 tons of water,¹⁹ and she was able to keep up with the rest of the High Seas Fleet. The incident did create some alarm in the High Seas Fleet and at least one ship started firing its guns at imagined submarines. The Ostfriesland was able to reach port, was repaired and ready for sea again by 29 July.²⁰ She survived the war, only to be transferred to the United States, which sank her in July 1921 in trials with Colonel Billy Mitchell’s bombers. That the Ostfriesland’s sister dreadnoughts did not strike more mines laid by the Abdiel was perhaps due to the limited size of the minefield that could be laid by a minelayer carrying only eighty mines. This was a shortcoming of the first Abdiel’s design that the British would later remedy in a second Abdiel.

The destroyer-minelayer Abdiel, which was with the Grand Fleet at Jutland. (IWM SP 3155)

With the German High Seas Fleet rarely venturing out again before the end of the war, the Abdiel continued her minelaying duties, but did not have another opportunity to ply her offensive minelaying skills as she had at Jutland. Her sister Gabriel was similarly converted and a number of other destroyers were converted to minelaying duties before the end of the war. In 1918 the Abdiel was the leader of the 20th Flotilla, based at Immingham, She survived the war and was not sold for scrap until 1936.

Most importantly for the future of British offensive minelaying, the Grand Fleet’s Admiral Jellicoe was very impressed by the Abdiel’s role in the battle of Jutland. Writing after the war, he referred to her as ‘this most useful little vessel’ and because one of the British submarines Stationed near Horn’s Reef on the morning of 1 June heard several underwater explosions between 02.15 and 05.30, ‘it was judged that several enemy ships had struck mines’. Finally, he noted that she had ‘carried out her duties with the success which has always characterised her work’,²¹ praise that boded well for her unique type of ship.

The German cruiserminelayer Brummer. (Author’s collection)

The Imperial German Navy engaged in minelaying from the first days of the Great War and to it goes the distinction of building the first fast minelayers designed and built as such, the Brummer and Bremse, the former completing just before the battle of Jutland in 1916 and the latter just after. Using turbines ordered for the Russian battlecruiser Navarin, they could develop 33,000 horsepower from coal and oilfired boilers and were rated at a maximum speed of 28 knots, though 34 knots has been claimed for them. Rated as cruiser-minelayers, their normal displacement was 4385 tons, they were lightly armoured and were armed with 5.9in guns and 88mm anti-aircraft guns. It has been claimed they could carry from 360 to 450 mines, an astounding feat for ships of their size without an enclosed mining deck, but it was probably more like 120.²² With their three funnels and raked bow, the two ships were built to resemble the British Arethusa class light cruisers.

The Bremse and Brummer did carry out some minelaying operations, without spectacular results, but are best known for attacking and nearly annihilating a British-escorted convoy sailing between Scotland and Norway in October 1917. Their designed appearance worked well; at first mistaken by the convoy escorts for British cruisers, they got in the first shots and quickly sank the British destroyers Strongbow and Mary Rose and then most of the ships in the convoy. Both ships were interned at the end of the war and were scuttled with most of the rest of the High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in June 1919.²³

While the Abdiel was the first fast destroyerminelayer, the Brummer and Bremse were the first fast cruiser-minelayers, though not blindingly fast or fitted with an enclosed mine deck. The Germans revived their names for ships that served in the Second World War and were equipped for minelaying, but Germany never built anything like a fast minelayer again, instead relying on destroyers and S-boats for that function.

At the Admiralty, on the other hand, the idea of a fast offensive minelayer had definitely caught on and doggedly hung on. According to a detailed study of the subject, in July 1918 the Admiralty Controller requested a specially-built fast minelayer, based on two cruiser designs then under construction, the large Hawkins class with 7.5in guns or the smaller ‘E’ class with 6in guns (completed after the war as the Emerald and Enterprise). So close to the end of the war, the idea lapsed, but was revived in earnest in 1920.²⁴

The Admiralty studied various options between the wars and the result was the 6740-ton minelayer HMS Adventure. Laid down in 1922 and not completed until 1927, she was armed with 4.7in guns for anti-aircraft defence and carried 280 mines in an enclosed mining deck. She was designed to make 28 knots, but was too large and slow for offensive minelaying.²⁵ A follow-on design to the Adventure was considered, but in the end did not materialise. The idea lapsed for the time being, but did not quite die.

Instead, after the Adventure was built the need for offensive minelayers was addressed in other ways. Several classes of standard destroyers were outfitted as minelayers, much as the Abdiel had been in the First World War. In the event, the destroyers so fitted were two of the ‘E’ class, the Express and Esk, later followed by four destroyers of the ‘I’ class, the Icarus, Impulsive, Ivanhoe and Intrepid.

The minelayer Adventure early in her career. (Constance Keogh via Hermione Alcock)

Submarine minelaying was introduced. In the early 1930s six members of the Grampus class were built.²⁶ Of the six, the Seal was damaged and captured by the Germans in 1940, but the Rorqual would make quite a name for herself in the Second World War.

The Royal Navy actually did construct one purpose-built minelayer in the 1930s, but the 805-ton coastal minelayer Plover, completed in 1937, could make only 14.75 knots and was thus the antithesis of a fast, offensive minelayer,²⁷ though she later impersonated one in a wartime propaganda film called HM Minelayer.²⁸

These expedients were not sufficient for real offensive minelaying. In 1935, the Admiralty was presented with a memorandum urging the construction of ‘a number of specially designed vessels to form the permanent nucleus of an offensive mine force’.²⁹ In 1936, the Admiralty became interested in a replacement for the Adventure and explored the design of a single large minelayer of about 9000 tons, with 5.25in guns, 360 mines, cruiser-like armour and a speed of 38 knots.³⁰ At least in November of 1936, it was giving serious consideration to an 8000-ton minelayer with a speed of 34–38 knots.³¹ Those designs never saw the light of day; something more suitable was needed.

The minelayer Adventure in camouflage on 30 June 1942. (Author’s collection)

CHAPTER 2

GETTING IT JUST RIGHT

Designing the Abdiel Class

There is nothing like a threat to focus the mind and, as Britain rearmed in response to the threat from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Admiralty finally decided what it really needed was a small fast minelayer. In January 1937, the Controller of the Admiralty gave verbal instructions that a sketch design of such a ship should be prepared. They were to be known as ‘fast minelayers’, not ‘cruiser-minelayers’, though they have been frequently referred to as such, even by the enemy. For administrative purposes, they were rated as ‘cruisers and above’.¹

For a completely unprecedented type of ship, their design moved along relatively quickly, especially since the Construction Department of the Admiralty was very busy with many other designs at a time of fevered rearmament. At that time, the Director of Naval Construction was Sir Stanley Goodall and his very able assistant was Sir Charles Lillicrap. The Chief of the Naval Staff (the First Sea Lord) approved a sketch design on 19 July 1938 and Goodall submitted specifics of the design and drawings for the approval of the Board of Admiralty on 18 November. The Board approved the design’s legend and drawings on 1 December 1938. In the meantime, tenders from prospective builders were to be invited so that orders might be placed before the end of the year.

Sir Stanley Goodall, Director of Naval Construction during the design of the Abdiel class. (NPG x 89436, undated portrait by Elliott & Fry, © National Portrait Gallery, London)

During the design process, there were many choices to be made as the design of the fast minelayers began to take shape. At first, the design called for just two twin 4in gun mounts, but this was increased to three. It was proposed at one time to fit two of them aft and one forward and somewhat detailed plans were drawn up,² sufficient to inspire an artist’s impression of the design. In the end, however, two (‘A’ and ‘B’) were to be fitted forward, one superfiring over the other and one (‘Y’) aft.

During the design process, some bad ideas were rejected. The idea of replacing the 4in dual-purpose guns – which could be used against aircraft or surface targets – with two heavy weather-proof, power-operated 4.7in twin mountings with only 50 ° of elevation (which were to be fitted in the ‘L’ class destroyers then under development) was fortunately rejected, as they would have been of little use against aircraft. One of the worst ideas, the provision of quadruple 21in torpedo tubes, was also rejected. During the design process, it had to be pointed out that the ‘offensive’ in the term ‘offensive minelayer’ meant the minefield they were to lay rather than the ship itself and the emphasis on maintaining high speed had to be pointed out in connection with additional fittings that would decrease their speed.

The result was a class of ships that was larger than any British destroyer and smaller than any British cruiser and plenty faster than any of them. Specifically, at 2650 tons standard displacement, the Abdiels were larger than the largest British destroyers of the day, the 1850-ton ‘Tribal’ class, an example of which was the legendary HMS Cossack, and were smaller than the smallest modern British light cruisers of the day, the 5419-ton³ Arethusa class, an example of which was the similarly legendary HMS Penelope. The Abdiels’ displacement was 3780 tons in deep condition, their length overall was 417ft 11in, their maximum beam was 40ft, their draught forward was 10ft and 12ft aft.⁴

Many regarded the Abdiels as very attractive ships. Rear Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles, who as a veteran of the war in the Mediterranean when they were operating there likely had plenty of opportunities to observe them, said it best: ‘What lovely ships those Abdiels were.’⁵ Captain John S Cowie, who had a hand in the 1935 memorandum that eventually led to their construction, referred to them as ‘these beautiful little ships’. Samuel Elliot Morison, the official American naval historian of the Second World War, described the Ariadne as ‘handsome’.⁶

A profile of the 1938 Fast Minelayer design. (Eric Leon)

The Abdiels had a raked stem and a cruiser stern and were flush-decked, with the sheer line of the upper deck running straight most of their length but then rising gently from the bridge to the stem. Their bridge was much more like a destroyer’s than a cruiser’s. They shipped a tripod foremast aft of the bridge and forward of the first funnel and a shorter tripod