Britain's key wartime convoy escort was adapted from a whale-catching boat
When Britain needed anti-submarine escorts in a hurry in 1939, a Teesside firm that built fishing boats offered a design based on its whale catcher Southern Pride. The result, the Flower-class corvette, was slow and lightly armed, yet 294 were built and they became the backbone of Atlantic convoy defence.
As war with Nazi Germany loomed in early 1939, the Royal Navy realised it lacked escorts to counter U-boats, especially along Britain's east coast. It wanted something bigger and faster than a trawler but cheap enough to mass-produce in small merchant yards, since the big shipbuilders were already busy. Smiths Dock Company of South Bank-on-Tees, a fishing-vessel specialist, proposed a development of its 700-ton, 16-knot whaler. The navy revived the old label corvette for the type, though it has no link with ships of that name before 1877.
Because the design used merchant-ship parts and building methods, it could be assembled in small commercial yards across the United Kingdom and Canada that could never have produced a destroyer. Ordinary triple-expansion engines replaced steam turbines, so reservist crews, many from the Royal Naval Reserve and Volunteer Reserve, already knew how to run them. There were 225 original Flowers ordered in 1939 and 1940, and 69 slightly larger, better-armed modified versions afterwards.
Planners meant them for coastal convoys, but their long range made them the mainstay of mid-ocean escort work in the first half of the war, until frigates and destroyer escorts arrived in numbers. They were not comfortable: top speed was only 16 knots, armament was minimal, and with crew quarters forward and the galley aft, meals had to be carried the length of the ship. Royal Navy ships were named after flowers, giving the class its name, and it is also called the Gladiolus class after the lead ship.
Most served with the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy. Some Canadian-built ships passed to the US Navy under lend-lease as Temptress- and Action-class patrol gunboats, a few crewed by the Coast Guard, and others sailed for Free French, Dutch, Norwegian, Indian, Greek and New Zealand forces. After the war many were sold to other navies or civilian owners. HMCS Sackville is the only one preserved as a museum ship.
Source: Flower-class corvette
