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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025: Walking the Beat

Above we see the Danish inspektionsskibet— classed as a “fishery cruiser” at the time in Jane’s— Fylla in rough seas on her patrol route, likely off Iceland, in the late 1920s.

Armed with a pair of 4.7-inch guns and another set of 6-pounders, she replaced Denmark’s only proper cruiser just after the Great War but started her life under service to a different king.

The “Cabbage” Class

When the British slammed into the largest naval war in history up to that time, the Royal Navy found themselves in urgent need of small purpose-built fleet escorts and minesweepers and a class of ultimately 112 vessels in five distinct groups ordered under the Emergency War Programme would prove suitable to both needs.

The so-called Flower or Cabbage-class minesweeping sloops were triple hulled forward to allow them survivability when working minefields or dodging torpedoes but still constructed to merchant rather than naval standards, allowing them to be produced quickly (typically in just five months from keel laying to delivery) by commercial yards while Royal Dockyards and the like could be left to the business of building “proper” warships for the Grand Fleet.

All were 250 feet long at the waterline (267 oal), with a simple two-boiler/one engine-screw-funnel power plant good for at least 15 knots. Designed to carry two medium-sized (3, 4, or 4.7-inch) and two light (3-pounder/47mm or 6-pounder/57mm) guns, there was much variation through the builds. Allowance was made for mechanical minesweeping gear, although not all were fitted with it.

The Flowers were built in five sub-classes spanning three in the original “slooper” format: 36 Arabis (sloop-sweepers with 2×4.7″/40 QF, 2×3-pdr/47mm), 12 Azalea (sloop-sweepers with 2×4″/40 QF, 2×3-pdr/47mm), 12 Acacia (sloop-sweepers with 2×12-pdr/3″ QF, 2×3-pdr/47mm) and two as “Warship Q” vessels: 12 Aubrietia (Q-ships with 2x 4″ guns, 1×3-pdr/47mm, depth charge throwers), and 28 Anchusa (Q-ships with 2x 4″ guns, 2x 12-pdr/3″ guns, depth charge throwers).

Arabis-class sloops of the Flower typeNo less than 15 yards built the Cabbages including Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, Wallsend;  Earle’s Shipbuilding & Engineering Co, Kingston upon Hull; Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Greenock;  Barclay Curle & Company, Whiteinch;  Lobnitz & Company, Renfrew; Charles Connell and Company, Scotstoun; Napier & Miller, Old Kilpatrick; Archibald McMillan & Son, Dumbarton; Greenock & Grangemouth Dockyard Company, Greenock; Bow, McLachlan and Company, Paisley; William Simons & Company, Renfrew; D. & W. Henderson & Company, Glasgow; Workman, Clark and Company, Belfast; Richardson, Duck and Company, Thornaby-on-Tees; and Dunlop Bremner & Company, Port Glasgow.

Meet Asphodel

Named for the lily connected via Greek legend to the dead and the underworld, our sloop, HMS Asphodel, was one of six Cabbages (five Arabis type) built by D. & W. Henderson in Glasgow alongside the yard’s bread and butter– War Standard “A” tramp ships.

Asphodel was D&W Hull No. 498, completed with a T3Cy 22½”36½”60″x27″ 180psi 2,000ihp engine, launched 21 December 1915 and commissioned 28 January 1916, with CDR Reginald Gay Copleston, R.N., Retired List, as her first skipper. Copleston, who had voluntarily moved to the Retired List in 1911 after 15 years of service, was the Librarian at the Royal Naval War College when the War started. Asphodel was his first seagoing command since the old Apollo-class second-class protected cruiser HMS Sirius in 1909.

Ordered to the Mediterranean, Asphodel sailed into Alexandria on 19 March to join the East Indies and Egypt force under VADM John Michael de Robeck, First Baronet. There, she joined several other sloops including several sisters (HMS Amaryllis, Cornflower, Nigella, Verbena, and Valerian) supporting the old Majestic-class pre-dreadnoughts HMS Hannibal and Jupiter along with five monitors and seven cruisers.

Asphodel had a quiet life, as she was typically used as a fleet messenger on the 1,000-mile run between Alexandria and Malta, leaving once a week for a round-trip back and forth, with Hannibal listing her arriving and departing in her logs over 200 times across the next 42 months.

Copleston commanded Asphodel until being appointed Commander of Patrols, Malta on 18 August 1917, replaced by the younger CDR James Charles Wauhope, formerly of the unsuccessful Q-ship HMS Carrigan Head (Q4) out of Queenstown. Wauhope would command her for the remainder of her RN career.

Asphodel was assigned to the newly-formed Twelfth Sloop Flotilla in June 1918, a force that grew to as large as 19 such vessels.

She outlasted her consort Hannibal, which was paid off for disposal in Malta on 25 October 1919, and left Malta with her own paying off pennant in December 1919, bound for decommissioning on 27 April 1920 and storage in the Home Isles pending disposal.

Asphodel, as far as I can, tell never saw combat during WWI but she did lose three men at once– all outbound to the Devonport Naval Dockyard– drowned in Malta on 2 April 1918. They are among the 351 Commonwealth Great War burials in Malta’s Capuccini/Kalkara Naval Cemetery.

• ADAMS, Charles W, Able Seaman, J 17911
• CARROLL, John, Petty Officer 1c, 190285
• GREEN, Cyril G, Armourer’s Mate, M 5081

A fourth Asphodel man, Able Seaman John Browning Smale, 21, died in an accident on 5 October 1918 and is buried with his shipmates at Capuccini.

The war was not otherwise kind to the Cabbages, with eight lost while on Q-ship duty and four on more traditional naval work, with Asphodel’s direct sisters HMS Arabis sunk by German torpedo boats off the Dogger Bank in 1916, HMS Primula sent to the bottom in the Med by SM U-35, and HMS Genista sunk by SM U-57 in the Atlantic the same year.

Post-war, most were paid off, sold either to the breakers or for mercantile use in the early 1920s and the few kept around were hulked as drill ships for the RNVR or tasked with ancillary uses such as fisheries patrol.

A few went on to be sold or donated to other governments, as military aid. This included HMS Zinnia heading to the Belgian Navy as a fishery protection vessel, HMS Pentstemon becoming the Chinese gunboat Hai Chow, HMS Gladiolus and HMS Jonquil becoming the Portuguese “cruisers” NRP República and NRP Carvalho Araújo, and HMS Geranium heading down south to become HMAS Geranium.

This brings us to Asphodel’s second career.

Danish Service

For some 30 years, the Danes made steady use of the British-built 3,000-ton krydserkorvetten (cruiser corvette)  Valkyrien, a close cousin of the Armstrong-built Chilean protected cruiser Esmeralda. She cruised the world and waved the Dannebrog as far away as Siam and Hong Kong and is most notable for overseeing the Danish West Indies (Virgin Islands) to the U.S. in 1917.

Denmark’s only true cruiser, by the early 1920s, the ram-bowed Valkyrien was hopelessly obsolete and needed replacement.

However, after a wartime mobilization that saw the Danish military swell to over 75,000 and construct the 23 km-long Tunestillingen line of defenses near Copenhagen, the Danish fishing and merchant marine fleets had to absorb the losses of more than 324 ships to both sides during the conflict, and the economic burden of the reunification of economically depressed Southern Jutland (Northern Schleswig) from Weimar Germany in 1920, the Danes were flat broke and had little appetite for more military spending.

This led the government to the bargain basement deal that was HMS Asphodel.

A good deal lighter than the Valkyrien (1,250 tons vs 3,000) as our sloop had zero armor plating other than the shields of her main guns, she was nonetheless the same length (267 feet oal) while a lighter draft (11 feet vs 18 feet) allowed her to enter more colonial ports and harbors. While Asphodel only carried two 4.7-inch guns and another pair of 6-pounders, Valkyrien by 1915 only carried two aging 5.86″/32s and six 3″/55s. But the substantial savings was in crew, with Valkyrien requiring a minimum of 200 men even in light peacetime service (albeit allowing space for another 100 cadets), while Asphodel could be placed in full service with only 75 men in her complement.

As a no-brainer, the surplus ex-Asphodel was acquired for her value in scrap metal from the Admiralty in June 1920 and then sent for an overhaul at Orlogsværftets in Copenhagen.

Following her last summer cruise to Greenland and Iceland in 1921, Valkyrien was laid up in 1923 and sold for scrap the next year. Her spot was taken by the newly dubbed Fylla— the fourth Danish warship to carry the name, with the first two being sail-powered frigates (fregaten) completed in 1802 and 1812, respectively.

The name had previously been carried by an Orlogsværftets-built 8-gunned steam-powered armored schooner that joined the Danish fleet in 1863– just in time to fight the Germans– but spent her career cruising as a station ship in the Danish West Indies and around the Faroes, Greenland, and Iceland.

Our Fylla’s first Danish skipper was CDR Prince Axel, a swashbuckling 32-year-old grandson of King Christian IX of Denmark and at the time the fourth in line to the throne. Axel, who nursed a love of sports, flying, and fast cars his whole life, was a career naval officer, having joined the service in 1909 and cut his teeth on numerous Danish coastal battleships including tense Great War neutrality patrols threading the needle between the British and the Germans, later becoming one of the Danish Navy’s first aviators. In 1918, he led the Danish Naval Mission to America and returned to Europe in company with the dynamic Assistant SECNAV, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Her inaugural cruise in late 1920 was captured in photos.

Fylla typically was employed as the station ship in Iceland and would patrol the Faeroes to the southeast and Greenland to the northwest as well, with the occasional visits to Holland, England, and Norway.

At the time, the Danes only had two smaller inspection ships on the same beat and they were significantly older and less well-armed: Island Falk (entered fleet 1906, 730 tons, 183 feet oal, 13 knots, 2×3″ guns) and Besytteren (entered fleet 1900, 450 tons, 142 feet oal, 11 knots, 2x57mm guns), so Fylla was the queen of the overseas fleet.

She would carry King Christian X to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland in June 1930, one of the first visits by a sitting Danish monarch to the far-flung Atlantic colonies. On the return leg, escorting the coastal battleship ship Niels Juel, the ships visited Oslo and saluted King Haakon VII.

She was graceful enough in Danish service that she caught the eye of maritime artist Christian Benjamin Olsen who captured her in at least three of his period works, several of which are in the Royal Danish Naval Museum in Copenhagen. Of note, Olsen visited the Faroe Islands and Iceland in 1921, 1926, and 1930, having frequent chances to see Fylla in action.

However, all good things come to an end. When the two large new aircraft-equipped inspection ships, Hvidbjornen (1,050 t, 196 feet oal, 2x87mm, 1 floatplane, 14 knots, circa 1928) and Ingolf (1,180 t, 213 feet oal, 2×4.7″/45, 1 floatplane, 16.5 knots, circa 1932), were ordered in the late 1920s/early 1930s, the need to retain the aging Fylla was removed.

At that, Fylla was withdrawn from service in 1933, disarmed, and sold for scrap.

Epilogue

Little remains of our subject.

Of her RN skippers, Copleston returned to England after the war and reverted to the Retired List in December 1918. A cricketer from a family of cricketers, he died in Devon in 1960, aged 85.

Meanwhile, the younger CDR James Charles Wauhope would post-Armistice volunteer for transfer to the Royal Australian Navy from which he would retire in 1929. Returning to England pre-war after working a claim in the Wewak goldfield in New Guinea for years, he rejoined the RN in WWII, ultimately serving as Naval Officer in Charge, Stornoway. Capt. Wauhope died a pauper in General Hospital Paddington, London in 1960, aged 76.

The Royal Navy commissioned a second HMS Asphodel, appropriately a Flower-class corvette (K56) in September 1940. She was sunk on 10 March 1944 off Cape Finisterre by U-575, with only five survivors.

Fylla’s first Danish skipper, Prince Axel, continued his military service albeit from a desk and was appointed a rear admiral on the naval staff in 1939. He was also simultaneously the director of the Danish East Asiatic Company shipping concern from 1934 to 1953 and had previously commanded the 8,100-ton SS Alsia under the EAC flag. During the war, although under surveillance by the Gestapo, he reportedly endorsed the scuttling of the Danish fleet in 1943 to keep it out of German hands, and quietly blessed the work of EAC’s fleet-at-large in Allied service– with the company losing at least six ships during the conflict. He also cultivated contacts with several of the Danish resistance groups. Promoted to a perfunctory full admiral in 1958, his youngest son, Prince Fleming, a naval cadet in 1945, served on active duty with the Danish Navy for several years as a submariner. Axel passed in 1964, aged 75, and was buried in his naval uniform.

The Danes commissioned a fourth Fylla, a 1,700-ton Aalborg-built inspection ship (F351) that entered the fleet in 1963. She served until 1991.

Of Asphodel/Fylla‘s 111 sister Cabbages, a dozen had been lost in the Great War, one (HMS Valerian) was lost at sea in a hurricane off Cuba in 1926, one sunk by the Japanese in 1937 (ex-HMS Pentstemon/Hai Chow), at least three (ex-HMS Buttercup/Teseo, HMS Laburnum, and HMS Cornflower) were sunk in WWII. The last in RN service– and the last active coal-burner on the Admiralty List– HMS Rosemary, had been a fishery protection ship interbellum then was pressed into service as an escort during WWII, was only sent to the breakers in 1947.

Just one Cabbage is believed to remain, the Anchusa group Q-ship HMS Saxifrage, which continued to serve as RNVR President from 1922 through 1982 as a moored drillship sans guns or engines. Sold to private interests, she has changed hands several times in the past few decades and, carrying a wild dazzle paint scheme, is currently owned by a charitable trust that is seeking to preserve her. Laid up at Chatham Dock with much of her topside razed, she may not be around much longer.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

 

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

 

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