Pangbourne Class Minesweepers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The Pangbourne Class minesweepers were built around 1917-1919 and were classed as 'Fleet Minesweepers', that is ships intended to clear open water. An unknown number between 24 and 30 are known to have been commissioned, but details are hard to find. They were all named after middle-sized British towns. The computer game Minesweeper. ...

Displacement was 'around' 700 tons and they were forced-draught coal burners, that is they burned pulverised coal in an artificially augmented airstream. One consequence of this was that they produced a lot of smoke, so much so that they were more usually referred to as 'Smokey Joes'. Another was that if they were fed anything other than the Welsh Steam Coal they were designed for then the fuel consumption was enormous - one ship was bunkered with soft brown Natal coal and burnt 20 tons in a single day.

Most of them spent the period from 1919 to 1939 in mothballs in obscure corners of dockyards around the world, with Malta and Singapore having most of them.

They had twin screws and a very shallow draught (8 feet, 2.43 metres). Armament was one 4 inch forward and a 12-pounder aft plus two twin machine guns.

They were equipped for sweeping with Oropesa floats only, that is for moored mines.

Several (Sutton, Kellett, Pangbourne, Ross and Lydd) took part in the evacuation at Dunkirk, and most saw service in the Mediterranean war. This article is about a Second World War battle in 1940, for the 1658 battle of the same name see Battle of the Dunes The Battle of Dunkirk (French: Bataille de Dunkerque) was a major battle during World War II which lasted from around May 26 to June 4, 1940. ... The Mediterranean Sea is an intercontinental sea positioned between Europe to the north, Africa to the south and Asia to the east, covering an approximate area of 2. ...

Some sources refer to them as the Hunt class, but this does not seem to correspond with the names.

Known ship names

• Aberdare
• Abingdon
• Bagshot
• Derby
• Dundalk
• Dunoon
• Elgin
• Fermoy
• Fitzroy
• Huntley
• Kellett
• Lydd
• Pangbourne
• Ross
• Selkirk
• Stoke
• Sutton
• Widnes

History

Widnes was sunk during the evacuation of Crete. Fermoy, Huntly and Stoke were sunk by dive-bombers during the early months of 1941. Abingdon was damaged beyond repair by dive bombers in April 1942 (at Malta) Dunoon and Dundalk were sunk by mines off East Anglia in 1940/41 Norfolk and Suffolk, the core area of East Anglia. ...