Most US warships have been named after states, Presidents, fallen heroes, or famous battles. But thumbing through FSM (may '09) I saw a kit for "HMS Glowworm". Can anybody shed some light on the origin of the ships name?

Hi,
In the case of British warships most carried names of previous ships e.g. HMS for His/Her Majesty`s Ship ROYAL OAK, Queen Elizabeth etc. Some carried names from ancient mythology such as DIDO.
Others like a particular class of cruiser (The County Class) had names of English counties such as SUFFOLK.
To my knowledge the British system has never named a ship after a sailor or distinguised serviceman.
The Royal Australian Navy RAN has broke with this tradition and has a submarine named after Ordinary Seaman Teddy Sheean who died at his post on HMAS ARMIDALE during an attack by Japanese aircraft December 1st 1942.

Hope that helps

Please take this with a bit of humor. Some RN ships like the HMS Penelope which I'm researching perhaps should be painted pink. Or as Tom Clancy wrote in Red Storm Rising, at least we don't name our ships after our mother in law. OK, I'll shut up now.

Hi Don,

In fact, the RN HAS named ships after distinguished sailors--just think of HMS HOOD, ANSON, HOWE, NELSON, RODNEY, etc.

Cheers,
John Snyder
The Token Yank
White Ensign Models
http://whiteensignmodels.com

The RN had the practice of naming their destroyers with the letter of their class. The Glowworm you mention was of the G-class. Others in the class included: HMS Gallant, HMS Garland, HMS Gipsy, HMS Grafton, HMS Grenade, HMS Grenville, HMS Greyhound, HMS Griffin. It may be more practical than the US practice of various classes of destroyers/destroyer escorts for people.

The ship naming branch at the Admiralty may have had a few jokers, when you consider they named a ship Glowworm, but then consdier the entire Flower-class of corvettes.

the Tribal-class destroyers had names of indigenos peoples - Eskimo, Ashanti, Cossack, Zulu etc and the Flower-class corvettes - Convolvulous, Blubell, Compass Rose etc. Others, as stated had a letter like the qouted G-Class destroyers Grenage & Glowworm.
Glowworm might not have had an auspicious name, but she was the ship that purposely rammed the German cruiser Hipper. She laid a line of smoke and doubled-back behind it. The Hipper sliced through the smoke only to find Glowworm in its starboard side. The rest is history. So was Glowworm.
George, out..........

Well, sort of a system, though the changing nature of the fleet over the years means that new names are introduced and some old ones fall by the wayside.

Some probably weren't much liked by the crews - serving aboard the TBD HMS "Fairy" might have been a test of character. Their Lordships obviouly thought better of this idea as the Flower class corvette "Pansy" was renamed "Heartsease" before lauching

Often a class of ships would be given names that tied the members of the class together in some way . G class destroyers as in the case of Glowworm had names beginning with G , ethnic groups or nationalities such as Zulu or Maori were used for the "Tribal" class. There were also Hunt class escorts named after foxhunts, Racecourse class minesweepers, Flower class corvettes and so on.

Cruisers often got the names of counties  (e.g."Shropshire", "Kent"), or classical names ("Leander", "Ajax" "Achilles")  , and the WW2 lend-lease destroyers were given names of towns that could be found in both in the Britain and the US e.g "Ludlow"   

Capital ships (which category includes nuclear submarines these days) tend to perpetuate the names of former ships of the line ("Resolution" etc), admirals (e.g. "Hood", monarchs ("King George the Fifth") and sometimes former prizes -  "Temeraire" was a french prize of the 1750s later taken into the Royal Navy, for example, though the name is now attached to a stone frigate. These names tend not to follow any rigid system due to the very few ships involved

Names are recyled for other types of ship  - classical names which first came into use on ships of the line in the 1700s were later used on cruisers and then on frigates - "Leander" for example