Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

8 First Nuclear Submarine

Late October 1973 saw Lieutenant Dan Conley as officer of the watch (OOW) on the bridge of HMS Swiftsure in the English Channel, heading out to a diving area in the deep water of the Southwest Approaches. Making a comfortable 15 knots, he could sense the power of the hunter-killer, nuclear powered submarine’s propulsion, with well over 20,000shp available, compared to the maximum of 4,000 that Oberon’s diesels could generate. The only sound was the gentle breaking of the deep trough of water formed either side of the boat as its rounded bows parted the calm sea. The hiss of the curling water seemed to Conley, in a reflective moment, to exemplify the quietness and stealth of this new class of SSN. He had joined the boat in Plymouth on completion of its post-build work-up and had taken over as sonar officer, responsible for the operation of the submarine’s suite of new, advanced types of acoustic sensor.

Designed to take on second-generation nuclear submarines which were emerging in large numbers from Russian shipyards, the Victor, Charlie and Yankee classes, the 4,500-ton Swiftsure class was a step improvement upon the Valiants, being faster, deeper-diving, quieter and more manoeuvrable. The class had a safe operating depth of well over 1,000ft and their hulls could sustain the almost two million tons of pressure which would be exerted on them at 2,000ft deep. Although limited to about 16 knots on the surface, under the sea where their propellers were more efficient they could almost double this.

Subsequent to the lessons learnt from the loss of the Thresher, Swiftsure was the first British submarine to be fitted with a separate, high-pressure main ballast tank emergency blow system which would be effective at deep depths. The amount of internal piping required to sustain sea pressures had also been reduced, significantly decreasing the risk of flooding owing to a pipe fracturing or a joint failing. She was also fitted with the world’s first submarine computerised contact data-handling system, although it only had a very limited memory of 64 kilobytes, negligible by today’s standards but state of the art at the time. This system principally used bearings obtained from passive sonar and was revolutionary in that it could automatically calculate target parameters of course, speed and range provided the input was accurate. The first of a class of six boats, in overall performance she more than matched the contemporary United States Navy’s Los Angeles-class SSN. However, there were inevitably going to be initial teething problems in such a complex machine and, of course, the designers and constructors wanted to test it to the boundaries of its capabilities. This sometimes made for challenging times for the crew.

HMS Swiftsure, like all previous British nuclear submarines, was fitted with a power plant based upon the American S5W pressurised water reactor (PWR) design. The PWR works by heating highly pressurised water in the reactor core, then pumping it into two boilers to produce steam from a separate water system which is not subject to radiation. This steam is then piped out of the reactor compartment and used to drive the main turbines and electrical turbo-generators which provide power to the myriad of systems and equipment. As the PWR is self-regulating in its fundamental physical characteristics, it is inherently a very safe design, and American and British submarine and warship PWRs have undergone tens of millions of operating hours without major incident.

Should the reactor need to be shut down at sea, a battery-backed diesel generator provided electric power and an emergency propulsion motor was capable of propelling the boat at a modest 4 knots. The battery provided power until the diesel was started but, of course, it could only support the emergency propulsion for a limited time.

During contractor’s sea trials Swiftsure more than met expectations regarding her performance, but on surfaced passage it was evident there was a need to flood the after of four main ballast tanks, increasing the depth of the stern to provide acceptable steerage and better bite for the propeller. Swiftsure was fitted with a very large skew-bladed propeller, but most subsequent Royal Naval nuclear submarines would have pump jet propulsors (a shrouded rotor arrangement) which are quieter and more efficient than conventional propellers. The stern ballasting measure effectively removed 25 per cent of the surfaced reserve of buoyancy; and this contributed to making the bridge, which was much lower in height than the Valiants, very wet in heavy weather. In the early days of the class there were a few instances of large quantities of seawater coming down the conning tower into the control room. Unlike previous types of British submarine, the fore planes were retractable into the hull, and the initial practice was to have them extended when on the surface, with rise applied to help to get the stern deeper. Swiftsure’s rudder was to prove excessively large for manoeuvring underwater at speed, and later boats were fitted with smaller versions.

Compared to diesel submarines Swiftsure, like all nuclear boats, offered much greater crew comfort, including separate messing and sleeping arrangements. Her atmosphere was closely controlled, air purification equipment removing carbon dioxide and other noxious gases whilst maintaining oxygen levels at an acceptable level. As her distilling plants were capable of making plenty of water, there were no restrictions on the sensible use of showers and a laundry service was available.

Her sonars and sensor equipment used cutting-edge technology, so her operators were required to develop operating procedures to ensure these systems were used in an optimum, efficient manner. However, on the downside, her torpedo armament consisted of the obsolescent Mark 8 antiship and the ineffective Mark 23 anti-submarine weapons.

Being part of the Royal Navy’s ‘new’ Submarine Service, most aspects of operating Swiftsure were undertaken in a much more professional manner than hitherto. There was an end of the old buccaneering way of doing things and — symptomatic of this — the era of ‘pirate’ rig at sea had ended and the culture of heavy drinking when alongside was over.

Once more Conley was under the wing of his old Odin mentor, Geoffrey Biggs, now a lieutenant commander, who had taken over as executive officer and was therefore Swiftsure’s second in command.

The first major series of Swiftsure’s first-of-class trials took place in early 1974 in the tropical environment of the Atlantic Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre (AUTEC) which has its shore facilities in the Bahamian island of Andros. Completed in 1966, AUTEC provides excellent three dimensional tracking facilities of ships, aircraft and submarines. Its main tracking range is about twenty miles long and fifteen miles wide and, with Andros to the west and unnavigable reefs and shoals to the east and south, AUTEC benefits from unique deep-water acoustic conditions. This, and the absence of interference from passing shipping, make it an ideal place to test sonar and underwater weapons.

During the deployment Swiftsure used the modern, well-equipped Port Canaveral as a base, and after enduring a Scottish winter the crew naturally very much appreciated the sunshine of Florida and the motels of nearby Cocoa Beach where they lived when off-duty and in harbour. With the ending of the Apollo Moon landings in December 1972, activity at Cape Canaveral had markedly reduced, and Cocoa Beach, developed in the 1950s, was already looking tired. Its motels, which had sprung up in the heyday of the space race, looked distinctly rundown. However, for the crew there was plenty of nightlife, and a particular favourite of the officers was a restaurant which had been frequented by astronauts and consequently displayed a very large and unique collection of their autographed photographs.

Another revelation at Port Canaveral was specific to Swiftsure herself. The AUTEC trials had been preceded by a docking in her base in Faslane. Included in the work undertaken was the gluing of one thousand noise reduction tiles to a section of the outer pressure hull. This was the first attempt to fit acoustic baffling to a British SSN, but as the tiles were applied in Scottish winter conditions of wind and driving rain, it is was no surprise that on arrival in Port Canaveral only about half a dozen had survived the submerged passage across the Atlantic. A more serious worry was the SOSUS detection during the crossing of a strong, discrete noise emission, which was established to be coming from the main engine cooling water inlets on the after stabilisers situated either side of the hull forward of the propeller. Eventually, this noise problem was to be solved, but not before the complete failure of trial stabiliser fairings which fell off whilst manoeuvring at sea temporarily increasing the noise problem by exposing the cooling water inlet pipes.

During the AUTEC trials period numerous senior visitors were embarked for a day at sea to witness the handling and capability of Britain’s latest SSN. All were very impressed, including those from the United States Navy. To establish its handling and noise characteristics, the boat was put through very demanding manoeuvres, whilst scientists and engineers, both onboard and ashore, made acoustic measurements and collected data. One noise measurement trial involved the submarine in a dived condition being positioned stationary in tidal conditions at very close proximity to a large acoustic array suspended from a buoy attached to the seabed. Already one American SSBN had wrapped itself around the array with startling consequences, getting entangled in a mass of wires and hydrophones.

The tests to determine the dynamic manoeuvring characteristics of the submarine were often very dramatic, and with the trials scientists trying to push the boundaries of the boat’s safe operating envelope, severe angles were experienced in both the horizontal and vertical planes. The pièce de résistance of the manoeuvring trials was a full-power run at depth, whereupon the boat’s massive rudder was put hard over at 30 knots. With the crew closed up in maximum readiness at diving stations, on applying the rudder the boat listed alarmingly forty degrees to port causing engineering mayhem, as both of the vital turbo-generators tripped out on low lubricating oil pressure, the subsequent loss of electric power causing the reactor to shut down dramatically and start progressing into the very safe, but drastic, emergency-cooling mode. Main propulsion was lost and the crew had quickly to engage the very limited emergency propulsion whilst control of the submarine was regained. If emergency cooling had initiated, it would have required the boat to be surfaced and the engineering staff to undertake complex procedures to restore the reactor to its normal operating mode. Fortunately, this situation was narrowly averted by the quick reaction of the engineers, and within an hour the reactor was restarted and main propulsion restored. During the event, Conley recalled, ‘never seeing and hearing so many different alarms simultaneously registering in the control room’. No damage was caused, and in due course the lubricating oil system was to be made more robust, but the experience frayed a number of nerves.

This incident chiefly demonstrated that events can get rapidly out of control in a nuclear submarine at high speed, with its potential to increase depth at over 1,500ft per minute making safe depths of around 1,000ft look modest. Several years later, the crew of the Valiant-class SSN, HMS Churchill, coincidentally also conducting manoeuvres at AUTEC, briefly lost control of their boat. Before control was regained, her bows reached a depth of over 1,200ft, close to her theoretical pressure hull collapse limit.

The AUTEC trials were followed by an eastward passage across the Atlantic to conduct torpedo discharge system proving trials in sea areas in the proximity of Gibraltar. A critical and fundamental evaluation of the boat’s ability to destroy the enemy, should this become necessary, the location was chosen for the availability of deep water and the reasonably benign sea conditions which facilitated recovery of the discharged torpedoes. Weapons were launched down to 1,000ft, an unprecedented depth for a British submarine. Here, over a hundred tons of sea pressure is exerted on the few square inches of torpedo-tube rear-door retaining clips, all that stood in the way of the pressure hull and the Atlantic. Fortunately few, if any, of the crew would have undertaken this calculation; some information is best not considered.

For much of the duration of these tests, Swiftsure had the company of a smart and apparently businesslike Russian Kashin-class missile destroyer, stationed to gather what intelligence her operators could about this new British nuclear submarine. Both vessels exchanged the occasional friendly message by light using the International Code of Signals and on proceeding on the surface back to Gibraltar on a Friday evening for a two-day break, the destroyer requested Swiftsure to ‘please stay at sea and keep me company’. This little cameo struck Conley as an example of the contrast in lifestyles between the West and the Soviet bloc. There was no run ashore awaiting the Russian sailors and, even if they had managed to land in Gibraltar, they would have had no money to spend in its shops or bars. Instead, they were confined onboard, with neither good food nor quality movies available to alleviate the monotony, while the enticing lights of Gibraltar and its fleshpots twinkled on the horizon.

The torpedo discharge tests involved launching inert trials Tigerfish torpedoes with their rear-mounted guidance wire dispensers. The dispenser was a cylindrical container which held a reel of 5,000 yards of guidance wire, intended to allow the firing submarine movement after launch. The torpedo itself held another 15,000 yards of wire for its controlled run to target which could take up to twenty minutes. After leaving the torpedo tube, the dispenser disengaged from the weapon, but remained connected to the submarine by armoured cable. When Tigerfish started coming into service in 1976 this crude arrangement proved very unreliable, and a considerable time later was replaced by a more robust system.

After the torpedo was fired, the deployed dispenser restricted the submarine to a maximum speed of 6 knots and, normally, at the end of the torpedo’s run would be cut loose. However, the wire dispensers used in these trials had special recording gear fitted and consequently had to be recovered. Slowly returning to periscope depth, in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes with a bow cap open and dragging a guidance wire dispenser, was a manoeuvre fraught with risk and engendering tense nerves. Conley recalled that on one occasion whilst he was on watch, the submarine reached periscope depth almost underneath a passing merchant ship, and collision was only narrowly averted. Once the boat had surfaced, divers were used to bring the dispensers onboard.

On completion of the evaluations in the Caribbean and Gibraltar, it was back to Scotland for more noise trials. These included a unique first-of-class noise ranging in a ‘dead ship’ condition, all machinery being shut down in stages to a state where absolutely nothing was running. The measurements were conducted over a period of several nights, with the boat in a neutrally buoyant, static condition suspended at 150ft depth between four buoys, one on each quarter, at a noise range situated in Loch Goil in Argyllshire. The reactor had to be shut down for several days prior to the trials, to ensure the decay heat in its core had reduced sufficiently to enable its vital cooling pumps to be stopped for a period. Thus a miserably slow tow by tug from Faslane to the range was incurred, with the submarine’s diesel engine providing power for its basic machinery load. As the navigator was on leave, during this evolution Conley undertook the pilotage on the bridge and for several hours he was immersed in a cloud of diesel fumes from the exhaust mast at the rear of the fin, augmented by a spray of the mast’s cooling sea water. To this was added a dash of relentless Scottish drizzle: balmy bridge watches when on the surface on the AUTEC range seemed a long time ago.

On the final night of the trials, the plan was to switch all machinery off and consequently only a bare minimum crew remained onboard the boat, which was in conditions of near darkness with only emergency lighting providing dim illumination. In the eerie silence, with the ventilation shut down, scientists and technicians scuttled around the various compartments, excitedly taking readings whilst shore monitors measured the external radiated noise. The commanding officer, Commander Tim Hale, and Conley were in the control room as the final pieces of running machinery, the hydraulic pumps which supplied pressure to the submarine’s hydraulically operated systems, were switched off. As hydraulic pressure was a vital element of operating the submarine’s many valves and control components, this was the last plant to be shut down. A minimum level of pressure was sustained for a while by a number of pneumatic accumulators, filled with high-pressure air, incorporated into the hydraulic pipework.

After the hydraulic pumps were switched off, complete silence followed for a few minutes, but soon all onboard became aware of an ominous gurgling sound which grew progressively louder. Staring through the gloom at the hydraulic oil header tanks at the rear of the control room, Conley became aware of great quantities of heavy, brown oil vapours spilling out. These rapidly engulfed the control room personnel to waist level. Before catastrophe struck, either through the crew being disabled by breathing the thick vapours, or (being highly inflammable) they ignited, the trials were hastily terminated and Swiftsure was immediately surfaced using emergency hand control to work the compressed air valves. Once on the surface, machinery was restarted and the boat was quickly ventilated to get rid of these exceedingly dangerous hydraulic vapours. As surfacing OOW Conley opened the upper conning tower hatch and arrived on the bridge to witness the sun rising over the loch’s mountains on a glorious still, summer morning with an accompaniment of cheerful birdsong, a very vivid contrast to the Stygian gloom beneath his feet. Subsequent investigations revealed that on the hydraulic pressure reducing, some of the internal fittings of the accumulators had ruptured. This caused high-pressure air to course round the system, ending up in the header tanks to generate the vapour cloud. After this escapade, the commanding officer and some members of the crew were evidently becoming increasingly stressed by the demands of the trials, with their very unpredictable outcomes.

The summer of 1974 saw Swiftsure being deployed for the first time on operational patrol, setting up a sonar search barrier between the Orkney and Shetland Islands. Her quarry was the Russian Whiskey-class diesel submarine which regularly patrolled the seas to the west of the United Kingdom. This submarine normally deployed from the Baltic, and was tasked with the training of prospective submarine commanding officers in potentially hostile waters, sometimes conducting submerged passage between the Mull of Kintyre and Rathlin Island to enter the Irish Sea. Besides training submarine commanders to operate in the potential enemy’s backyard, these boats attempted to monitor NATO warship and submarine traffic in the Northwest Approaches. Despite being about twenty years old, when running dived on main motors, the Whiskey was very difficult to detect using passive sonar — listening as opposed to transmitting an acoustic pulse. It was Swiftsure’s task to covertly detect and track a deploying Whiskey and to establish exactly where it patrolled and what it got up to.

Despite Swiftsure being Britain’s most capable SSN and having the support of maritime patrol aircraft, the patrol was not a success. The specific target submarine was lost by monitoring forces as it dived on leaving the Skagerrak, north of Denmark, to commence its passage to its patrol area. However, the British SSN did achieve an entirely serendipitous short period of passive sonar contact at close quarters on the elusive Russian in the Orkney-Shetland gap. Unfortunately, the command team was unskilled in dealing with the short-range situation and this contact was soon lost. A few mornings later, the Whiskey-class boat was again detected, this time at about fifteen miles’ range, snorting to the west of the Outer Hebrides. However, the commanding officer, who as executive officer of Warspite had experienced the collision with a Russian nuclear submarine referred to earlier, was not keen to get close to him. Consequently, when the Russian stopped snorting shortly after sunrise, contact was again lost and not regained, despite a subsequent active sonar search, which would have given the game away to the Whiskey crew that a British submarine was looking for them.

The patrol highlighted to Conley that even when an SSN was equipped with the most modern of sonars, it was difficult to detect a diesel submarine when she was battery-powered. Also, once contact had been achieved, there was an evident need to develop tactics to deal with this threat.

Post-patrol, for crew relaxation Swiftsure headed for a few days’ visit to the port of Barry, situated a few miles to the west of Cardiff. In the 1970s this former coal-exporting port was one of a large number of smaller British ports in terminal decline, owing to changes in trade and industrial patterns, restrictive labour practices and the advent of container ships which required larger, deeper water facilities than those offered by many of the existing older tidal harbours. As activities in these ports ramped down, pilotage and tug provision also declined consequently, making the entry of Swiftsure, with her deep displacement draught and sluggish surface handling, into Barry a difficult one.

The first impression of the harbour with its redundant coaling wharves was one of dereliction, with only one other ship alongside, the regular Fyffes-owned specialist refrigerated cargo vessel unloading her cargo of bananas from the West Indies. The perception by some of the locals that nuclear submarines were hazardous was reinforced by the local Royal Navy liaison officer distributing potassium iodide tablets to the port employers, with the advice that their staff swallow these radioactive material blockers if a nuclear accident should occur onboard the visiting submarine. This, of course, was a complete nonsense, as in the highly unlikely event of a serious nuclear incident onboard, the harbour environs would have been evacuated long before there was the remotest risk of contaminants getting into the atmosphere. That said, the crew were soon immersed in very generous local hospitality, which compensated for them being billeted in the somewhat shabby Butlins holiday camp. This, however, proved unexpectedly to have some tangible benefits in the friendliness of the female staff. Shortly after Swiftsure’s visit, Barry was deemed unsuitable for berthing nuclear submarines, and today it is no longer an active commercial harbour

The commissioning captain was replaced as a matter of due course in the autumn of 1974. Very unusually for a seaman officer, earlier in Tim Hale’s career and prior to joining Dreadnought in construction at Barrow, he had received nuclear propulsion training in the American submarine force.

Accordingly, he had an excellent technical knowledge of Swiftsure’s machinery and systems that proved very advantageous during the trials programme, while his successor, Commander Keith Pitt, was to prove both tactically aware and capable of improving further the crew’s fighting efficiency which had been somewhat patchy. Moreover, Swiftsure had been designated to start undertaking the Barents Sea intelligence-gathering operations the following year and he needed to raise significantly the operational sharpness of the command team to meet the unique demands of this task. As part of the preamble to these patrols, a number of exercises were undertaken with other Royal Navy SSNs, where the skills of covertly following another submarine were honed.

As the crew efficiency improved, Conley recognised that the ship’s company of Swiftsure was much more professional and better disciplined than the crews of which he had been a part in diesel boats. Indeed, it was evident that several key individuals had been hand-picked to bring this world-leading nuclear submarine into operational service. Meanwhile, the boat had changed her operational base from Faslane to the Second Submarine Squadron in Devonport. During an extended docking period there in late 1974, there being no shore accommodation available in the base wardroom, Conley and several of his officer colleagues rented a farmhouse in the Devon village of Cornwood on the edge of Dartmoor. Life in the farmhouse and Devon countryside was very far removed from the stresses and strains of nuclear submarining and, over the three months of their tenancy, several lifetime friendships were cemented.

February 1975 again found Conley officer of the watch on the bridge at night, this time in extreme Storm Force 10 conditions. HMS Swiftsure was making a surface passage down the Minches between the Inner and Outer Hebrides towards a dived rendezvous with the SSN HMS Conqueror in the Northwest Approaches. Constrained to the surface until reaching sea areas where the submarine was cleared to dive, the commanding officer was concerned about making the rendezvous on time and was keen to press on, notwithstanding the heavy seas battering the boat and periodically covering the two bridge personnel, Conley and his lookout, in spray. Unlike ships, submarines tend to go through waves rather than ride over them, and on the bridge Conley and his assistant were frequently deluged by the occasional solid crest of a wave.

Having rounded Barra Head and left the lee of the Outer Hebrides to head southwest, the size of the waves increased. In the darkness and fury of the storm, Conley saw ahead an exceptionally large cresting wave and just had time to yell to the lookout to duck. There followed a heavy blow to the upper part of his body and several seemingly interminable seconds of darkness as the wave engulfed him. Undoubtedly, he and the lookout would have been swept overboard had it not been for their safety harnesses. As the effects of the wave passed, a gasping Lieutenant Conley and his lookout were left reeling and choking, with water up to their armpits. The bridge lifebuoy had been knocked over and its light activated under the receding water in the bridge well and in his now illuminated surroundings, cold and very wet, Conley mused upon the strange way he had chosen to make a living. The watchkeepers in the control room reported that their depth gauges had momentarily read 80ft as the wave passed over Swiftsure which, even allowing for the instruments’ dial fluctuation and the 60ft between keel and bridge, meant that for a few moments there was at least a dozen or so feet of solid water above the heads of those on the bridge.

Reporting to the captain that either the submarine be drastically slowed down or the bridge watchkeepers risked being drowned, Conley and his lookout were brought below and the bridge was shut down. Having changed into dry clothes, Conley found maintaining watch below, with visual lookout on the powerful periscopes fitted with image intensification, was both much more comfortable and safer, a world away from the exposure of the bridge. However, it engendered a false sense of security, and soon the captain increased speed, although the boat was taking a real pounding.

Swiftsure had yet another surprise awaiting her crew. On diving a few hours later it soon became apparent that all was not well. All the signs were that the boat was massively heavy forward and it was proving very difficult to control her depth. After an hour of trying unsuccessfully to gain a reasonable buoyancy trim, concerned that Swiftsure was already late for her rendezvous with HMS Conqueror, the commanding officer ordered the boat deep and fast, directing the trimming officer to continue to sort out the apparent excess of ballast water which was being carried forward. A very significant quantity of forward ballast was removed, but a few hours later, on being slowed down to check the state of the trim, the boat rapidly headed out of control to the surface with a steep bow-up angle. Speed was applied just in time to avoid broaching the surface in the storm which was still raging. A hastily gathered investigation team soon reached the conclusion that whilst the fore planes’ angle indicators were displaying ‘normal’ operating, the planes had been bent on their drive shaft by the exceptionally heavy seas to the full dive position.

An immediate return to harbour and docking confirmed this to be the case and thereafter the Swiftsure class kept their fore planes retracted whilst making passage on the surface in heavy weather.

In March 1975 Dan Conley married his long-time sweetheart Linda, a communications officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). For Linda, it was to mean giving up her successful career to be with her new husband, along with a future of frequent family moves which typify Service life. Their honeymoon was even put in jeopardy owing to the unplanned docking to fix the fore planes problem, but at the last minute it was agreed that a temporary relief would join, allowing their wedding arrangements to stand.

As the responsible officer for the sonar outfit, during the evaluations of these systems Conley started building up a substantial level of knowledge of the operation of sonars and of ‘the acoustic environment’. However, at the age of twenty-eight he had been selected to undertake the submarine commanding officers’ Perisher course, and consequently had to accept that he would not be present for Swiftsure’s first Barents Sea operation planned for later that year.

Conley’s last period of sea-service in Swiftsure involved major sonar trials in deep water off the Canary Islands with a consort ship and submarine. Much to his dismay, once the trials had started, his departmental chief petty officer reported to him that, in error, inadequate stocks had been embarked of the photographic chemicals required to operate the main active sonar display. Normally, this would have not been an issue as active sonar was not often used, but on this occasion a key element of the trials was testing this mode of operation and display. Whilst pondering upon the best time to break the bad news to his captain, the Russian navy came to Conley’s rescue. Intelligence reports indicated that a large Russian naval force had deployed into the eastern Atlantic and consequently being a far higher operational priority, the trials were terminated forthwith and Swiftsure was dispatched to shadow the Soviet force. The latter was successfully detected, but because of Swiftsure’s after stabiliser noise problem, which remained unsolved, Pitt was reluctant to get in close and very little intelligence-gathering or crew training were forthcoming. Having been spared the ire of his captain by the fortuitous Russian intervention, on return to harbour Conley handed over to his successor and bade farewell to the Swiftsure wardroom and his sonar team.

Conley had learnt a great deal during his twenty months onboard Swiftsure. He had developed an excellent knowledge of his first nuclear submarine’s many complex systems. Moreover, the nerve-wracking engineering events and ship control problems he had experienced were to give him the ability later in his career to handle confidently and adeptly the nuclear submarines he would in due course command. For him it had been a very exciting appointment where he had enjoyed immense job satisfaction. However, the major career hurdle of passing the much apprehended ‘Perisher’ was now his immediate goal.