Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

4 Joining Submarines

In September 1967, almost exactly four years after arriving at Dartmouth, Conley was appointed to the Submarine School at HMS Dolphin — the submarine base in Fort Blockhouse, Gosport. Here he would undertake the Royal Navy’s twelve-week course intended to convert him into a submariner. The course concentrated on the operation of the Royal Navy’s conventional submarines of the ‘O’-class, the latest so-called ‘diesel boats’ in service. Conley and his colleagues would focus on learning in detail about the submarine systems and the skills necessary to monitor sensors, comprehend the control of the boat and undertake supervised control room watch-keeping when they joined their first operational submarine as a trainee officer.

There was a real buzz about Fort Blockhouse as the Submarine Service was rapidly expanding. The shift of Britain’s nuclear deterrent from the Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy offered a change of gear in the Navy’s fortunes and was the oxygen of liberation for ambitious young officers like Conley. Alongside the top-secret role of the nuclear-powered, Polaris-armed submarines, the first two of the five nuclear attack submarines of the Valiant class, popularly designated ‘hunter-killers’, but known to the navy as SSNs had been commissioned, and the first British nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, had been in service for four years.

The decision by the Labour government of Harold Wilson to confirm stewardship of the nation’s nuclear deterrent to the Royal Navy, while restoring to the Senior Service its traditional task of ‘the nation’s sure shield’, also conferred benefits on the local economies on the banks of the Clyde, the Mersey and the northwest of England. British shipyards were a hive of activity, with six nuclear submarines under construction at Vickers Armstrong’s yard at Barrow-in-Furness and the Birkenhead yard of Cammell Laird & Co. Besides these, three ‘O’-class submarines were being built at HM Chatham Dockyard and Scotts of Greenock for the Canadian and Australian navies, all of which provided a strong industrial base to underpin the Submarine Service’s rapid expansion.

In the post-war years, many submariners had felt that the domination of naval aviation and the Royal Navy’s commitments east of Suez had to an extent marginalised their arm of the Service. Although most of the submarines remaining in commission after 1945 — chiefly those of the ‘T’ and ‘A’ classes — had been modified, there had been no new construction. It was true that some of this modification, known as modernisation, which consisted of streamlining and in some cases enlarging battery capacity to increase submerged speed, extended the ageing boats’ useful life, but it was into the 1950s before the Admiralty turned its attention to a new class of submarine. The result was the Porpoise class, the name vessel of which, HMS Porpoise, was commissioned in 1958. She was followed by seven other boats and to these were added thirteen of the similar ‘O’ or Oberon class. The latter differed chiefly from their predecessors in having a stronger hull construction and the outer casing and fin being made of glass fibre. Highly regarded, not least for their operational low noise level, these were capable of up to 17 knots when dived.

To the Submarine Service these new boats restored morale and offered something in the way of parity with the surface Fleet which in recent years had benefited from the introduction of several new classes of destroyer and frigate fitted with modern sensors and weapons. This question of morale was of considerable importance in view of Wilson’s major shift in government policy. To undertake the stewardship of the nuclear deterrent required an elite force, not a run-down arm of a shrinking Navy which had found it difficult to adapt to its peacetime roles and was regarded with low esteem by some in the surface Navy.

The rundown from the high-stress pitch of the war to peacetime conditions had had a profound effect upon morale which reached a nadir when HM Submarine Affray was lost in the English Channel in April 1951. Although at the time this had been attributed to the failure of her snort gear, the cause of her loss, be it human error or material failure, has never been established. Bad enough as this was, the Affray’s loss was made far worse because she had on board an entire class of officers under training and these circumstances were held to be a contributing factor towards a culture of hard drinking within some elements of the corps of submarine officers.

Ten or more years later there remained a small but significant number of commanding officers who, having started their careers in this low period, drank excessively when in harbour. These men failed to exhibit those professional standards expected of naval officers, let alone submarine captains, and were regarded askance by their subordinates. Thus when Conley’s group of officers under training were dispersed from Dolphin and posted to their submarines, they were to discover that the best commanding officers had been selected for the new nuclear boats. In a number of cases, those who remained in diesel boats were in the last phases of their careers and although many of these men commanded a perverse respect on account of long service and experience, several were inadequate for the task, and had very limited tactical or war-fighting ability.

As for those commanding officers selected for the nuclear programme in command or at executive officer (second in command) level, many were to find their new charges very challenging. Contending with the much more complex task of being in command of a nuclear submarine required of them qualities which a fair proportion lacked; consequently, they found it difficult both to delegate responsibility and to exploit the full capabilities of their new, and much more capable, charges.

In 1967 the Flag Officer Submarines (FOSM) was Rear Admiral Ian McGeoch, who as a wartime submarine commander had lost one eye when HM Submarine Splendid was sunk in the Mediterranean. Many other senior officers had very accomplished war records, such as McGeoch’s successor, Rear Admiral John Roxburgh, who had commanded his first submarine at the age of twenty-two. Such men exuded an undoubted aura of experience and professionalism, but there was a world of difference in offensive submarine operations in the Second World War, which was a young man’s type of war where a touch of the bravado in the character was an essential for success, and the qualities necessary to command a nuclear submarine in the Cold War. The new Submarine Service was moving away from being a peripheral, semi-piratical organisation, regarded by the rest of the Fleet with a mixture of envy and affectionate scorn for its raffish disregard for the full panoply of naval protocols. The new, nuclear-powered Submarine Service was taking over the mantle of the nation’s sure bulwark. Its ships’ companies might cling to the anachronism of calling their submarines ‘boats’, but these were Great Britain’s new capital ships.

Conley’s training class consisted of twenty officers, including two Australians. Of the British officers on the course, four, including Conley, would eventually command submarines. Over time the others would leave the Submarine Service or the Navy either from choice, for reasons of health, such as degradation of eyesight, or unsuitability.

From the outset, these men were instructed in the detailed principles of how a submarine works by being able to vary its displacement. With her machinery, crew accommodation, power plant and weaponry contained in a central pressure hull, varying her displacement requires the filling and emptying of ballast tanks external to the pressure hull. On the surface its ballast tanks are kept full of air, providing positive buoyancy; to submerge, vents are opened, air escapes and is displaced by water. The vessel’s displacement increases and she slips below the surface in what amounts to a controlled sinking. In addition to the main ballast tanks, there are also several variable seawater-filled compensation tanks inside the pressure hull which enable the submerged boat to be maintained precisely in a state of neutral buoyancy. In normal conditions this means she is trimmed horizontally fore and aft, providing a level platform for her crew. The content of these supplementary tanks is carefully adjusted prior to diving to ensure, as far as possible, that the submarine is neutrally buoyant: too little weight of water in these tanks will make it difficult for the submarine to submerge; and too much will result in loss of depth control when submerging. In the case of a conventionally powered submarine, prior to diving her diesel engines are shut down and her propulsion shifts to her battery-powered electric motor.

Once underwater, depth is changed by applying a bow up or down angle to the boat through the use of hydroplanes, one set fitted forward in the bows, the second set aft and close to the rudder. Older boats controlled both these hydroplanes and the rudder using separate handlebar levers, but modern submarines use a single or twin joystick. This arrangement is not dissimilar to an aircraft’s controlling joystick. As a submarine goes deeper her hull compresses quite significantly, decreasing its displacement and making it vital that ballast water be pumped out in compensation for the increased negative buoyancy. To surface, high-pressure air retained in immensely strong compressed-air cylinders is blown into the ballast tanks where it expands, ejecting the ballast water, positive buoyancy being regained and the boat rising.

All combat submarines operate in a relatively shallow stratum below the surface of the sea, those of Western navies up to maximum safe depths of less than 1,500ft (455m) although some of their Soviet counterparts could operate significantly deeper down to greater than 3,000ft.

Some of the Royal Navy’s older post-war boats were restricted to a safe depth of little more than 350ft, not much of a margin greater than the length of the hull. If a submarine goes below its safe depth through flooding, total loss of power or a high-speed uncontrolled dive, the boat risks crushing by the immense pressure of the sea with the loss of all on board. This point of no return is known as her ‘crush depth’ and is normally a factor of between one and a half to twice her safe depth. High speed can involve steep boat angles in excess of 30 degrees in both axes and, accordingly, nuclear submarine crews are taught ship control in three-dimensional trainers very much akin to those used for aircrews. Should a nuclear submarine be proceeding at depth and high speed when a catastrophic failure of her hydroplanes occurs, if these happen to be in the full-dive position, the crew must react very fast indeed to avoid the boat exceeding her crush depth.

For most of the Second World War, all submarines of all the belligerent powers had one thing in common: they were designed to operate on the surface the majority of the time. The low available speed underwater when under electric power deprived them of most of their tactical advantages beyond the obvious one of being out of sight. For this reason, German U-boat operations against Atlantic convoys commonly occurred in darkness and were often made by limiting the dived period during an approach to a convoy to ducking under the sonar search area of the leading escorts. Once inside the screen they could surface and attack several targets as the cumbersome merchantmen steamed past in their columns, before submerging under the tail of the convoy where the sea was churned by the passing wakes, further confusing the sonar operators of the rear escorts. To counter this, the escorts preferred to prosecute a U-boat well beyond the immediate vicinity of the convoy. In response, towards the end of the conflict the Germans came up with the expedient of operating at periscope depth under diesel power, drawing air into the U-boat using a raised intake, a pipe they called the ‘schnorkel’, anglicised to ‘snorkel’ or later, when adopted by the Royal Navy, ‘snort’.

The fitting of these to the Type XXI U-boats operational in early 1945 introduced for the first time a submarine specifically intended to spend the majority of its sea-time submerged. Besides enabling a diesel-engined U-boat to remain continuously dived, by drawing air down the snort mast, the air quality within the boat was much improved, while her batteries could be kept charged. Engine exhaust gases are discharged through a separate mast, but ‘snorting’ carried risks beyond that of detection of the snort mast or her cloud of exhaust fumes. In heavy seas, the self-sealing head valve at the top of the snort mast functions less efficiently, allowing a considerable amount of water to come down the mast. While this is drained off into an internal tank, if this is not carefully monitored and regularly pumped out, it can result in a build-up of negative buoyancy which may only be evident when the boat slows down. Moreover, as the head valve shuts when the snort mast dips under waves, the running engines will suck air out of the pressure hull, thereby causing a vacuum in the submarine. This intermittent but cumulative situation, if prolonged, can cause serious loss of breathable oxygen unless the engines are promptly stopped. Alternatively, if the exhaust valves are shut with the engines still running, the boat can quickly fill with lethal carbon monoxide from the exhaust gases.

However, the biggest risk is failure of the snort system hull valve to shut when a submarine goes deep and shifts from diesel to electric power. If this occurs, severe flooding will follow. The loss of two French submarines, the Minerve in 1968 and the Eurydice in 1970, is thought to have been caused by this. Both sank in deep water in the Mediterranean and, as mentioned earlier, snort hull valve failure was considered a key factor in the foundering of HMS Affray in 1951. For these reasons drills and procedures associated with snorting were to feature as a very important part of the training class curriculum, a major feature of the prime element in the course: that of submarine safety. It was emphatically impressed upon the individual that error on the part of any member of the crew could very quickly imperil the boat.

Another key safety factor was that of battery ventilation. In the final stages of charging, hydrogen is emitted which, unless purged by the ventilation system, can quickly build up to dangerous explosive levels. Although modern British submarines have their batteries enclosed in separate compartments, unlike some other nations’ boats, this did not prevent explosions occurring. Battery ventilation failures caused two explosions, one aboard HMS Auriga in 1970, the second the following year in Alliance, in which in several men were injured and one was killed. Among the losses of nuclear submarines, of which there have been several, the most plausible theory for the loss of the American hunter-killer, USS Scorpion, in 1968, was that a battery explosion killed or disabled the control-room team resulting in control of the boat being lost and it sinking to crush depth.

At the closing phases of Conley’s own career in submarines, as the officer responsible for accepting new vessels from the shipbuilder, in 1992 he delayed the handover of HMS Ursula, the penultimate boat of the conventional Upholder class, until some damaged battery cells were replaced after a small explosion had occurred in her battery tank.

Should the worst occur, from whatever cause, it was essential that submarine crews should be able to escape from the confinement of their damaged boats. This could, of course, only occur if the submarine lay at a depth compatible with the ability of the human body to withstand the pressure, but if this was the case it was important that each individual had experience of such escape, for which nerve and a cool head were a prerequisite. The experiences of the late war combined with peacetime losses of submarines such as the Affray placed escape practice high on the trainees’ agenda.

Although by the 1960s all British submarines were being fitted with separate escape chambers, prior to that the basic method of escape was to assemble all hands in a single compartment. Each man wore an escape suit and all were mustered for what was called a ‘rush escape’, which took place through a canvas trunking rigged under the compartment escape hatch. This would be opened when the compartment pressure had been equalised with that of the sea outside by flooding the compartment. This rudimentary method requires each man to breathe pure air through a mouthpiece which is discarded on entry into the escape trunk. The safe ascent then relies upon the disciplined blowing out of air through pursed lips all the way up to the surface if burst lungs or a very dangerous air embolism in the bloodstream are to be avoided.

The more sophisticated chamber escape method had the advantage of each individual being evacuated in sequence, continuing to breathe freely all the way up to the surface inside a totally enclosed escape suit. This type of escape was periodically tested down to a depth of 600ft from ‘O’-class submarines sitting on the seabed, some of the crew volunteering to undertake the drill.

To familiarise trainees with the possibility of undertaking this hazardous procedure, training took place in the escape tank in Fort Blockhouse. This was 100ft deep and, in addition to having an escape chamber, had facilities at different depths which replicated the flooding of a whole compartment and the vertical escape to the surface following evacuation of the submarine. Such an evolution took place in benign conditions, in warm, well-lit water, with a number of instructors situated at various stages of the ascent to ensure the student was performing appropriately. Failure to blow out adequately in the training ascent was inevitably met by a firm prod in the stomach. All this would, of course, be a far cry from the darkness, the bitterly cold water and the fear prevalent in a real escape from a stricken submarine. Even so, it was not without inherent risk and in later years the value of pressurised escape training, with its occasional serious injuries or even fatalities, would be questioned. However, experience had indicated that it was highly likely that an untrained crew member would panic and fail to get out of the escape chamber, causing a fatal obstruction which prevented the remainder of the crew escaping.

Now aged twenty-one, Sub Lieutenant Conley completed the course in December 1967 and was appointed to the five-year-old ‘O’-class submarine Odin. The Odin belonged to the Third Submarine Squadron based at Faslane, on the Gareloch, Scotland. The boat had been intended to be based in Singapore but the Wilson government, intent on withdrawing from the Far East, changed all that. Instead, her ship’s company exchanged the intense tropical humidity which offsets the delights of Singapore, for the 65 inches of cold rain and the Scottish midge which assailed those who lived on the shores of the Gareloch. Despite being under training, he was Odin’s torpedo officer and was responsible for the casing — the external superstucture.

The ‘O’ class and their immediate predecessors, the ‘P’ class mentioned earlier, although of new post-war design, were built on traditional lines of a relatively long hull length, two propeller shafts and torpedo tubes in the bows and stern. Curiously, the earliest Royal Navy submarine, the Holland I of 1901, had a much more efficient underwater design than those that followed. This was because the short, rounded, single shaft hull design — known as an ‘albacore’ in shape and not dissimilar to the profile of a whale or porpoise— whilst highly manoeuvrable under water, tended to make for very wet, unstable operation on the surface. Since the traditional submarine was still essentially a submersible rather than a true submarine craft, until the adoption of the snort it was more important to design for surface efficiency.

This tradition was broken by the Americans one year after the lead vessel of the ‘P’ class, HMS Porpoise, entered service. In 1959 the United States Navy commissioned the conventional submarine Barbel, which was albacore in design. Submerged, she and her two sisters proved to be much faster and handier than the Royal Navy’s ‘P’ and ‘O’ classes and they proved the superiority of the albacore hull form, sometimes called the teardrop, over the accepted style based upon the empirical development to that date. The true significance of this return to the form of the Holland I was that by this time the United States Navy possessed the means to drive a fully submarine warship: a nuclear power plant.

Nevertheless, the Os and Ps had many excellent features, chief of which was their absence of noise when running under electric motor propulsion. This was exemplified by one of these boats passing over an array of highly sensitive seabed hydrophones when the only noise detected was the patter of rain on the surface of the sea. They were also very seaworthy on the surface, possessed an excellent range of about 15,000 miles and were able to remain at sea for up to sixty days. With eight torpedo tubes, they carried an impressive outfit of up to twenty-six torpedoes and — for a limited duration of about forty minutes — could achieve a submerged maximum speed of 17 knots. Their accommodation was considered reasonable enough for long patrols, with separate mess areas, each fitted with bunks and tables, although some of engine-room staff lived between the after torpedo tubes.

Their disadvantages in handling lay in their slow turning rate, large turning circle and a relatively low speed of 7 knots at periscope depth, when the propellers would start making a significant noise owing to the onset of cavitation. Furthermore, unlike the submarines of some other navies, when running on the surface under diesel power, the engines did not have a separate air induction system. Instead, their air was sucked down the conning tower hatch and through the control room. Wet and salt-laden, this rapidly moving airstream did little good to the increasing amount of electronic gear being fitted in this location. In very rough weather, where lots of spray and the occasional lump of solid water could be expected down the conning tower, a plastic fabric trunking was mounted below the control room hatch. This in turn was lashed into a 3ft-high canvas receptacle with a hose connected to a pump set up to remove any overflowing seawater, an expedient known as the ‘bird bath and elephant’s trunk’.

In rough weather at night, with the control room in near-darkness, going on bridge watch, dressed in foul weather gear and safety harness, involved negotiating a wet, moving and slippery deck, climbing into the ‘bird bath’, avoiding falling into water it contained, before battling up the plastic trunking by way of the conning tower ladders through a very noisy and violent 100mph rush of indrawn air. Emerging onto the bridge, even the conditions of a force 8 gale would seem serene after the experience of the vertical climb against such odds. Fortunately, the later major modernisation of the ‘O’ class, which incorporated improved lockout arrangements, where the submarine ran on the surface with all conning tower hatches shut and the snort system open, mercifully consigned the ‘bird bath’ to history.

Such things might be tolerated up to a point. Less easy to accept were the more important deficiencies in ‘warfare capability’. Both the ‘P’ and ‘O’ classes were originally built with sensors and torpedo control equipment which had advanced little since 1945 and, indeed, this was still the case when Conley joined Odin. While these submarines had to be able to sink surface shipping, their primary combat role was to hunt and destroy other submarines, a task for which they required efficient sonar equipment and a capable anti-submarine (ASW) weapon. Their sonars, nearly always operated in the passive mode (not transmitting) to avoid counter-detection, had only a single narrow trainable beam and the long-range sonar, which had its hydrophones fitted in the ballast tanks, required the submarine to slowly circle to conduct an all-round search. The control room attack equipment relied upon a number of rudimentary paper or Perspex plots which, although foolproof, were manpower-intensive and required a considerable degree of skill to develop target parameters and solutions.

As to their offensive weapons, they could deploy the Mark 8 torpedo, which was of pre-Second World War vintage and, although reliable and capable of use against both surface ships and submarines at periscope depth, it was relatively short-ranged. For use against a hostile submarine the prime weapons were the Mark 23 and Mark 20 homing torpedoes, described by Conley as ‘totally ineffective’. The former were wire-guided versions of the latter, but the wire arrangement was very unsatisfactory and, coupled with both poor homing performance and component reliability, made for a total system performance which was utterly inadequate. Although of course he could not know it, rectifying these deficiencies would occupy a significant part of Conley’s naval career and would not be fixed until the eve of the end of the Cold War, a quarter of a century after the Royal Navy commissioned its first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, in 1963.

Throughout this period, when the Royal Navy replaced the Royal Air Force as ‘the nation’s sure shield’ as steward of Great Britain’s nuclear deterrent, the Submarine Service’s senior officers on the whole reluctantly accepted these deficient weapons, somewhat failing in their duty to adequately thrust the issue under the noses of their civilian counterparts at the head of the Ministry of Defence, or those politicians responsible for the defence of the realm. In a period of such prolonged tension, with the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction ever present, the irony of this is inescapable.

Those responsible who regarded these serious deficiencies with such complacency focused upon the number of submarines, seemingly imbued with a touching confidence that, in event of hostilities, success would still be achieved even with inadequate weapons. Here the lessons of history were being thrown away with cavalier abandon. Clearly, these senior officers had failed to acknowledge the generally poor performance of torpedoes in the Second World War. They appeared ignorant of the wretched history of American and German torpedoes, the latter of which ameliorated Allied losses in the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic — to the fury of Dönitz — whilst the former probably extended the Pacific War by at least six months.

Appreciation of all this lay in the future for Conley, who arrived at Faslane when Odin was still at sea. He checked into the brand new wardroom of the Clyde submarine base, HMS Neptune, which had been built specially to support the four new Polaris submarines which would become operational shortly. The base possessed new submarine jetties, workshops, shore accommodation and a floating dock, but was still under construction, with many other facilities in various stages of completion. To Conley it seemed that no expense was being spared in meeting the imperatives of the Polaris programme which was running to schedule and, despite the obvious outlay surrounding him, was on budget.

Officers’ married quarters had been completed in the nearby village of Rhu and a large estate of ratings’ quarters established behind the town of Helensburgh. This, however, was not very well built and in due course was to become very much a bleak, soulless place for families where the father could be away at sea, out of contact for several months. Although the officers’ quarters had won an architectural prize, the exterior of most of the buildings looked like giant chicken coops and were ill-designed to cope with the winter weather of the west of Scotland.

In line with the United States’ model, the base boasted very comprehensive recreational facilities, including a petrol station and cinema which were to quickly prove commercially unviable. When off-duty the British submariner — unlike his US counterpart — spent as little time as possible in the base, preferring the very limited offerings of the Helensburgh nightlife or venturing further afield to Glasgow, some forty miles away.

On joining Odin, Conley experienced disappointment. The submarine was about to undergo annual inspection and all hands were focused upon bringing the boat up to the highest levels of cleanliness prior to proceeding to sea for two days of exercises when she would be put through her operational paces. Therefore, initially he felt himself to be a bit of a nuisance. Besides which, although Odin’s accommodation was considered adequate enough for sea-duty, it was the practice of all sub-marines in port to accommodate the crew ashore in barrack accommodation, leaving only a duty watch onboard overnight to deal with the routine running and security of the vessel, or to meet any arising emergencies. This tended to add further to Conley’s sense of isolation and he experienced ‘a fairly ragged time’, being detailed to help the completion of painting and cleaning the torpedo compartment, much to the embarrassment of the senior rating in charge. Also, greatly to his chagrin, he was instructed to remain ashore for the operational sea inspection and received the displeasure of his commanding officer when he was not there on the jetty to meet Odin when she returned to harbour unexpectedly early.

He had, meanwhile, been decanted from the shore wardroom accommodation to the 1938 vintage depot ship Maidstone that, prior to the base being established, had been the Third Submarine Squadron’s shore support facility. Moored alongside, this venerable old ship had great character and there was a tremendous sense of camaraderie and spirit amongst the submarine crews billeted in her accommodation. Dinner in the wardroom was always a convivial occasion, a fair amount of drinking being buoyed by the ebullient presence of a number of Canadian and Australian officers on exchange appointments to British submarines whilst their boats were under construction. Also present were the officers of the Israeli submarine Dakar, until recently HMS Totem, who, conducting work-up prior to departure for Israel, added a friendly international dimension to the gatherings. Rather unusually, the commanding officer and first lieutenant of the Israeli submarine were brothers. Very sadly, a few weeks later Dakar was lost with all hands in the Mediterranean en route to her new home. The wreck, in deep water, was not located until 1999, but the cause of her sinking has never been established. Conley had got to know some of Dakar’s junior officers and this tragedy was a poignant reminder that submarining could be a dangerous profession, a cold douche to add to his nonchalant reception aboard Odin.

The depot ship’s repair and maintenance staff were cheerfully helpful, a welcome contrast to the surly civilian dockyard mateys whose apathy and lack of urgency was legendary. Indeed, all departments of the Maidstone were committed, as was traditional, to deliver a level of support which the much larger shore staff of Neptune initially found difficult to replicate. Unfortunately, Maidstone left Faslane soon after Conley’s arrival and, as the shore wardroom was now full, he moved into a cabin onboard the old landing ship Lofoten, which provided overflow officers’ accommodation until the base facilities were complete.

By this time Conley was wondering if he and submarines were mutually suited. He was not to feel ‘part of the team’ until the Odin again put to sea after the Christmas leave period, whereupon responsibility was heaped on him. In company with other submarines, Odin left Faslane for exercises off the northwest of Ireland. Influenza swept through the ship’s company and owing to shortages of fit watch-keeping officers, Conley soon found himself conducting watches on his own in the control room when the submarine was deep. His mentor and training officer was the Odin’s first lieutenant, the late Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Biggs, who quickly recognised Conley’s abilities. On more than one occasion Lieutenant Biggs came on watch with Conley and discreetly disappeared, leaving the young sub lieutenant to it. Biggs was not only a good delegator, he was intelligent and capable and a great character; the two men were to serve together on a number of subsequent occasions.

Conley was soon to learn the hard way that diesel submarines spent a lot of time on the surface. Bridge watch-keeping in the winter off the British coast could be a very cold, wet experience. Watchkeepers slept in damp clothes to dry them off for their next duty period and, as the junior officer, Conley had been allocated the most uncomfortable of the seven wardroom bunks, in which it was almost impossible to sleep in rough weather. Here, jammed into the curve of the pressure hull and sharing the space with the brackets which supported the weight of the bunk above, he further pondered the wisdom of his career choice.

On completion of the exercises, Odin was programmed to make a courtesy call to Newcastle upon Tyne and headed for Cape Wrath. She had been scheduled to fire a torpedo at the small island of Garvie, situated off the Cape and used as a target by all three armed services. This ‘proving warshot’ with a live torpedo was, for some reason, cancelled and, as the weather deteriorated, Odin ploughed her way eastwards towards the Pentland Firth on the surface. This proved an exciting experience, with the rising westerly wind, now approaching storm force, blowing against the westerly setting tide of over 8 knots. The seas this generated were phenomenal for their steepness, and for a while little progress was made through the infamous very turbulent area — Merry Men of Mey — as one of the two main propulsion motors had failed, owing to a defective lubrication oil pump. A jury-rigged Black and Decker heavy-duty drill was ingeniously set up by the engineers to drive the pump, enabling the motor to be restarted, and ran continuously for the next thirty-six hours.

Clear of the Firth, Odin swung south into the North Sea on the night of the Glasgow ‘hurricane’ of January 1968, during which twenty Glaswegians were killed. On watch at 0230 as the storm was at its height, with the wind speed gusting at over 100mph, visibility was down to a few hundred yards. On Odin’s bridge the seas were breaking over Conley and his lookout. Radar performance was also poor thanks to the ‘sea clutter’, the echoes returned from the myriad surfaces of waves in their immediate vicinity. As a result, any other vessel would only have been detected at very short range, but fortunately there was little shipping around.

With access to the bridge through the conning tower airlock, and with air for the engines being supplied by the snort induction system, both Conley and the lookout were locked out of the submarine to prevent the control room flooding. When it came to his turn to be relieved at 0430, Conley experienced real trouble locking back into the submarine, as on climbing down to the airlock he found it flooded up by the breaking seas, which had filled the enclosed space in which the hatch was located. Attempts to pump it out proved fruitless, as every time he opened the upper hatch to climb in to the lock, the sea poured in after him. He therefore decided to stay in the chamber whilst it was pumped empty. Crouching at the top of the airlock ladder, his knees in water, suffused in the added surrealism of red lighting and with the pump drawing a vacuum, causing the seawater around him to start vaporising, he was very glad when the airlock was emptied and the control room crew swung the lower hatch open.

Having discovered that his bunk was untenable, he decided to sleep under the wardroom table where books, a typewriter and miscellaneous odds and sods fell on top of him when the Odin hit a particularly big wave.

Once alongside in Newcastle, and according to an unwritten tradition of the sea, as the junior officer Conley found himself on duty at the evening drinks reception. This was for local dignitaries and other guests, and towards the end of the gathering he was instructed to somehow manoeuvre a very drunken lady mayor out of the submarine by way of the access hatch and up a steep gangplank to her awaiting limousine. This was only achieved with a great degree of difficulty and the help of several members of the duty watch.

Solicitude for its submarine crews had persuaded the Ministry of Defence in the 1960s to grant them the privilege of living ashore when on courtesy visits to non-naval ports. On the day following his onerous duty of discharging the pickled recipients of Odin’s hospitality, Conley checked into the comfort of a central Newcastle hotel. However, owing to the cost of the hotel exceedingly the daily subsistence allowance, the first lieutenant decided the officers would move into the far cheaper local Mission to Seamen. This proved clean, friendly and hospitable, leaving sufficient of their allowance to be spent on enjoyment and Odin’s crew took advantage of the city’s hospitality, so much so that, the appointed day for her departure being a Sunday, a large gathering of well-wishers watched from the quay. They were treated to the rather unedifying sight of the commanding officer and the first lieutenant rummaging through the dustbins placed on the quay for the boat’s use, in search of a local telephone directory. This was required to determine why the ordered tugs had not arrived on time. This impasse resolved, the submarine slipped her moorings, made her farewells and began her passage downstream. On the way out of the Tyne, Conley received another reminder of the fragile mortality of submariners as Odin passed the spot where, a year earlier, one of his Dartmouth contemporaries had drowned after he was swept off his submarine’s casing and his lifejacket had failed to inflate.

HMS Odin’s next task was to return by way of Cape Wrath to the exercise area off Malin Head where she was to take part in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) evolutions, in the role of the loyal opposition to a group of frigates and destroyers acting as convoy escorts, supported by maritime patrol aircraft (MPA). Notably, towards the end of the exercises the escort force encountered a Soviet Whiskey-class diesel submarine which, after several hours of prosecution by sonar, surfaced and requested a weather forecast. This incident was a reminder that the United Kingdom’s naval forces and coast were subject to continuous surveillance by Soviet forces, surface and subsurface. Indeed, for several decades a Soviet intelligence gathering ship was to be permanently stationed just outside territorial waters on SSBN patrol transit routes to the north of Ireland.

With the exercises completed, Odin headed for Lough Foyle and a visit to Londonderry, berthing alongside HMS Stalker. This was a large infantry landing ship which had been built in Canada for the D-Day landings and later converted to support submarines. The Joint Anti-Submarine Training School, which had run the exercise, was installed in HMS Sea Eagle, a shore establishment in the city. Inevitably, submarines arrived last into port and delivered their exercise records after the other participants. With inter-Service rivalry rampant, the trick for a submarine officer reporting in to the staff who had been monitoring the exercise was first to examine closely the large floor plot in Sea Eagle. Here the exercise had been followed and set out, so a subtle shift of one’s own submarine’s position away from the locations of reported submarine detections, especially those by aircraft, afforded an egregious satisfaction.

Many of the officers of the visiting warships congregated in the evenings in a local hostelry which usually reverberated to loud Irish Republican music, rousing in tempo and melody, if dubious in sentiment for officers of Her Majesty’s Navy. ‘The Troubles’ were yet some months away and although fault lines fractured Ulster society, the lubricating effects of alcohol and Celtic music won the day. Nevertheless, late one evening, whilst Conley and his colleagues from Odin’s wardroom were enjoying this convivial and noisy hospitality after official closing time, the pub was raided by the police. The Royal Ulster Constabulary made rather futile attempts to take the names of the large number of customers present, which included a rather bemused group of officers from an American destroyer.

Another favourite haunt was the village hall dance in Muff just across the border in the Irish Republic, where Irish dance bands provided outstandingly good music and the local girls were willing to dance. The urbane intrusions of young British naval officers and ratings often provoked fights, which had the curious quality of proceeding at the pace of the music being played.

Conley and his shipmates were all struck by the friendly welcome they received from the people of Londonderry who, at that time, never bothered to lock their house doors. However, the city was evidently a poor place and the armed police patrolling the streets gave hints of the tensions which would tear apart a citizenry divided by two religious factions and plunge Northern Ireland into a dark and bloody era of widespread violence. Despite the disenfranchisement of the Roman Catholic population by the requirement of being a freeholder to vote in local elections, it was remarkable that Conley and his colleagues were struck by the genuine friendliness of the local population to the Royal Navy. However, it was little wonder that the Northern Ireland Civil Rights organisation was to be increasingly strident in its appeals for equality, while the repression of their demonstrations by the largely Protestant Ulster Constabulary was to act as a catalyst for the many years of ‘the Troubles’ then looming.

By this time Conley had settled into submarine life. Notwithstanding his early experiences, the Odin proved a happy and efficient submarine, well led and motivated by the strong team of her commanding officer Lieutenant Commander David Wardle and his second in command Lieutenant Biggs, her morale buttressed by the colourful tradition of the Submarine Service in allowing the wearing of exotic outfits at sea. This slackening of the strictures of naval discipline was a hangover from the Second World War, but added immensely to the bonding of a submarine’s company, at the same time marking them as special — and to the individuals — an elite within the Royal Navy, part of that cocking a snook at the rest of the Fleet that went with their insistence that they served in ‘boats’.

Aboard Odin at the time, the ratings manning the sonar system dressed as French onion sellers, engine room artificers wore Arab garb and the control room watchkeepers attired themselves as high Victorians. Conley stuck to a fisherman’s sweater and slacks, which reminded him of his roots. This non-conforming and so-called ‘pirate rig’ would be prohibited in the early 1970s as, with its increasing number of nuclear submarines, the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service underwent the major cultural shift discussed elsewhere. Moreover, the cleaner conditions aboard the nuclear submarines were more conducive to the wearing of formal uniform, whereas the old diesel-engined boats always smell strongly of diesel fuel, an acrid odour which permeates everything, including clothes, and pirate rig could be left on board when men went on leave, rather than risking the ire of their wives by bringing the very pungent stench into the home.

Shortly after visiting Londonderry, the commanding officer, extremely popular, was due to be relieved and prior to his departure, having finished a week of ‘Perisher’ work in the Clyde, the ship’s company resolved to take him on a farewell run ashore into Campbeltown. Needless to say, it was an occasion of great revelry, which finished with a very noisy parade down the jetty with a chaired CO wearing a Viking helmet with replica Norse sword as baton, conducting a rendition of the submarine’s song which had the repetitive chorus, ‘Odin send the wind and waves to make it safe for snorting.’

The next day Odin proceeded to sea, dived and was then sat on the seabed for the morning, allowing her crew to recover from the excesses of the previous evening. Such was life in a typical diesel-engined submarines of the Royal Navy during the decade of the so-called swinging 1960s.

After her task in the Clyde, Odin was ordered to Chatham Dockyard where several weeks were spent undertaking repairs to her engines. This was necessary because the greater than normal high revolution running of her type of engines had proved detrimental.

Sub Lieutenant Conley’s period as a trainee was coming to an end. Biggs had been impressed and Conley had grown into the niche the Navy had offered him; it was time to move on. The next hurdle was the successful passing of an examination, the submarine qualification. Given the importance the Royal Navy apparently attached to imbuing its young submarine officers with technical knowledge at the outset, this was a hurdle that in his case was not so much jumped, as kicked aside. Conley took the written part of the qualification in an office ashore in the dockyard, under the invigilation of a coxswain loaned from another submarine refitting alongside. Half way through Conley’s papers, this helpful chief petty officer left the room and returned with two steaming cups of coffee. Sitting down beside the candidate he obligingly ran through the questions Conley could not answer, contacting his mates by telephone where he could not answer a specific question. As Conley afterwards drily commented, ‘At least I was spared the embarrassment of coming top of my training class in the examinations.’ This collaboration proved successful and he duly received instructions to transfer to Sealion as navigating officer. Whilst this was a promotion and opened new prospects for him, it was not such good news and he would have preferred to remain in Odin.

Like his old boat, Sealion belonged to the Third Submarine Squadron. She had been completed at Cammell Laird’s Birkenhead yard in 1961, the penultimate example of the ‘P’ class. However, she had a poor reputation; her commanding officer was a heavy, aggressive drinker in harbour and a bully at sea, a situation not helped by her first lieutenant being a very weak character, incapable of handling his superior.

Conley’s worst fears were proved when he joined Sealion in what seemed like a forgotten floating dock in a remote corner of Portsmouth Dockyard, where she was undergoing repairs to both of her propeller shafts. She was filthy dirty, with crew morale palpably at rock bottom. The stench of her wing bilges, which contained remnants of packed food from past patrols mixed with oily water, was added to the usual pungent aroma of diesel oil. There was long-standing dirt and grime everywhere and much of the deck and bulkhead paintwork and finish had been damaged and not made good. She ought not to have been much different in her internal appearance from Odin, which was only a year younger, so the overall effect on her new navigator — or ‘Pilot’ as he would be called — was profoundly depressing.

There were, Conley discovered, some mitigating factors. Sealion was the last conventional British submarine to conduct intelligence-gathering patrols in the Barents Sea. During her first commission on one patrol she gathered data from Soviet nuclear bomb tests on Nova Zemlya and on another, whilst gathering information on missile firings, had been counter-detected. She was then harassed for many hours by a group of Soviet destroyers who, despite the interaction happening in international waters, during the prosecution dropped many warning charges on her in an attempt to force her to surface. Sealion, however, made it safely into Norwegian territorial waters. These northern patrols involved a long snort to and from the patrol areas with wear and tear upon both machinery and crew. She had finished these patrols about a year before but was mechanically worn out and many of her men were also in an exhausted frame of mind. In particular, those responsible for maintaining her weapon systems were a poor lot. If their equipment became defective, they often could not fix it: the best men were being drawn away and transferred to support the highly prioritised Polaris programme. Consequently, clapped-out boats like Sealion had to struggle with substandard technicians. This unhappy situation was worsened by a very defective character being in command.

As navigator, Conley inherited equipment which was adequate for coastal work, but was not up to the mark for operating in the deep ocean. The long range LORAN-C radio-navigation system was defective, taking months to get repaired, and the echo-sounder was incapable of taking the deep sea soundings for navigating using seabed contour charts. This left Conley with the periscope sextant. This was a very complex piece of equipment fitted with an artificial horizon which would enable him to take observations of the sun, but would prove totally unsuitable for star sights. ‘In fact,’ he recalled, ‘I never came across anyone who successfully used this equipment to get an accurate star fix. The fallback position was to use dead reckoning with all its inaccuracies, owing to the unknowns of deep ocean currents or the boat undertaking an “action surface”,’ enabling him to take star sights at morning or evening twilight using a conventional sextant. ‘This evolution strongly risked the ire of the commanding officer if my astronomical measurements did not result in an acceptably accurate navigational fix.’

In due course, with two new stern shafts fitted, Sealion proceeded down harbour and secured in Haslar Creek, alongside the Portsmouth submarine base at HMS Dolphin. Here she loaded torpedoes and stores prior to going to sea, and here Conley observed his new commander at close quarters. As duty officer on the final evening alongside, he had just finished dinner when the sentry on the casing reported that the commanding officer was coming aboard with some friends, one of whom had brought his dog. Conley then had to carry a very heavy Labrador into the submarine through the accommodation hatch and down a vertical ladder. At the end of an evening of excessive boozing, he had to reverse the process. Owing to the weight and nervousness of the Labrador, this proved more difficult than extricating the lady mayor in Newcastle.

Conley’s ordeal was not yet over, for to his despair, having said goodbye to his chums, the captain returned onboard, sat in the wardroom where Conley was obliged to keep him company, and drank whisky until 0600. He then staggered ashore and off to bed in his shore quarters. As the off-duty crew came aboard at 0800 the duty officer welcomed them with bleary eyes. The commanding officer returned onboard just before noon and resumed drinking at a reception set up in the control room for the First Submarine Squadron officers to thank them for their support and assistance during Sealion’s sojourn in Portsmouth. The guests departed at about 1400 and the ship’s company went to harbour stations for leaving; Sealion slipped her berth at 1500. It was not to be expected that matters would go smoothly.

On reversing out of Haslar Creek, his judgement impaired by the vast quantity of alcohol he had consumed, Sealion’s commander successfully avoided a sand dredger by a violent alteration of heading. However, this caused the Sealion to be caught up in the strong ebb tide sweeping through the narrow entrance to Portsmouth Harbour on the western side of which lies the wardroom of HMS Dolphin, which has a large patio adjoining the sea wall. Here all the squadron officers were gathered to bid her farewell. They were treated to the sight of one of Her Majesty’s submarines leaving for sea duty, beam on, athwart the line of the channel and with her bows pointing towards — and passing a few yards away from — them. With a modest shudder accompanied by a muddy disturbance and rising bubbles, Sealion’s bows grounded at the Dolphin saluting point, while her stern was swung by the fierce tide to point down channel towards Southsea Castle.

HMS Sealion was drawn off the bottom by the application of full astern power, thereafter continuing down the buoyed channel stern first until the commanding officer found a suitable position to turn her round. This was a very inauspicious start to Conley’s time as navigator.

Having arrived in the Gareloch, Sealion undertook several weeks of workup with the assistance of the squadron shore staff. Conley soon learned that when things went wrong the commanding officer was like a raging bull in the control room, yelling at everyone he conceived to have contributed to the cock-up. The first lieutenant was demonstrably ineffective and unwilling to support his fellow officers.

Part of the work-up involved passing at night through the stretch of water between Kintyre and the Isle of Arran in a submerged condition. This was very demanding, as there were very few navigational marks or lights from which to take bearings through the periscope, while the lack of a moon made it doubly difficult to identify significant features along the shoreline against the backdrop of the dark mountains. The evolution involved various scenarios which included exercising minelaying procedures, inshore photoreconnaissance, the avoiding of ASW warships and penetrating a field of dummy mines which had been laid off the coast of Arran. As navigator in such close-quarters situations as these evolutions generated, Conley was on his mettle. Under an exemplary command team this would have taxed his abilities, even if he had been an experienced navigator; in his present circumstances this was to call from him extraordinary reserves. Properly, the first lieutenant should have reorganised the watch-keeping rota to avoid the navigator being kept at continuous fever-pitch for fourteen hours in the control room but, if the ordeal was to prove one of the most arduous Conley endured in the Submarine Service, it proved something else: he could run on little sleep for several nights running, and he could handle extremes. This was noticed by others, particularly Sealion’s captain who, despite his ‘very aggressive behaviour’ to Conley at sea, expressed every confidence in his new navigator, and gave up checking up on his work.

Whilst Sealion passed her work-up, just meeting the overall satisfaction of the squadron staff, her commander did not. Both he and the first lieutenant were soon to disappear, but not before Sealion undertook trials of a prototype Polaris submarine communication buoy. This involved fitting special rails to the after part of the casing to house and recover the buoy, which measured approximately 8ft by 6ft; it was attached to the submarine by about 1,000ft of wire. Fitting of the rails was taken in hand by Scotts Shipyard at Greenock, which had a distinguished history and where two ‘O’-class submarines previously mentioned were being completed for the Australian Navy.

At the same time the opportunity was taken to replace many of Sealion’s very tired fabric and furnishings, all of this work being concealed in the cost of the rails. However, although the workforce evidently possessed a much better work ethic than their cousins in the Royal Dockyards, the senior directors were very uninspiring and the yard’s infrastructure was very rundown and undercapitalised. The boat required dry-docking for a few days but the Scotts dock needed the continuous running of pumps to keep the wooden dock floor reasonably free of water. Other evidence of decrepitude was the use of ancient telegraph poles as side shores, to keep the submarine in position on the blocks. Unsurprisingly, like most other British shipyards which were living on an historical reputation for excellence, Scotts would go out of business a few years later.

The deficiencies of the yard were made manifest before the Sealion reached her trials areas. The buoy trials took place in the Mediterranean, in waters to the east of Gibraltar. Rough weather encountered crossing the Bay of Biscay on the surface tore the newly welded rails from the casing and a new set had to be manufactured and fitted by Gibraltar Dockyard. Once this had been accomplished, Sealion embarked on her trials which involved running eastwards daily from Gibraltar, testing different buoy types, configurations and towing wires at dived speeds up to 16 knots.

Besides having on board a number of technical staff — or ‘trial scientists’ — opportunity was taken to host a number of local guests at sea for the day, including army personnel, the medical staff from the naval hospital and local dignitaries. Accommodated in the wardroom, most commented on the bemusing array of cans strung out below the deckhead to catch water from a leaking cable gland. On one occasion Sealion departed from the dockyard with an army band playing on the forward casing, though some difficulty was experienced getting the drums below through the accommodation hatch once at sea.

The buoy trials proved successful in demonstrating the hydrodynamics at a range of speeds, but on the final day the trial scientists produced a tow wire covered in ostrich feathers, which had been fitted with the aim of avoiding wire ‘strum’. This was a harmonic oscillation of the wire that occurred as it was drawn through the water and which, by being a ‘potential acoustic counter-detection hazard’, would possibly betray the position of any submarine deploying the equipment in an acute operational situation. An expedient relying upon ostrich feathers to reduce strum was predictably regarded with that scepticism ‘Jolly Jack’ has for the intellectually derived solutions of boffins. Jolly Jack won: on working up to full speed, the wire parted owing to the increased resistance of the feathers and the buoy was lost — never to be recovered.

The lax atmosphere that prevailed aboard Sealion guaranteed that a final departure time from Gibraltar two hours before midnight would result in a significant portion of the ship’s company returning from shore leave one hour before sailing in less than sober state. This proved to be the case and shortly afterwards, true to form, the captain arrived by car a few minutes before departure and also staggered across the brow in a sorry state. Certain irregular preparations were made by members of the crew before leaving the berth while the commanding officer worked up his own departure plan. Ignoring all harbour speed restrictions, and determined to make his last departure a memorable one, Sealion was reversed from her berth at maximum speed and created a significant wash as she came abeam of the guard ship alongside, HMS Zulu.

The Tribal-class frigate had fitted to either side of her bridge large decorative Zulu shields which had been presented to her. These had somehow appeared secured to the Sealion’s fin and were unsubtly illuminated by lamps.

Their sighting by the frigate’s watchkeepers caused a flurry of activity and a high-speed rigid raider was dispatched to recover the booty. By the time this reached Sealion she was already outside the harbour mole and her outgoing captain, in no mood to part company with the trophies his warriors had gleaned, took appropriate action. As the fast boat roared alongside, a Royal Marine officer, immaculately dressed in his mess kit, stood up in the stern to plead for the return of the shields, whereupon Sealion’s captain bombarded the boat with potatoes from a bag he had had sent up from the galley. The Zulu detachment repelled, the shields stowed securely away, he disappeared below to his cabin. Here he remained for most of the next three days as Sealion ran north, up the Portuguese coast and headed across the Bay of Biscay. Something of his psychological state of mind, not to say Conley’s confidence, is revealed by the fact that he made no protest when Conley, guying his commander, kept the navigational charts under lock and key. Apparently indifferent to the Sealion’s progress until the diving area was reached in the Bay of Biscay, the wretched man departed without ceremony after speedily handing over to his relief when the boat berthed at Faslane.

With her ‘booze-loving’ commanding officer gone, the Sealion rapidly improved. Cleaner and more efficient, her crew, having undergone many changes, was more competent. The new captain, although initially lacking confidence, was nevertheless a big improvement. The same could not be said for the new first lieutenant, who was exceedingly eccentric, possessed an abrasive temperament and badly lacked management skills. In consequence, the other members of the wardroom, which had also undergone changes and which now included some very capable individuals, drew together like a ‘band of brothers’, supporting each other and developing into a very effective team. In this atmosphere lifetime friendships were formed.

Perhaps most enlivening was the arrival of a new wardroom steward who closely resembled the character of Baldrick, a servant played by Tony Robinson as a foil to the Blackadder of Rowan Atkinson in a the popular television series. Baldrick’s common sense combined with his disreputable appearance producing risible solutions to his master’s frequent plights made him extremely popular. The Sealion’s new wardroom steward displayed equally unsurpassable ingenuity in procuring extras for the wardroom. Many a supply officer of a warship berthed near Sealion must have wondered where their wardroom langoustines, fillet steaks or fresh strawberries had disappeared to, while the recipients of this cunning turned a Nelsonic blind eye.

For the remainder of the commission, Sealion undertook routine submarine work which more often than not involved acting again as the loyal opposition in exercises. Some of these were of large scale, including a NATO exercise in which a dozen merchant ships had been chartered to act as a transatlantic convoy.

The new captain proved somewhat accident-prone; early in his tenure of command Sealion struck the jetty when berthing in Portland harbour, causing it significant damage. He also had a minor collision with a fishing vessel whilst manoeuvring alongside in Funchal, Madeira, and temporarily grounded Sealion on the horseshoe bend in the River Avon on the way up to Bristol for a pre-Christmas visit in December 1968. She was quickly pulled off by the leading tug but in terms of seriousness none of these incidents were to match that of the following spring.