Under Pressure

HMS Dolphin was the very first time I saw serving submariners. The base was home to the 1st Submarine Squadron and the ‘Oberon’ class submarines, or O-boats, as they were called; these were diesel-electric submarines, Cold War intelligence gatherers also used for Special Ops drops and pick-ups (usually members of the SBS – the Special Boat Service – doing reconnaissance or covert landings). I’d mosey on down to the jetty and gaze at these sleek, stylish boats with their bulbous front ends where the sonar was mounted, wondering: How do people live on something so small for weeks on end? Sometimes I’d wait until the crew appeared, to get a glimpse at what this way of life might do to me. They always looked rough and greasy, with a deathly pallor about them. Doubtless they stank as well, although I never got close enough to tell.

These men were a throwback to the submariner heroes of the past, a tightly knit crew in their own secret world, all members of the exclusive underwater club, with the golden dolphins badge† to prove it. They may have looked gaunt and unkempt, but it was the swagger of their gait that gave the game way, confident but not cocky, men completely at one with themselves and their crewmates. It seemed like a lot to live up to.

HMS Dolphin was very much like going back to school, punctuated by the odd pint or six in Gosport, or over the water in Pompey town centre, in the footsteps of Admiral Nelson himself. One of the nightclubs, I think it was Joanna’s, was a favourite haunt, treading through sticky, beer-slicked carpets onto the dancefloor, dancing to Barry White, Marvin Gaye, Paul Hardcastle and Madonna, with one-night stands a-plenty – the dirtier the better.

The accommodation at the base was four to a largish room. There were no kit inspections, no hassle from the staff, a complete change from the horrors of Part 1 basic training. It wasn’t without its moments, though. In the room next door a trainee submariner from Aberdeen scared us to death one night, returning back to base well and truly hammered, waving a gun around and threatening to shoot someone. We became scared very quickly, and amid all the screaming and panic I found him with his back to me. I gave him a hefty kick behind his right kneecap and he collapsed like an old block of flats being demolished, straight down in a big heap. As he hit the floor the gun flew out of his hand, and we pinned him down until security arrived and took him off to the detention quarters. Just like CPO Jenkins, he was never seen again.

The final stage of submarine training ended with four pressurised ascents of the 100-foot submarine escape water training tank (SETT), the enormous concrete tower that dominates the skyline on the Gosport side of the Solent as you leave Portsmouth Harbour. All the training had been leading to this point, for this was the test, the ultimate trial of nerve. This section of submarine training in the tank had seen a few deaths over the years, and put the fear of God into every young submariner courageous or stupid enough to attempt it.

Before I started, I had to sit in a decompression chamber that sits near to the tank itself to make sure my ears could endure the pressure I’d shortly experience in 100 feet of water. Then I was bundled into the chamber with around half a dozen other terrified souls and we waited for pressurisation to commence.

No one had told me about the hissing sounds as the air rushed in. I sat there holding my nose, clearing my ears and looking like a startled child, praying that we’d get to the prescribed depth pronto. The air temperature increased and I started feeling exceedingly wary of where this was going. Soon enough we reached the required depth of 100 feet and the air temperature equalised. The instructor announced, after what seemed an eternity of five minutes, that he would slowly release the pressure and that the temperature might drop. We finally returned to normal pressure at sea level and I clambered out disorientated, nauseous and nervous; ‘shitting conkers’ is the expression that comes to mind. Next stop, the tank.

I had to make two free ascents from 30 feet below, one from 60 feet and then, to my horror, an ascent from 100 feet, in a fully pressurised suit out of a cramped, claustrophobic escape-hatch based on the type you’d find aboard a real submarine. My nerves were shot to pieces as I clambered into the first side chamber, contemplating my first free ascent from 30 feet. There were around 20 of us sitting in the chamber, which was about to simulate a rushed escape from a stricken submarine. Trying to listen to the final instructions from members of the teaching staff, my mind wandered back to my childhood in the old Victorian central swimming baths in Wolverhampton; I’d be wearing arm-bands and a rubber ring, being pulled along on a rope by an unimpressed swimming teacher with my father looking on in hideous embarrassment, until he’d up and leave to wait in the car, unable to stand the sight of his limp-bodied son. I can’t say I blamed him. Back then I was scared to death of the water, and if someone had told me I would be free-ascending from the murky depths a decade later, my seven-year-old self would have cried uncontrollably and probably pissed himself.

First off, the 30-foot ascent. The water started to rush into the chamber and I tried to clear my ears as the internal pressure equalised with the external water pressure in the tank (around 15 pounds per square inch) at 30 feet. Dressed in swimming briefs, lifejacket, goggles and nose plug, I was in the middle of the queue to get out. Very soon it would be my turn, and my heart was racing. I couldn’t hear anything with all the noise of the water pouring into the chamber. Quickly, in what felt like seconds, the chamber was flooded, with just a small gap at the top left in which to breathe. Once the pressure equalised, the main hatch to the escape tank would open and it would be time to get it done. I was next in line at the entrance, taking a big, deep breath as one of the instructors pushed me under and out into the vast expanse of the tank. I barely had time to take in the surroundings as I was met by two instructors who seemed to take an eternity to let go of me. I glanced around, they released me and I started the ascent. I knew I had to breathe out all the way up, because the volume of air in your lungs increases as the pressure decreases, and if you held your breath, your lungs would simply burst. I pushed the air out and looked straight ahead as I glided upwards for what seemed like a lifetime before I hit the surface.

Next up came another big test – the free ascent from 60 feet, something that filled me with abject terror. Maintaining exhalation from that depth seemed to me a close call, but the instructor informed me that if I ran out of puff, and if I felt like I couldn’t breathe out anymore, then I needn’t worry – I should just keep blowing, as I’d still have 25 per cent of my lung capacity left. Of course, I didn’t believe him. Water pressure increases the lower you go; at a depth of 60 feet, I’d be experiencing 30 pounds per square inch of pressure on my body. In addition, the greater the pressure, the greater the chance of a burst eardrum while equalising to the pressure in the tank. All of this information turned me into a nervous wreck as the water began to enter the chamber in preparation for the mock escape. I cleared my ears, and then I was next. ‘Take a good, deep breath,’ someone bellowed at me as I ducked down and pushed out into the tank. Within seconds a barrel-chested, slightly pot-bellied instructor appeared from a diving bell in the tank to make sure I was breathing out correctly. Meanwhile, in my head I was screaming: Shit, let go of me before I run out of puff and my lungs give way!

Slowly I started to rise, but this time I was really struggling to breathe out – the natural bodily response is of course to hold your breath. I got halfway up and a second instructor who’d been hiding in another diving bell came out to meet me and jabbed his outstretched hand into my rib cage to make sure I was exhaling. I clocked the depth gauges as I ascended, and I realised how deep this actually was. I had to regulate the blow, as I felt I was running out of capacity, but eventually I breached the surface, relieved I’d made it through unscathed.

The final part of these two days of hell was an ascent from 100 feet, with a simulated evacuation from a replica submarine escape tower. This involved climbing into a tiny compartment beneath the 100-foot tower in a hooded pressure suit. I clambered in, having only half-listened to the instructor, overcome by an adrenaline rush and heart palpitations. I couldn’t yet vote, I was about the age at which I could learn to drive, yet it felt like I was putting my life in completely unnecessary danger, as if I’d sleepwalked into this nightmare in the hands of total strangers. The tower closed shut behind me and I was stuck in a minuscule space that was about to be flooded. I guessed that they were checking for signs of claustrophobia and stress, and I saw there was an implement for me to start banging on the pipes with if I couldn’t hack it. Pleasant thought.

I climbed gingerly into the escape hatch, head to toe in a self-contained submarine escape suit; I knew I needed to plug myself into an air pipe that would inflate it as the water came in, making it fully pressurised. Suddenly it was time, and the water started to shoot in, my stress levels becoming almost unbearable as I was squashed into this tower, the suit inflating around me. As the water pushed against me, I tried to clear the pressure from my ears with the help of a nose plug, all the while trying to remember what I’d been told. I recalled all the stories of what could go wrong; at the very least I was expecting my eardrums to burst.

The pressure on my suit was immense now, around 50 pounds per square inch, and bubbles blurred my vision as water rapidly filled the tank. I was terrified beyond comprehension, but within 30 seconds the hatch suddenly opened. After floating out I said my name and RN ID number to the instructor, who had gone to the bottom of the tower to meet me in a diving bell. I was then attached to a pole and shot up the 100 feet of water in around ten seconds. As I was now in a fully inflatable suit I remembered to breathe normally, in, out, in, out, reminding myself constantly that my ascent needed to be smooth, and that I should breathe all the way to the top. I suddenly popped to the surface, almost fully breaching out of the water, then floated onto my back doing a fair impression of the Michelin man, before I was finally led to the side of the pool and handed over to the medical staff for a once-over.

At once terrifying and exhilarating – a trainee breaks the surface after successfully completing the 100-foot ascent. (POA Phot Gary Davies/MOD)

This was both the high point and the most nerve-wracking part of initial submarine training. The Navy stopped all pressurised escapes in 2009 and worked on a simulation basis instead. This seems like a shame to me as it takes away the key element of danger. Although I found it a suitably terrifying experience at the time, which I’m sure pales into insignificance compared with a real-life submarine escape, the retirement of the tank-ascents programme strikes me as an example of modern-day health and safety gone mad. It’s worth noting that in 1987 on board HMS Otus in Norway,‡ two staff members from the SETT team escaped in pressurised suits from a depth very close to 600 feet, a truly remarkable achievement by an extraordinary group of men.

I was told shortly after my final examinations that, subject to vetting, I would be drafted to the 10th Submarine Squadron, which meant only one thing: nuclear deterrence. The 10th Submarine Squadron took their name from the heroic 10th Submarine Flotilla, who performed miracles in the Second World War in their defence of Malta from German forces, by keeping the country in supplies, as well as sinking German ships destined for Rommel and his troops in North Africa. In total the flotilla sank around 412,000 tonnes of Axis shipping. At the forefront of this effort was Lieutenant Commander M. D. Wanklyn, who torpedoed, sank or disabled around 127,000 tonnes of shipping, an astonishing feat that earned him the Victoria Cross and Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He was declared missing in action in 1942, aged just 30.

* Naval training is split into three parts: Part 1 is basic training; Part 2 is shore-side specialist training; Part 3 is at-sea training.

† The dolphins badge is awarded to fully qualified submariners after Part 3 sea training and an oral exam.

‡ ‘HMS’ can mean both ‘Her Majesty’s Ship’ and ‘Her Majesty’s Submarine’, with the context usually giving a clue as to which is meant. Here it’s clearly a submarine.

2

HMS Neptune, Faslane

It was time to head north to Scotland. Far from being an alien land to me, this was where my mother and father had moved for Dad’s last job before retirement, to a small village called Houston, just outside Paisley, near the wonderful city of Glasgow. Dad then worked in Govan. I was going further north-west to Gare Loch, a sea loch in Argyll and Bute, about 25 miles from Glasgow. The loch, around six miles long and on average about a mile wide, is not at all what you might associate with potential Armageddon, as it’s mostly a very peaceful place, almost suburban in much of its appearance, flanked by the picturesque, affluent seaside town of Helensburgh, with its polished Edwardian and Victorian houses dominating the skyline of the eastern shore. The village of Rosneath lies on the western shore, among blue-green hills, and it’s at this point that Gare Loch narrows to just 600 metres wide, at what’s known as the Rhu Narrows, after the tiny village of the same name. Here, at its southern end, Gare Loch joins the Firth of Clyde, providing access through the North Channel to the main submarine patrolling areas of the North Atlantic.

It was further north on the eastern shore that the dominating fixture of the landscape lay in wait for this somewhat nervous-looking, anxious 18-year-old ‘man’. The Clyde Submarine Base, Faslane, had been the home of the British nuclear deterrent since 1968, and was the Royal Navy’s main presence in Scotland. Known as HMS Neptune, I was struck by its razor-wire security fences, the MOD policeman patrolling the perimeter fencing armed to the teeth, and the Comacchio Group of the Royal Marines doing hand-brake turns in their RIBs* as they raced up and down Gare Loch, keeping at bay any unwanted trespassers from the Faslane Peace Camp, a permanent CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) site since 1982.

The base had the usual accommodation blocks, parade squares, offices and training centres, as well as a hospital and massive canteen, but the whole place was geared towards the main jetty and the submarine that was harboured there: HMS Resolution, my new companion, a weapon of war capable of destruction on a scale hitherto unseen in any modern conflict. Its nuclear weapons could deliver massive explosive force, more firepower than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For someone as young as me, this was hard to comprehend. Until that point I’d barrelled through life with a carefree attitude and a cheery sense of bonhomie; now I was about go to work on this most lethal of killing machines.

Before joining Resolution I was security vetted to within an inch of my life by a bespectacled, ruddy-faced man in a double-breasted pinstripe suit in a small office somewhere in HMS Dolphin. The office was well lit and looked particularly unforgiving as I entered: two chairs, his across from mine, two plastic cups and a notepad on my side laid out on a plain white table. Initially I heard footsteps in the distance – sharp, unforgiving strides as the man’s steel-tipped shoes announced his imminent arrival from some distance away, reminding me of Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Am I going to be on the receiving end of those? I wondered. He entered the room, we shook hands and he proceeded to inform me that he was a vetting officer. Vetting officer, my arse. He was a member of the security services based in London, and it was his job to make sure I was of sound temperament and had no skeletons in my closet that would make it impossible for me to serve on the nuclear deterrent.

He asked a wide variety of questions, some about politics, others about family, starting with, ‘Are you a communist?’

‘Nyet,’ I answered in Russian.

That went down well.

More questions followed, about my sexual orientation, whether I liked a flutter on the horses, and whether I could keep secrets about operations and the submarine. Then the Irish wing of my family – my mum’s side – who hailed from the Catholic south, found themselves in his crosshairs. The Troubles were still in full swing – bombs, murder and misery across the water in the six counties – and he asked if I had any Republican sympathies. I replied that the notion of a united Ireland was a noble idea to aspire to, but the way it was being played out on the streets by lunatics on each side was ridiculous.

I detested the way the Irish had been treated by the British, the casual racism that they suffered, particularly after the Birmingham pub bombings; the endless Paddy jokes about how thick they were, told most nights on television by misogynistic, racist comedians. My grandfather was from Dublin. Crossing the water to find work decades earlier, he had grafted all his life and settled in the Midlands. I’m sure he must have witnessed this racism first-hand, but he never made comment about it. I relayed all this to the vetting man, who looked at me open-mouthed and speechless.

Then the final subject surfaced – nuclear weapons – and a series of questions designed to assess whether I was sufficiently sound of mind to be trusted to work in close quarters with a weapon that could wipe out a sizeable chunk of humanity. I, of course, kept schtum, too frightened to speak in case I said the wrong thing. All things considered, it was a topic best not to have too firm an opinion on and I hadn’t really given it much thought until that point, there in that spartan room with a complete stranger sitting in front of me. All I knew about nuclear war came from nonsensical 1970s public information films. I didn’t want my career to be over before it had even started, but presented with the scenario that at the age of 18 I might be party to delivering the most lethal weapon system in the history of warfare and play a role in the destruction of nameless millions was a little off-putting, to put it mildly.

‘Are you comfortable with the use of nuclear weapons?’ he asked directly.

‘Yes,’ I eventually answered.

The vetting man looked me up and down, then jotted some final notes in his folder. A week or so later I was informed I’d been positively vetted to serve my country. My national security clearance was Top Secret.

I presume fledgling submariners would have seen their careers end with a wrong answer. I know for a fact that some officers who had passed Perisher, the notorious Submarine Command Course,† and who had subsequently been offered the captaincy of a Polaris submarine, had declined, as they couldn’t live with the awesome responsibility of having to fire their missiles in retaliation for a Soviet first strike.

Upon arrival at HMS Neptune I was met by two humourless MOD policemen, who proceeded to process my ID card for the base. Radiating machismo, they made it obvious that they were both armed – some sort of machine guns, by the looks of them – but I put it down to them not getting out much. It took more than an hour for them to register that a) I was indeed a human being and b) a new member of the ship’s company. On reflection, they probably needed the guns, as they looked so out of shape they wouldn’t have been able to chase down an intruder. I was led by these two charmers through three gates, all involving bag searches, then onto the jetty where I caught my first glimpse of HMS Resolution.

She lay there motionless, tied with ropes forward and aft, 80 per cent of her bulk hidden underwater. Sleek, black and athletic-looking, Britain’s ultimate war machine had more than a hint of menace about her, as if she knew the punishment she could inflict, quite aware that she could disappear like a ghost and travel undetected for months, armed to the teeth with weapons of unimaginable destructive power.

Resolution was a Polaris submarine built by Vickers shipbuilders in Barrow-in-Furness to the south-west of the Lake District. The other three Resolution-class boats – submarines are never called ships, reflecting a time when submersibles were taken out to sea on the back of ships like boats – in the squadron were Repulse, Revenge and Renown, Repulse also being built by Vickers, the other two by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. The Polaris programme was born of discussions between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that took place in the Bahamas in 1962, and became known as the Nassau Agreement. This ended the programme of airborne-launched nuclear missiles, which had been used by the Americans since the 1950s.

Britain had joined the trans-Atlantic programme in 1960 but had struggled to revamp the newer missiles to its existing squadron of Vulcan bombers, the beautifully designed delta-winged, high-altitude strategic planes that had been Britain’s carrier of nuclear weapons since November 1953. With the withdrawal of airborne-launched ballistic missile systems, the plan was to switch to submarine-launched ballistic missiles, giving rise to the Polaris submarine programme. Britain would have their own submarines but would be supplied with American Polaris missiles. Building of the subs began in 1964, with Resolution being commissioned and finished in 1967, and completing her first patrol in 1968. Along with the other three subs comprising 10th Submarine Squadron’s Polaris fleet, until its decommissioning and replacement by Trident beginning in October 1994, Resolution was the most powerful weapon of war ever built in this country.

With the advances in missile defence made by the Soviets in the 1970s, it was deemed that the existing Polaris warheads were vulnerable to interception around the major Soviet cities, particularly Moscow. The way around this was to develop a system whereby the missiles on re-entry would launch a multitude of decoys and counter-measures that would offer too many incomprehensible targets, thus overwhelming Soviet anti-ballistic missile defences while the real warheads slipped through. This became known as the Chevaline Warhead System, and had been kept in strict secrecy by successive Labour and Tory administrations. It was a wholly British design and represented a fundamental shift away from methods used in the American programme. By 1982, Britain, with this new warhead in place, had a fully independent deterrent missile system.

Longer than a football pitch, narrow and forbidding, HMS Resolution lay silent as death as I looked on – no machinery running, no sailors or stores being loaded on board, no hustle and bustle in the neighbouring support depots, just quiet and still. Even Gare Loch was motionless – no birds or wildlife, only the tiniest swell lapping against her bow as if in reverence to this huge, black leviathan. She was a killing machine – everyone in this place knew it, most of all me. I was extremely nervous, almost a wreck by this point. On the jetty next to the submarine I exchanged forced pleasantries with the quartermaster (QM), the seaman in charge of the boat’s security.

As he checked my name against the list of names permitted on board that day, I detected a Mancunian accent. I knew full well that if your name wasn’t down, you weren’t coming in. Had even the First Sea Lord – the highest ranking officer in the Navy – come a-calling unannounced and wasn’t booked in for the day, he’d have had a long night waiting up top freezing his nuts off. Nothing was compromised at any point; clockwork and military precision were the order of the day as the security of the boat was paramount. My cockiness on passing Part 2 submarine training five weeks earlier had quickly dissipated, and it was with a deep sense of unease that I made my first steps across the gangway and prepared to go on board.