by James Jinks
We’re now in the domain of Tireless’s Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Nick Brooks. He’s thirty-five and joined the Navy as a direct entry graduate after taking a degree in mechanical engineering at Loughborough. Engineers are like gold dust in the Submarine Service. The boats can’t sail without them and there’s a growing market for trained nuclear engineers in the outside world as the UK moves towards constructing its next generation of civil nuclear-power stations. The Navy supplements their engineers’ pay to increase the chances of retaining them. But it’s not the money that keeps Brooks in the Service. ‘There was a shortage of engineers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But I wouldn’t be here now, eleven and a half years later if I didn’t enjoy it – the professional challenge; the camaraderie.’
Manoeuvring Room
The Manoeuvring Room is like a mini-control room in a nuclear-power station with its bank of dials. There are between five and eight sailors in here (with another three in the engine room), and it’s manned twenty-four hours a day in port and at sea. Everything electrical and propulsive in Tireless is controlled from here. This is the most baffling bit of the boat for a visiting layman without an engineering training as your gaze travels over the dials that measure pressures, temperatures and flows. In the middle rests the throttle control panel which converts orders from the Control Room into revolutions of Tireless’s two main turbines.
Every six months or so Tireless’s team train for a ‘scram’ on a simulator in either Devonport or Faslane. A ‘scram’ means the reactor has to be shut down to maintain core safety. The word ‘scram’ goes right back to the very first nuclear reactor that went critical, on 2 December 1942 in the West Stand Squash Court at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field sports ground which housed it. The great Enrico Fermi had a cunning plan to prevent disaster if the core overheated. Cadmium control rods would be dropped down from above. If it happened (which it did not), Fermi would shout ‘scram’ to a man above the pile holding an axe ready to cut the ropes supporting the cadmium. So ‘scram’ originally stood for ‘safety cut rope axe man’.14 Nowadays, the control rods drop down automatically; axes are not required.
Overheating can be caused by equipment failure or by too much load on the reactor. On the right of the Tireless Manoeuvring Room is the Control Rods panel. If a scram occurs, lights flash red and a bell rings. The main engines might trip. The job is to minimize heat and to switch the submarine to battery power, produced by the diesel generators for a few hours and the entire boat goes onto half-lighting.
Tireless’s engineers are reassuringly calm. ‘This is the quiet end of the boat,’ says Brooks. ‘There are normally only eight of us back here.’ We move into his workshop with its lathes, drills and grinders. Here, too, is the white smoke signal ejector for use when Teacher wants to give away the boat’s position to its pursuers. We inspect the gearbox. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Brooks’s people put potatoes in tinfoil and bake them on the throttles.
0325Z. Control Room
Back in the cool though, things are hotting up. The boat is crossing a shallow stretch of water called ‘The Bridge’ between Arran and the Kintyre peninsula which is between 40 and 50 metres deep. The next task is intelligence recovery of the approaches to Campbeltown harbour. It’s going to be tricky to pull it off because over ‘The Bridge’ the submerged geography takes Tireless into an underwater ravine with only just enough depth beneath the boat. Meanwhile, the hunters on the surface are now all after us – the two frigates, the minesweeper and the helicopters operating off the frigates. It’s going to be a testing run to get that photograph and it’s made all the harder for the Perishers because they are navigating without GPS (GPS would be turned off if this was for real). Griffiths does have access to GPS so he knows exactly where the boat is.
As the two frigates above go into their fast racetrack manoeuvre (describing an elongated circle to hunt the sub) and the Merlins dip their sonar buoys to ping the boat, the Perisher in the duty Captain’s hot seat is Lieutenant Commander Sam Owen. As Owen tries to take evasive action it sounds as if one of the Type 23s is simulating the firing of a torpedo at us.
0415Z
You can feel the concentration and the concern rising in the Control Room. Griffiths and Halton are with the navigators. Griffiths looks up, plainly anxious. Three months later, over dinner in London, I ask him about this. Griffiths says the approach to Davaar is ‘an ever-narrowing canyon. He [Owen] was driving himself closer and closer to danger because it’s very steep.’ ‘Were you worried?’ ‘I was. I vividly remember it.’15
In my notebook I record the depth between the bottom of the boat and the seabed becoming a problem as well as the sides of the canyon. A sailor intones the depth at regular intervals in the Control Room like the tolling of a bell. Teacher and Griffiths confer. This is the moment of maximum concentration. Griffiths tells Teacher he’s not prepared to carry on with this bit of the mission. Thanks to GPS, Griffiths knows exactly how close we are to the canyon wall. Sam, the Perisher, does not and thinks we are in a safer place than we really are. Davaar light will remain unphotographed. We’re turning back north and heading for ‘The Bridge’. ‘Quite a lot of risk around,’ I suggest to Ramsey. ‘Yeah. The one who has the greatest risk is the Captain [i.e. Griffiths]. It’s very impressive how he’s carrying himself through this.’ Ramsey recalls that on his Perisher HMS Triumph actually hit the bottom. ‘Captain Phil Buckley handled that amazingly.’ ‘Was it you?’ ‘It wasn’t me. I slept through it.’
0425Z
The tension has eased. The pursuers are heading south. We’re going north. Monmouth is transmitting but she’s further away than she was.
0530Z
Owen and I have a chat about the aborted Davaar operation in the Admin Office. ‘The world according to Owen’, he calls it. It’s plainly been a strain but he’s recovered pretty well. He drifted a bit after Bangor University, working on building sites, but he’s clearly found himself in the Navy and was in HMS Tireless in 2004 when she went under the ice to the North Pole. He realizes this patch of Perisher was not his finest hour:
Owen: ‘I don’t think that run went well. The comfort I’d find in that is they’re not designed to run well.’
Hennessy: ‘But you kept calm.’
Owen: ‘It’s the swan approach. It’s fairly clear what happened. The unnerving bit is not controlling the target. It was St Albans doing the racetrack. The problem was had she turned towards us and charged us. It would have forced us into an emergency action going deep. That would have been rubbish.’
Hennessy: ‘Was this the toughest bit of Perisher so far?’
Owen: ‘Yes … Captain Halton is Teacher’s boss. It’s a bit rubbish when you do a bad run when he’s on board … three and a half hours is an awfully long time not to take a photo. What we basically did was drive ten miles underwater not to take a photo.’
Owen recognizes that he delayed too long in deciding to abort the Davaar run: ‘If I was going to self-critique it’s that I should have stuck to my guns ten minutes before when I didn’t think we could do it. My instinct and gut feeling was that it probably wasn’t going to happen. The maths said we could. But I should have baled out. If we had gone in and taken the photo we would have been detected and attacked again.’ Though he wonders if Teacher used the white smoke to give his position away, Sam is not downcast by the afternoon’s experience. I ask him about Perisher generally.
Owen: ‘It’s brilliant. You never get to do this again.’
Hennessy: ‘Will you be all right?’
Owen: ‘I like to think so. I know I can lead men in a submarine.’
The four Perishers know each other very well by this stage and Sam says they are firm friends:
‘Whatever happens individually on the course we’ll always be friends because of that shared experience. In service there are about sixty to a hundred Perisher-qualified officers. It’s a fairly elite club. Ten, maybe twelve, of them are sea-going. The o
ld Russians knew who had been on Perisher.’
Owen thinks the entire Submarine Service is pretty special:
‘It’s the camaraderie of it. There’s an operational element to whatever you do … We know it’s bloody hard to do. It’s got some of the largest esprit de corps, a lot of band-of-brothers; the lads’ professionalism … And these “T” boats can still compete against the best in the world and it’s the people who enable us to do it. Tireless is home. We were one of the real sneaky boats. Turbulent was the other. Ryan took her on some pretty crunchy patrols.’
As Owen grappled that Saturday afternoon with the depth of the Kilbrannan Sound, the canyon on the approach to Davaar Island and the surface attacks, all of which combined to box him in, not to mention an increasingly anxious Captain Griffiths, Captain Halton, Commodore Garrett and Teacher Bower watching his every move and non-move, I managed a few snatched conversations about submarine life in general with the young men in the Control Room:
‘It can be very dull: ninety per cent boredom; ten per cent abject fear.’
‘The mates carry you through.’
‘The removal from sunlight and society does things to people.’
‘Makes you value your time when you’re at home!’
‘The Bombers [the Trident boats] have a very specific job to do and they do it very well.’
‘These submarines are a lot more flexible – practising beach surveys, terrorist training camps.’
‘For the Submarine Service, the Cold War was the golden age – North Atlantic, Norwegian Sea, Cold War ASW, protecting the Bombers. We were very good at it.’
I have a chance to talk to Ramsey about the characteristics of each submarine. ‘Every boat,’ he says, ‘has a personality. Turbulent was a can-do boat, pretty aggressive. Every CO before me was aggressive. Tireless and Turbulent are real sister ships, doing the same things but in a different style.’
Ramsey reflects on the way submariners have to learn to live together in an immensely confined space: ‘If the world was like submarines there would be no need for submarines.’ He thinks we are cutting it fine with our Armed Forces: ‘180,000 people and two per cent of GDP to protect sixty million people. The Navy could fit into Stamford Bridge and leave room for the away fans.’
Short Visit to the W/T Room
All the communications channels are explained. Very Low Frequency is the primary instrument for receiving traffic. Tireless trails a 3000-feet-long buoyant wire aerial to pick up signals. ‘T’ boats have an email capability that families can use. The ‘V’ boats don’t ‘because as soon as they leave the wall, they are on operations’.
Control Room
Another chat with Alex, the Logistics Officer. He confirms something I always notice on submarines. ‘ABs [the seamen] are a lot more independently minded on submarines. They are given much more responsibility. They take on things. They’re not fazed by anything.’ The duty Captain is now Lieutenant Commander Neil Botting, a geology graduate from Imperial who has served in ‘Vanguard’ class SSBNs and ‘Trafalgar’ class SSNs (he was in Triumph during the Libya campaign). His task at the moment is surveillance of our pursuers and the western coastline of Arran, working towards a periscope reconnaissance of the King’s Caves.
A Touch of Protein
Suddenly a rating clambers down the ladder from the Control Room to the Galley carrying a plate on which is resting a piece of raw steak. I ask Ramsey what on earth is going on? It turns out that Botting had been dithering in the Captain’s chair. It was too much for Halton, who sent a sailor down to the Galley to get the steak. Halton thrusts it at Lieutenant Commander Botting with the words: ‘You need some red meat. Decide! Decide!’ Ramsey captured on film a rather sheepish-looking Botting holding the plate. Ramsey thinks this protein moment is a first in the history of Perisher. Later I ask Halton about it:
‘He was being wet. He needed some red meat to improve his aggression levels. He was getting a lot of hassle. I tried to lighten it a bit. It’s a fascinating, people-watching thing.’
It strikes me as a literal example of the elders of the tribe blooding the young ones. How refreshingly different from the techniques and qualities of most modern HR practice.
A few weeks later, at a Promotions party in the Ministry of Defence Main Building, I recount the ‘protein moment’ on Tireless. ‘Ah,’ says Captain Andy McKendrick, the former CO of HMS Vengeance, ‘the theatre of Perisher.’16 Rear Admiral Ian Corder, Commander Operations at Northwood, is on Tireless two weekends later, the last of the course. Later he tells us he had a similar moment to Halton’s, reminding the dithering Perisher (he didn’t say which one) he was ‘driving a sports car not a Lada’.17
This attitude towards command is admired all over the world. During a visit to a UK-based US intelligence installation shortly before travelling to Faslane, the subject of Perisher’s specialness came up in conversation with a group of ex-submariner Russia-watchers. What’s the difference between your submarine commanders and the British? ‘Balls, balls’ came the unhesitating reply. The explanation? Partly that the US Navy has become more risk averse. But even when it was less so during the Cold War, the Royal Navy’s SSNs would take more risks when up against the Soviet Navy probably, our admiring allies thought, because we had so few boats compared to the American Navy and wanted to bring as much intelligence material to the shared table as possible.
Wardroom
Halton, Garrett and Ramsey gather to discuss the Perishers. Owen, for all his tough afternoon, is judged ‘safe and effective’. Ramsey tells me Teacher didn’t use any smoke on the Davaar section. McLoughlin, who was sitting for a good while between Teacher and the duty Captain, noticed ‘that the tension touched everyone’. Later, Ramsey has a session with the four Perishers. He tells me about it early on Sunday morning: ‘It was all about making the best of it. Example. Direction. Risk. Communication. Teamwork. They’ve got two weeks to go now.’ And it’s plain they still have a lot to do.
This is the first time I’ve slept overnight on a submarine. I’m put up in the three-man cabin; one of two adjoining the Wardroom. There are three bunks on top of each other with almost no headroom clearance. I’m given the middle one and getting in requires a degree of athleticism I haven’t had to find for years. If my things had been put on the top bunk I don’t think I would have been able to manage it. Got to bed about eleven. No film in the Wardroom so quite quiet. Slept remarkably well given that I haven’t been so confined since spending the night with the Royal Marines in a Norwegian mountain snow hole somewhere north of Narvik in January 1978. The movement of the boat is soothing, sometimes rocking gently from side to side and really pleasant when it rises gradually and smoothly to periscope depth and descends again to its normal 30 metres (surveillance exercises went on through the night).
Sunday, 15 April 2012
Wake up shortly after 0530Z. Wash, but forgo a shave. Cup of tea in the Wardroom then up to the Control Room just after six. Tireless is now off the northwestern tip of Arran, and soon to do a ‘sensor drop’ at the mouth of the small sea loch, Lochranza. For Perisher purposes this is an enemy coastline protected by hostile warships. For ‘sensor’ read ‘mine’ in war circumstances. Reeves is duty Captain. Tireless has just gone deep to simulate the laying of the sensors. There’s a frigate around somewhere to the southwest in Kilbrannan Sound. Ramsey tells me it’s the navigational constraints close to a narrow inlet that produce the stress in a Perisher ‘sensor drop’.
There’s a slight shudder as the sensors are ejected and my ears feel the pressure differential. (The sensors aren’t really ejected. It’s just water shot through the torpedo tubes.) Another shudder as another simulated sensor goes out. One more to go then a swift exit from the scene. Luckily the frigate is going south and Tireless is going north so there’s no sonar contact. Tireless is taken up to have a look round on the periscope. It’s as well to check the sensors have been ‘dropped’ in the right place. If they’re more than 100 metres down they
might not work. At 0620Z a fix is taken through the periscope. The sensors have been placed effectively to cover the harbour entrance and the frigates evaded. Andy Reeves has done the job well.
It turns out that overnight Tireless suffered a mechanical defect while I was deep in sleep. A valve needed to be fixed in one of the main engines so the Perishers got some sleep.
Captain Griffiths now has a moment to talk to me more widely about Tireless’s private weekend war:
‘When you’re in extremely shallow water, you can’t go underneath to avoid a collision. It was concentrating the mind [as we approached Davaar Island yesterday afternoon] because we couldn’t duck underneath if we’d been charged. If it does happen you have to aggressively change tack. In training, in the final analysis, we can stick the fin out of the water and talk to the frigate.’
Griffiths’s concern and the affection for Tireless are apparent once more:
‘She’s not a machine. She’s far more than a machine. She’s a home. She has a life of her own – a being with a personality. They’re all temperamental. They all have slightly different ways. Little foibles. Each one has to be coaxed to get the best out of her. The boats settle into the water in a different way. My people know the foibles and how to play to the strengths.’
This is the submarine equivalent of anthropomorphism and deserves a Classical name all its own. It reminds me of how engine drivers would talk about the personality of their locomotives in the days of steam. No wonder virtually all the former COs turn up when one of these boats is finally decommissioned.
0650Z
