by James Jinks
In April 1960, the CIA alerted MI5 that it had learned from a Polish intelligence officer, Michal Goleniewski, that at some point in 1951 Polish intelligence had recruited an agent in the British naval attaché’s office in Warsaw. MI5 quickly identified Houghton as the prime suspect and placed him under surveillance. By July 1960, he had led MI5 to ‘Lonsdale’, who in turn led MI5 to an antiquarian bookseller and his wife, Peter and Helen Kroger, American KGB illegal agents acting as Lonsdale’s radio operators and support team and responsible for transmitting the information to Moscow.223 The Portland Spy Ring, as the group was later known, was convicted in March 1961. Houghton and Gee received 15 years each, the Krogers 20 years and Lonsdale 25.224 The Krogers were eventually exchanged for the British teacher Gerald Brooke, who had been arrested in the Soviet Union for smuggling anti-Soviet leaflets, in 1969, while ‘Lonsdale’ was exchanged in 1966 for Greville Wynne, an Englishman accused of spying in Russia. Lonsdale came to be regarded as a hero in the Soviet Union.
It is still difficult to gain a clear insight into the damage caused by the Portland Spy Ring. A 1962 brief on the projected Soviet submarine threat in the 1970s, prepared two years after the ring was closed down, for the Director of Under Surface Weapons, concluded that ‘The Soviets are behind the West in the development of long-range active and passive sonars but it is probable that by 1970 they will have sets of similar performance in use today by the West such as the 2001 and 186.’225 Embarrassingly, the British were forced to explain to the Americans that the secrets of DIMUS had been given to the Soviets before the Royal Navy had even put the new technology to sea in its new nuclear submarine.226
By 1960 the Admiralty was beginning to understand how to work effectively with Rickover. They recognized that he had little time for social chitchat and that he would, as a brief for Duncan Sandys explained, ‘only cooperate with people that he likes … if he takes a dislike to a particular individual, it is a complete waste of time to use that individual to deal with him’.227 Rickover would only unwind, slightly, when in the company of certain people: the Queen, Harold Macmillan, Lord Mountbatten and later Solly Zuckerman, the Chief Scientific Advisor at the Ministry of Defence. With everyone else he was both brusque and demanding. Jack Daniel encountered him once: ‘he grunted to me to get out of the way when he and I met in a doorway’.228 But, as the brief to Sandys also explained, ‘in spite of his very peculiar and temperamental behaviour and in spite of the fact that he is undoubtedly a megalomaniac who considers himself sent by the Deity into this world to see that America remains supreme, Rickover is very anxious indeed to help the British and can be relied upon absolutely to carry out any firm promise that he makes’. But, the brief also warned: ‘it is clear that his desire to help the British does not extend to tolerating any interference with his own programme’.229
Rickover was still unimpressed with how the Admiralty was managing the ‘Dreadnought Project’. While showing Mountbatten around USS Skipjack in October 1958 – a ‘fantastic peep into the future’, Mountbatten later said – Rickover was brutally honest: ‘Admiral, I think your British set-up is lousy … What you want to run a show like this is a real son-of-a-bitch.’ Mountbatten’s reply delighted Rickover: ‘That is where you Americans have the edge on us, you have the only real son-of-a-bitch in the business!’230 Rickover refused to acknowledge Rowland Baker, the new Technical Chief Executive of the Dreadnought Project Team. ‘[H]e would not see me,’ recalled Baker. ‘The second time we met (in the Admiralty Board Room) he again ignored me.’ Whenever Rickover visited the UK to inspect progress Baker took to recording detailed accounts of what took place. ‘I next saw the Admiral late on Wednesday evening at Duffield Bank House,’ he wrote of a February 1959 visit:
He was supposed to arrive for dinner but was late (on purpose?) There were present beside me Messrs. Pearson, Rubbra, Barman, Fawn, Bellings, Pepper and Marsh of Rolls Royce and Redshaw and Storey of Vickers. The Admiral felt the party was too big and was a bit disgruntled. He tried to ring Washington and could not get Lascora, the man he wanted. This made him worse. He did not approve of the billiards. Mandil did try one shot.231
On another occasion, Baker was with Rickover during a visit to Derby and Barrow. On boarding the train in London both men entered a compartment in which two window seats had been reserved for them. Rickover entered first and sat down. Baker went and sat opposite him. Rickover moved to the corridor, as far as it was possible to be from Baker, all in total silence. Shortly before the train departed a man entered the compartment and sat opposite Rickover. After some time he caught Rickover’s eye and said: ‘Pardon me, sir, but aren’t you Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine?’ Rickover asked how it was that the man recognized him, to which he replied that he had seen his picture on the cover of Time magazine and had never forgotten the story of Rickover’s achievement. According to Baker, Rickover was clearly pleased and almost polite for the rest of the day, even nearly saying sorry when he trod on Baker’s foot getting out of the train at Derby.232 But this was a rare display of civility.
By 1961, relations between Rickover and the Dreadnought team had once again become strained and the Chief of the British Naval Staff in Washington was ‘worried … particularly about his very bad relationship at present with Admiral Rickover’.233 On another of his visits to the UK, Rickover and Baker stopped off at the then Royal Navy Air Station Lossiemouth while en route to Dounreay, where the Captain of the Air Station, Michael (later Vice Admiral Sir Michael) Fell and his wife, Joan, decided to host a dinner party. A young Gunnery Officer, Peter Kimm, found himself sitting next to Rickover at the dinner table. At first the conversation was low key, with Rickover contributing little or nothing to it. Then, about halfway through the first course of shrimp cocktail Rickover suddenly came alive and said to Kimm: ‘Why are you here? Why aren’t you home studying?’ The table went quiet. ‘I’ve been invited to meet you, sir,’ replied Kimm. Rickover took another spoonful of shrimp cocktail, wiped his mouth, looked again at Kimm and said, deliberately and slowly: ‘I’ve got you figured out. You are an effete young English lord. You are interested in nothing but your fitness reports. I wouldn’t have you in my program if you were the last man alive.’ Everyone around the table was speechless as Rickover returned to his cocktail. Captain Fell eventually broke the silence and from the other end of the table quietly told Rickover that ‘you really have got Lieutenant Commander Kimm wrong. He is in fact a very good officer.’ Rickover was unimpressed. ‘If you hadn’t got your best here tonight, you’d be a damn fool,’ he said. ‘I stick by what I said. He is everything I dislike in the English. He is a socialite. He is an effete young English lord. He is interested in nothing but his fitness reports.’234
Another silence descended on the table. Then Rickover once again turned to Kimm and said: ‘Alright, if I’m wrong, prove it. I require all officers in my program to work forty hours a week formal technical studies in addition to their normal duties. Would you do that?’ No, replied Kimm. ‘Ah!’ said Rickover with great satisfaction. Kimm argued that he was not ashamed of his work, that he already led a full and balanced life, that he had a wife and children and that a man needed to re-create himself. ‘You can divorce your wife any day,’ said Rickover before tearing apart every part of what Kimm had tried to say. ‘In short,’ Rickover said, ‘you’re no more than a traitor.’ That was too much for Kimm, who stood up, white as a sheet, trembling with anger and said: ‘Admiral, nobody says that to me.’ ‘Aw don’t be so corny,’ replied Rickover. Another silence descended on that table. ‘Admiral,’ Baker said gently, ‘you really ought not to say that sort of thing to a Brit.’ Rickover backed down, ‘Alright. I take back “traitor”.’ The rest of the dinner went on, with Rickover repeatedly returning to press Kimm. The following morning Kimm called on Michael Fell to apologize for his outburst. ‘Peter,’ Fell said; ‘If you had struck him, I would have defended you at your Court Martial; and if he’d been a British admiral, and you had
n’t hit him, I would have fired you!’235 Such was working with Rickover.
When Mountbatten left the Admiralty to become Chief of Defence Staff in 1959, he ensured that his successor as First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Charles Lambe, was aware of just how important Rickover was:
One very important point is that stormy petrel of the American Navy, Vice-Admiral Hyman G Rickover, arrives next Sunday on a visit to our nuclear propulsion activities. As we virtually owe him the ability to complete DREADNOUGHT two or three years ahead of time with a saving of millions of pounds on R&D we must all keep in with him. In his unbelievable, egotistical way, he has always regarded the First Sea Lord as his opposite number, and went so far as to tell Geoffrey Thistleton-Smith [Vice-Admiral in the British Joint Services Mission, Washington, 1958–1960] that he had begun to doubt whether the British Government were taking nuclear propulsion sufficiently seriously, since they were allowing me to leave the Admiralty before the project was properly through!236
New appointments to the Admiralty, such as Lord Carrington, as First Lord in 1961, were simply told that ‘Rickover mattered’.
As Dreadnought neared completion there was a considerable amount of interest among submariners. When Sandy Woodward passed his Perisher in late 1960, Teacher politely informed him that ‘you’ve done quite well. So I’m giving you first choice of the available appointments in Command. Where would you like to go?’ Woodward told him, deadpan: ‘I’d rather like to drive Dreadnought.’237 He was disappointed and would have to wait a few more years for his own nuclear submarine. The Admiralty had already selected Dreadnought’s Commanding Officer. Born in September 1924, Peter Samborne was one of the early pioneers who had taken HMS Tabard into the Barents Sea in 1956 on one of the Royal Navy’s early intelligence-gathering operations. Samborne’s appointment as Dreadnought’s captain was the source of some controversy with Rickover. When the senior officers of Dreadnought were selected in 1959 they were all summoned to meet Rickover, along with Mountbatten. But the meeting was cancelled, twice, before being reinstated because Rickover insisted on having the final say over the appointments, just as he had done with every US Navy officer selected to serve on board nuclear submarines. ‘On the whole it made the prospect of being caught red handed by the KGB with a roll of film of the Kola Inlet in one’s briefcase seem greatly to be preferred,’ noted Coote.238 Mountbatten eventually persuaded Rickover to change his mind. But when the officers were finally brought into his presence ‘He met us with little grace,’ recalled Peter Hammersley, Dreadnought’s first Senior Mechanical Engineer.239
Alongside the nuclear plant, the US also provided the UK with practical experience and training. While the exchange of complex technical information was difficult enough, the training of personnel – shipyard personnel, shore-based personnel, shipboard personnel – was, according to Admiral Burke, the US Chief of Naval Operations, ‘nearly impossible to solve … they needed the experience which the United States people had accumulated without going through the expense and the false starts which we experienced. On our part the training of additional people put a severe burden not only on our school system and our shipboard training facilities, but also on our normal operating procedures.’ Samborne spent nine months on board USS Skipjack learning about the S5W and several of Dreadnought’s officers and ratings were given about six months’ sea training in US nuclear submarines.240 The US Navy offered to train a total of around fifty officers and men in sea-going nuclear submarines and at dockyards. Officers and ratings were sent to the United States for practical instruction and experience in handling a nuclear-power plant and its associated machinery. Officers then completed theoretical instruction at Greenwich, where a Chair of Nuclear Science and Technology was created.241 Ratings were trained at HMS Collingwood, the Naval Electrical School, near Fareham, and at HMS Sultan, the Mechanical Training Establishment at Gosport.
HMS Dreadnought was launched on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1960, by the Queen to considerable pomp and ceremony. At the post-launch lunch laid on for the Royal Party, Lord Carrington explained that ‘This is a very special occasion for the Royal Navy, which I have the honour to represent, for today we have seen the birth not just of a new ship but of a new era …’242 The Queen also praised Dreadnought as ‘a fine achievement on the part of designers and shipbuilders and a great step in the maritime history of our island’ and paid tribute to the US for providing the nuclear reactor and machinery that ‘had been ably pioneered under Admiral Rickover’.243 Rickover, who was also present, understood that the British were rightfully proud of their submarine. ‘We should be careful not to look as if we were trying to grab any glory from them. She’s their ship, let them have full credit,’ he said.244
Although most of Dreadnought’s internal structure had been completed by the time the submarine was launched, relatively little installation of machinery and equipment had been carried out. Fitting out was completed in a floating dock, where the submarine’s hull was opened up and the remaining items were installed. The fitting-out process, compressed into the two years between launch and start of tests and trials, was a considerable challenge as ‘in every compartment of the submarine there were major piping systems and main cable runs to be installed in what were, despite the large size of Dreadnought, often very congested conditions, with the different trades of the workforce competing for access’.245 Vickers worked around the clock to complete Dreadnought on time. ‘It seemed that whenever I visited, morning, noon or night, weekday or weekend, George Standen, the manager responsible for the reactor and machinery, would be there. No matter when, it seemed, George would emerge from a hatch looking pale and drawn but always in complete control of the situation,’ recalled Jack Daniel.246 Under Standen’s supervision Dreadnought’s nuclear core was installed on 8 July 1962. It was taken critical in November 1962, the power gradually increased, step by step, as a special Reactor Test Group carried out safety checks, including radiation surveys to measure the radioactivity levels inside and outside the submarine.
Sea trials took place in mid-December 1962 in the very stormy Irish Sea. Although designed and optimized for submerged propulsion no one knew for certain how fast Dreadnought would go on the surface. ‘She went like a racehorse,’ wrote Daniel, ‘through her resistance hump and away, swept along on a great wave at about 20 knots with her bow casing dry and her stern well down. I was on the bridge when it happened and could hardly believe my eyes when suddenly the bow came up and the forward deck was dry.’247
Dreadnought’s crew embraced the Anglo-American nature of their submarine, placing a sign on the bulkhead between the fore and aft sections of the submarine that read ‘Checkpoint Charlie – You are now entering the American Sector’. A chief stoker, a veteran of seventeen years’ service in conventional submarines, said proudly: ‘Wherever you go on this boat there’s a feeling of power. But it’s the spaciousness that means so much … when my wife came to look round she said she’d never seen anything like it for comfort: told me I was living in the lap of luxury – and I had to agree.’ Samborne was more realistic. ‘It isn’t cramped, but it isn’t a hotel – we are a warship after all.’248 For the first time a water-distilling plant provided virtually unlimited supplies of fresh water. There were washing machines, improved toilet facilities, air conditioning, a galley equipped with the most modern equipment, including bread makers and pressure cookers. There were three messes – the officers’ wardroom and separate cafeteria-style dining halls for senior and junior ratings. The standard of accommodation was of a quality far removed from any previous British submarine.
THE ‘VALIANT’ CLASS
Thus the Royal Navy had its first nuclear submarine, an entirely new weapon of war. But it was still years behind the United States and the Soviet Union. In August 1960, the Royal Navy placed an order for its second nuclear submarine with Vickers. Its nuclear plant, known as the Pressurized Water Reactor 1, PWR1, or the ‘Son of S5W’ as it was sometimes called, was supplied by Rolls-Royce and A
ssociates Ltd.249 Originally named HMS Invincible, the name was withdrawn after objections were raised on account of the disaster to the former battle cruiser HMS Invincible at the Battle of Jutland (it blew up with almost total loss of life, due to poor ammunition handling).250 The Committee then returned to the earlier suggestion of Inflexible (see here), with Implacable reserved for the third submarine. But, again, an objection to Inflexible was raised on the grounds that the name did not truly indicate the essential quality of nuclear submarines. The Committee, determined to select names with the prefix ‘Im-’ or ‘In-’, settled on Implacable as the first-of-class name. However, a year later, in 1961, the name was dropped and Valiant adopted instead.
