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
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