The last night before patrol was spent either on watch on board the submarine (unlucky) or ashore in Helensburgh (lucky) in the Imps – the Imperial Hotel – getting fully inebriated one last time before coming back on board by midnight and waking up with a hangover and a fried breakfast before setting sail. I experienced both over the years, and the evening out could either go very smoothly or it could be a night to remember for all the wrong reasons. Travelling back in a taxi on one occasion, very much the worse for wear, things were not quite right with one of the passengers, who was getting more and more annoyed with the driver. This passenger, a leading radio operator, hailed from the blue – Rangers – half of Glasgow, and he’d noticed some mini green-and-white-hooped boxing gloves hanging from the taxi driver’s rear-view mirror, showing his support for rivals Celtic. He didn’t wear that well, so he decided to set the driver’s head on fire with a Zippo lighter from the backseat. Luckily, he was overpowered by the rest of us. I shudder to think what he would have done to me if I’d mentioned to him the Irish Catholic side of my family. Some things are best left unsaid.
On another drunken evening I was apprehended by two burly policemen for the classic sailor misdemeanour of pissing in a public place (well, not really, it was 30 yards down a back alley. I did at least try my best). The coxswain, who was out with me, told the police they had to let me go as I was driving the boat and was the only person who could manoeuvre her through the Rhu Narrows. All complete nonsense, of course, but it did the trick. Plod let me go and I avoided time in a prison cell the night before departure. The coxswain was surprisingly gracious about it and saw fit not to tell the captain, so I got away with it completely.
As QM, dealing with full-on, pissed-up sailors returning to the boat could be hard work – making sure they didn’t fall overboard, start any fights, abuse the MOD police (easier said than done) or indeed give me any grief while getting back on board. Lots of us single guys used to volunteer to keep watch on the last night before a patrol to let husbands see their wives for a final time before they headed off to sea. It seemed like the right thing to do. To be brutally honest, given that service life involved being separated from loved ones for a very long time, I found it remarkable that any marriage could survive. The Submarine Service had the highest rate of divorce throughout the whole of the armed forces, but even so, many stood the test of time. It certainly took a remarkable type of woman to put up with a submariner as a husband.
As well as spending as much time as possible getting hammered, the last few days were dedicated to storing last-minute provisions, with engineers working overtime back aft to ensure that the reactor was fully operational and ‘critical’ – a confusing term in modern-speak, meaning it was creating enough nuclear fission to generate the power to propel the boat and run the life-support and other systems. This was crucial for obvious reasons; if the reactor was not running properly at sea, the submarine would have no power and be unable to function without using the diesel back-up, which would have been virtually impossible at periscope depth. Recharging the diesels was noisy and involved plumes of smoke coming out of the mast; not great if you’re meant to be undetected on deterrent patrol. It had been done before, however. On Resolution’s first patrol she’d had problems with her CO2 scrubbers not working correctly, so had spent a lot of time snorting at periscope depth to reboot the atmosphere throughout the boat. It could have endangered the very secrecy of the deterrent before it had even begun, but luckily for all, the boat remained undetected for the duration of the patrol.