Submarines have been around since 1620, when a Dutchman in the service of King James I of England built a vessel, which was navigated at a depth of 12–15ft for several hours in the Thames. The first mechanically powered ‘submarine boat’ to successfully dive and resurface was christened Le Plongeur (The Diver). It was launched in Rochefort, France, in April 1863 – ten years before Jules Verne created his fictional submarine Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea about which a character describes ‘an enormous thing, a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale’.
For years sailors and maritime engineers had attempted to devise ways of producing a weapon of war that could travel underwater to attack their enemies. Propelled by compressed air stored in twenty-three large tanks to power its engine, Le Plongeur was a super-size submarine. The engine could generate up to 80hp (60kW), enough to travel distances of up to five nautical miles on the surface. Le Plongeur could not travel far or fast, but she was the first of her kind.
The submarine made its first dive the following year, but the engine was unable to cope with excessive amounts of compressed air pumped into it and Le Plongeur ran into the quay. After modifications, it dived to 30ft a few days later. The submarine never managed to dive below 33ft, but if proof was needed that a vessel could successfully submerge and travel underwater, Le Plongeur confirmed it could be done.
As late as 1900 the British Admiralty declared: ‘We are not prepared to take steps in regard to submarines because the vessels are only the weapons of the weaker nations.’ Fortunately, a group of young English naval officers decided otherwise and their exertions compelled the Admiralty to buy early-twentiethcentury submarine technology from an Irish-American designer named John Phillip Holland.
Holland’s first submarine, built by Vickers, Sons & Maxim Ltd in Barrowin-Furness in 1901, was named Holland 1 after the designer. It was while working as a teacher in New Jersey that Holland had developed an interest in the potential of developing submarines for warfare. Sponsored by an Irish revolutionary group, the Fenian Brotherhood, he built a small one-man submarine, which the US Navy bought for $150,000.
Holland accepted a commission from the Admiralty to design an eight-man craft to assist the Royal Navy’s coastal defences. It was equipped to carry and fire three 18in torpedoes and fitted with one of the first ever periscopes allowing men to watch what was happening on the surface from a safe depth below the waves. While Holland’s periscope could turn through 180 degrees, the image appeared upside down.
Powered by a 70hp electric motor and fitted with 60 battery cells located beneath the deck, Holland I could travel up to 20 miles underwater at speeds of 7 knots and dive to a depth of 100ft. She measured 58ft in length with a beam of 11ft. She weighed 100 tons and was lifted out of the water by a crane. The bridge consisted of a handrail and on it was no protection of any kind.
When surfaced she was driven at 7 knots. Fumes were so obnoxious that, as a matter of course, officers and men either fainted or became intoxicated. The wardroom was smaller than a modern-day passenger lift and conditions on board were so dangerous that the Admiralty issued a ration of white mice to be used (like canaries in coal mines) to test the atmosphere. Holland 1 was called ‘the pigboat’ and the men who sailed in her ‘pigmen’. The names were used to describe submarines and submariners for several decades afterwards.
Admiralty top brass hated the submarine, branding Holland I ‘a damned un-English’ weapon of war. Although early submarines killed more of their own men than of the enemy’s, it was no longer possible to regard them as freakish toys.
The first British-designed submarine, known as the ‘A1’, was launched in 1902. She was lost with all hands when the steamer Berwick Castle rammed her off the Nab Lightship in March 1904. But despite these early disasters, the Navy became convinced that submarines had a future and this was confirmed after enemy U-Boats came close to winning the First World War for Germany.
A publication produced for the Admiralty by the Ministry of Information in 1945 to attract volunteers to the submarine service stated:
To the layman, the submarine is a novelty, strange and little understood and the Submarine Branch of the Royal Navy is cloaked in mystery. It is the most silent branch of a silent service, for many of its activities must be kept in secret and some of its finest triumphs will remain unrecorded until after the war. The men who man the submarines must not only be specially qualified and trained but peculiarly fitted for their duties. In wartime they are not all volunteers, but it is rare for a submariner to request to go back to General Service.
British and Allied submarines played a vital part in winning the war at sea in the Battle of the Atlantic. They had helped to cut Rommel’s supply lines in the Mediterranean, supply Malta at the height of the siege, smuggle Allied generals to England and virtually destroy Japan’s merchant shipping fleet in the Pacific. They were used to carry landing parties who demolished railways and bridges, hoping that luck would enable them to return to the submarine under cover of darkness. Submarines were used to creep into the very heart of enemy harbours and blow up warships at their moorings.
By the time HMS Affray – pennant number P421 – was completed by Cammell Laird & Company Ltd of Birkenhead and received by the Royal Navy ‘without prejudice to outstanding liabilities’ at 1600 hours on 2 May 1946, submarines had proved their worth many times over. Like all ‘A’ class submarines manufactured during wartime, Affray was intended for conflicts in distant war zones such as the Far East. Following the outbreak of war in the region, submarine designers were forced to rethink how boats should be modified since existing models were unsuitable for tropical climates or large expanses of ocean.
‘A’ class vessels were specifically designed for such conditions. At 281ft 9in long, a beam measuring 22ft 3in and a height of 16ft 9in, they were more streamlined than their predecessors and could travel up to 10,500 miles at surface speeds of 18.5 knots, and 10 knots instead of the usual 8 while submerged. Affray could dive to a depth of 500ft but could go deeper if necessary without risk of her hull collapsing.
The boats also offered better conditions for their crew of officers and ratings – up to sixty-one in peacetime and sixty-six in war conditions – and although submarines were cramped and claustrophobic, ‘A’ class boats were fitted with air-conditioning and refrigeration, making life inside more comfortable. Most submariners, however, felt the extra half-crown a day they were paid for working on submarines made any discomfort worthwhile and only a few regretted ‘signing up to go down’.
Many perceived submarines as dark, cold, damp, oily, cramped and full of intricate machinery. Edward Young, who joined the submarine service as a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1940 and went on to command HMS Storm, remembered his first visit to HMS Otway at Gosport in his classic memoir, One of Our Submarines:
I was rather disappointed at the fragile and ratty appearance of this submarine. It was so different from the sleek, streamlined craft of my imagination. I was unaware that most of what I could see was a sort of outer shell which filled with water when the submarine dived. The whole of the long, narrow deck, and most of the bridge structure, were in fact pierced by innumerable holes, so as to allow this outer casing to flood when diving and drain away when surfacing. As we were led for’ard and told to climb down through a round hatch into the innards of this monster, I don’t think any of us felt very happy about it.
Once inside, Young was astonished by the size of the boat and the fact that he was able to stand up to his full height and walk about with ease. He found the hull was wider than a London tube train and was surprised by the brightness of the lighting everywhere.
‘In the messes there were wooden bunks and cupboards and curtains and pin-up girls and tables with green baize clothes. I had not expected to find so much comfort and cosiness,’ he recalled.
Affray’s accommodation space, divided between the fore-ends and the boat’s control room, was far from spacious. While messes were crowded places and wooden bunks used by the crew were short, submarine crews were quick to adapt and there were few complaints. In addition to a kit bag, the only other item submariners brought on board was their ‘ditty box’ – a plain, unpainted wooden box in which they kept personal items such as photographs, a writing pad, plus a sewing and wash kit.
The bunks concealed one of the submarine’s most vital systems – half of the boat’s 224 large lead-acid batteries, each weighing half a ton, which powered the submarine while submerged and supplied power to numerous auxiliary circuits. One hundred and twelve batteries hidden beneath the accommodation section and held in place with asbestos string, supplied the starboard switchboard and main motor while the remainder, located underneath the heads (toilets) and washroom, also supplied the main motor and port switchboard.
Officers and chief petty officers had their own bunks near their wardroom, but junior ratings wishing to sleep after a long watch sometimes had to search for a ‘hot bunk’ – a nice warm bed recently vacated by the man coming on watch. Newly joined submariners quickly learned not to be too fastidious about sharing. Not that it mattered as everyone on board hummed with the same all-pervading smell of diesel fuel which clung to clothing in the open air and on shore.
The captain was the only person on board with space to himself – a small watertight cylindrical shaped ‘room’ positioned inside the conning tower, allowing him to gain access to the bridge or the control room equally quickly. Most captains hated this arrangement, preferring to live in the wardroom with other officers where they could be in touch with everything going on – even while asleep.
Other ‘A’ class innovations included an all-welded hull, radar that could be worked from periscope depth and a night periscope. The submarines were only marginally quieter than their predecessors. Engine noise has always been a dangerous thing in submarines, allowing them to be detected by the enemy or quickly located thanks to anti-submarine sonar systems. ‘A’ class boats, however, were hardly silent beasts. Thanks to the complexity of their engines, there was no part of the boat that officers and ratings could escape for peace and quiet. Over time, submarine crews became used to the thundering mass of metal and machinery and after a while they hardly noticed the continual engine churn night and day, above water and while submerged.
Affray could carry a larger weapon load than other conventional submarines, avoiding any need to return to base from far-flung patrol areas every time its torpedoes had been fired. Its bow section was taken up by six 21in torpedo tubes (two positioned externally) and a stern compartment fitted with four 21in diameter tubes. A further four torpedo tubes – two of them external – were positioned in the stern of the boat. Each of the twenty torpedoes on board weighed around one and a half tons and carried an 805lb explosive charge. They were moved from their storage space into the firing tubes using chains, block and tackle and a great deal of sweat and muscle from the crew.
The forward torpedo stowage compartment served as the boat’s community centre. It was here that films were screened and church services held on Sundays at sea. The captain conducted services as an unpaid parson with the off-watch crew crammed into the section in between and all around torpedo tubes. The area was also one of Affray’s main escape compartments with an evacuation hatch positioned amidships. If crew needed to evacuate from their boat quickly in an emergency, they would hastily don specially designed Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus – invented by Sir Robert Davis in 1910 and better known as DSEA – and while the compartment was flooded to equalise pressure and allow the hatch to be opened, they would breathe pure air from an in-built system in the apparatus.
Affray’s control room was positioned directly beneath the conning tower and contained practically everything necessary to dive and navigate the submarine. To a newcomer, the space was a confusion of pipes, valves, electric wiring, switches, dials, wheels, levers, pressure gauges, depth gauges, junction boxes, navigational instruments and other mystery gadgets covering every inch of the area apart from the floor.
Diving and surfacing was a simple procedure. Like all submarines, Affray rose on the air in its main ballast tanks, which ran along the hull on the outside of the boat. Large free-flood holes in the bottom were always open and as soon as the main vents were hydraulically released from the control room, supporting air was released and water flooded the tanks to take her underwater. The main vents were shut when fully submerged allowing the boat to return to the surface at any time by blowing water out of the main ballast tanks using high-pressure air injection.
On-board WCs – known as ‘the heads’ – and washrooms were positioned alongside a passageway leading to Affray’s engine room. The submarine was equipped with two fresh-water distillers, but they used too much electric power to run continuously and water was always in short supply while on patrol. On longer patrols it was rationed to one gallon per man per day for all purposes, including cooking and washing up. There was no spare water for bathing and crew had to rinse dirt, oil and grease from their hands in a communal bucket before undertaking a more thorough wash in one of the washroom’s steel basins. Crew members on long patrols rarely washed, as the lyrics of a popular submariner’s song testifies:
For I don’t give a damn wherever you’ve been,
Nobody washes in a Submarine.
The Navy think we’re a crabby clan,
We haven’t had a wash since the trip began.
We’ve been at sea three weeks or more,
And now we’re covered in shit galore,
Our feet are black where they once were pink,
Three blokes already have died of the stink.
We hid them in the fore-end where they couldn’t be seen
For to throw them in the sea meant they might have got clean.
The heads on ‘A’ class boats were better designed than sewerage disposal systems found in other submarines where contents had to be blown directly into the sea by ‘pulling the plug’. This occurrence occasionally failed when sea pressure overcame blowing pressure and was known as ‘getting your own back’. Affray was fitted with a sewerage tank into which all heads drained and this was blown periodically, usually at night where there was less risk of bubbles being spotted on the surface.
A small galley catered for officers and ratings and a single chef was kept busy for the duration of a patrol cooking three daily meals plus numerous ‘brews’ of strong tea. Bread loaded on board at the start of a long patrol quickly went stale, so the cook was required to bake fresh bread at regular intervals, filling the submarine with a welcome aroma that made a pleasant change to diesel and oil fumes.
Despite on-shore rationing, food served on submarines was plentiful and filling and every on-board cook had his own ‘signature dish’ to break up the monotony of tinned pie and mash. Favourites served on Affray by Cook Bob Smith included ‘Elephant’s Footprints’ (diced spam dipped in batter and deep fried until crisp), ‘Kye’ (a drink for anyone feeling a need to put extra hairs on their chest, made from cooking chocolate, condensed milk, boiling water and sugar all mixed together), ‘Pussers Pot Mess’ (a great delicacy made from tinned stewing steak, potatoes, tomatoes, baked beans and tinned spaghetti mixed in a large pot, heated ‘until festering’, served in a mug and eaten with a spoon), and ‘S**t on a Raft’ (kidneys cooked in Worcester sauce, mustard, butter, cayenne pepper, mushroom ketchup and eaten with bread which had been swimming in a fat fry).
Submarine meals were hardly haute cuisine, but hungry men working aroundthe-clock on watch were glad to be served anything hot and with a bit of flavour. There was little waste and rarely any leftovers. Officers ate meals in their own wardroom, sitting at a dining table covered with a cloth, and were served by a steward, while ratings consumed food anywhere available to them, often perched on a bunk or standing next to a table covered with charts or navigational equipment. Ratings queued in the passageway for meals, ate their food, returned plates and cutlery for washing and returned to work.
Following meal breaks, the highlight of any submariner’s day was his daily tot of rum, one of the longest unbroken traditions in the history of the Royal Navy and dating back to the days of Lord Nelson. Each day sailors and submariners were served 1/8th pint of neat ‘Pusser’s Rum’ – a blend specially made for the Navy – kept under lock and key in a wardroom cupboard. Officers were allowed to swap rum rations for spirits and pink gin (gin mixed with Angostura Bitters and tonic water if you could get it), a popular substitute in the 1950s.
Any free time on a submarine at sea was spent reading, writing letters home or playing cards or board games including cribbage, dominoes, draughts or chess. The most popular game was ‘Uckers’, played by four submariners using a traditional Ludo board and two dice instead of one. The rules were more complicated than Ludo and winning teams became submarine heroes until knocked off their pedestal by the next winning team.
Once meal times were over, it was back to work in the noisiest part of the boat for many crew members, a compartment shared by the engine room and motor room. Powering Affray on the surface were 8-cylinder, 4-stroke supercharged Admiralty pattern diesels, which thundered around the clock. The motor room was where speed and direction of the main motors – ahead or astern – were controlled as well as battery charging and the supply to auxiliary circuits. When submerged, Affray was powered by twin direct-drive English Electric motors.
As well as acting as a torpedo stowage compartment and tube space similar to the forward section, the after end also provided additional living quarters. Space in this section was much sought after, being as far away as possible from the engine room and the officers. It offered a small amount of privacy – the ultimate luxury in Affray.
Although life on board a submarine was far from comfortable, most submariners loved the life they had chosen to follow. As volunteers, they had signed up for the submarine service, although many claimed that the extra daily half-crown paid to members of the submarine service was the main attraction.
‘Underneath the Surface’, a popular song among submariners in the 1950s and sung to the tune of Flanagan & Allen’s ‘Underneath the Arches’, captured how most submariners felt about the service they were proud to have joined:
Big ships we never cared for,
Destroyers they can keep.
There’s only one place that we know
That is deep down deep.
Underneath the surface
We dream our dreams away,
Underneath the surface,
On battery-boards we lay.
There you’ll always find us,
Tired out and worn,
Waiting for the Coxswain to wake us
With the sound of the Klaxon horn.
Then we all get busy,
The Tiffies and the ‘Swains’,
Working vents and blows and hydroplanes
And when the panic’s over
We’ll get it down again;
Underneath the surface
We dream our dreams away.
(‘Tiffies’ is an abbreviation of the rank ‘Artificer’ and ‘Swains’ an abbreviation of ‘Coxswain.’)
Work constructing Affray commenced at Cammell Laird’s yard on 16 January 1944 and the submarine was launched on 12 April 1945. Under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander E.J.D. Turner, the boat was allocated to the 3rd Submarine Squadron on 5 November 1945, based on the submarine depot ship HMS Montclare at Rosyth. It was here just sixteen days later that Affray experienced the first of many mechanical problems that would disrupt her service life over the next five and a half years.
During sea trials in the Firth of Forth, Affray’s number one battery flooded without warning forcing her to return to Cammell Laird for investigation. Over the next three months, Affray underwent a series of tests and alterations before being finally accepted into service on 2 May 1946 by which time the war was over and the submarine saw no armed combat, making her motto ‘Strong in Battle’ unproven and redundant.
The mechanical breakdowns continued. On 3 September she needed another new battery and again returned to Birkenhead where she entered the yard for a week between 6–12 October.
Later that month Affray was assigned to the 4th Submarine Flotilla in Sydney, Australia, as part of the British Pacific Fleet, which included other ‘A’ class submarines Amphion, Astute, Auriga and Aurochs. En route in the Atlantic, Affray reported defects in her starboard supercharger and portside air compressor that would need attention once she entered harbour at the South African port of Simonstown, near Cape Town. Despite her mechanical problems, Affray smashed the UK–South Africa submarine speed record travelling both underwater and on the surface.
It would take Affray another four months before she finally arrived in Sydney. At Simonstown she was assigned to anti-submarine exercises during which excessive wear to her stern bushes caused Affray to enter dock once again for another month of repair work. Her crew were delighted. South Africa in December 1946 and January 1947 was a marvellous place to be. Unlike at home, the climate was warm and sunny, there was no rationing, the beer was cheap and officers and men from the submarine soon made friends with nurses from the local naval hospital.
When Affray arrived in Colombo, Ceylon, on 1 March 1947, she entered dry dock for a further week of maintenance followed by another two weeks at the naval dockyard in Singapore for repairs to her stern bushes. After visits to five different Japanese seaports and Hong Kong over a five-month period, Affray returned to Singapore for a partial refit on 13 September and finally arrived in Sydney on 7 April 1948.
It had been a long voyage to the other side of the world and Affray’s crew had plenty of time to get used to the sunshine and taste of Australian beer over the next few months that the submarine was based at the naval dockyard. Several crew members were discharged while Affray was in Sydney and some remained behind to become new Australian citizens.
By October 1948, Affray had returned to British waters, travelling home via Singapore, Colombo, Aden, Malta and Gibraltar. On the voyage home she had a most unusual encounter. While cruising on the surface off the coast of Portugal, a whale suddenly rose up in front of the submarine. Unable to stop in time, Affray smashed into the beast at full speed, cutting the unfortunate mammal in half. The submarine, however, was undamaged.
Back in home waters, Affray was now part of the 5th Submarine Flotilla based at HMS Dolphin in Gosport. June 1950 found her in the Norwegian ports of Galesund, Bergen and Haugesund before returning to Manchester on 7 July, where the crew were allowed to invite wives, parents and girlfriends on board for a tour of the vessel, followed by tea on shore.
By now Affray had covered 51,000 miles criss-crossing the globe. In December 1948 she had participated in her first exercise in home waters, Exercise Sunrise, and on 22 July 1950 she took part in Exercise Seaweed, carrying a group of trainee officers out to sea in simulated wartime conditions. By now Affray had her fourth commanding officer, Lieutenant Leafric Temple-Richards, and the training exercise went without a hitch. Nine months later Affray would participate in a similar training exercise with another commanding officer in charge. It would be her last voyage and she would never again return to Gosport.
After its defeat of The Netherlands in 1940, the German Navy discovered that a Dutch submarine squadron had been experimenting with an underwater ‘breathing device’ called a schnorchel or ‘snort’ system. This took the form of a long steel tube with a head valve at the top to prevent the entry of seawater when raised and a hull valve where the induction system entered the engine room. While on the surface, engine exhaust gases passed through muffler tanks at water level, but when snorting underwater, the gases had to be taken up through an exhaust mast whose open end was a few feet below the surface. At the same time, fresh air was drawn down into the vessel through a separate tube contained within the snort mast system. The Germans stole the idea and further developed it for their U-boats.
A 35ft long tubular snort mast was fitted to the hull by a large flange and secured to a cradle when not in use. It could be raised and lowered pneumatically from the engine room and self-locked into both positions. At the point where the air intake entered the hull was a bulbous casting housing the main induction valve and concealed from view. A float valve was designed to close automatically whenever the submarine dropped below periscope depth.
The Royal Navy claimed the snort mast as ‘a first’ for Britain, but failed to mention that it was invented for the Dutch navy and adopted by the Germans. It dramatically altered the amount of time submarines could remain underwater. During trials at the end of the 1940s, a British submarine fitted with a snort mast remained submerged for forty days. In 1949 all ‘A’ class vessels were fitted with snort masts, manufactured at the Vickers-Armstrong factory in Barrow-in-Furness.
Snort masts were regarded as a wonderful invention, but in 1951 they had some serious flaws that needed to be ironed out. Frequently, submarines cruising at periscope depth with the snort mast raised encountered swell, causing back pressure to direct water flooding down through the exhaust tube. Water could also enter the snort induction hull valve so rapidly that it could sink the submarine. The need to thoroughly train crews about correct usage of snorting equipment was paramount in the submarine service. Used and monitored correctly when raised, snorting apparatus allowed submarines to do things never thought possible beneath the sea ten years before. Used incorrectly by busy or inexperienced crew in the engine room, the snort could quickly send a submarine to the bottom of the sea.
Another drawback to the snort mast was the partial vacuum that ran throughout the entire submarine while snorting, because the engines drew air from inside the boat as well as down the snort tube. There were limitations on the level of vacuum permitted as any long-term change in conditions within the submarine placed pressure on the crew’s ears and hearing.
Affray received its own snort mast in January 1950 and at the same time lost its 4in gun and 20mm anti-aircraft weapon to create more room for the new device. The mast and its hoisting gear was fixed to the port side of the aft deck and when not in use, laid flat along the deck and locked into position in a ‘collar’ on one side of the conning tower.
Her mechanical problems, however, continued.