By the time Affray entered HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, for a major refit on 8 May 1950, she was an exhausted boat. Since entering service four years previously, she had travelled to the other side of the world and back, clocked up tens of thousands of miles and was badly in need of substantial repairs.
While still in the dockyard, Affray’s commander, Lieutenant Leafric Temple-Richards, received orders to sail and participate alongside other European navies in joint manoeuvres in Atlantic and Mediterranean waters between 1 September and 7 December 1950. Exercises in home waters were designated ‘The Autumn Cruise’. Once Affray arrived in Gibraltar the submarine would be taking part in Exercise Crafty Corsair involved in manoeuvres spread across long days at sea and shorter ones back in Gibraltar.
It was during the Portsmouth dockyard period that experienced crew members began expressing serious concerns about Affray’s mechanical and structural condition. One of them was Chief Petty Officer Engine Room Artificer 2nd Class David Bennington – known to his pals as Jim – who sent regular letters to his father, Oscar, in Ilfracombe, Devon, with news about his work in Affray’s engine room while in the dockyard. Bennington had joined the Navy straight from school at the age of 15. In a letter written shortly before Affray headed into the Atlantic, he wrote:
Another full day of work today right up to 10 o’clock and will be at it all day tomorrow, too. We must be ready for sea on Monday to exercise with the French and the Portuguese navies . . . whether we will be ready in time is very doubtful as the deeper we get into this job the worse it becomes. As far as I can see these engines have had their time. It’s come to the stage now when I wonder what the devil is to happen next. I’m sorry for the engineer, I think he is very, very fed up and he does work extremely hard. Well, from now on until we reach home, all I can see is piles of work in front of us . . . I shouldn’t be surprised if this boat pays off and went into reserve. By this time I’m heartily fed up with it . . .
At sea during the exercise, Bennington told his father in another letter:
I have just spent 24 hours solid working in the engine room getting one of the engines going. We are way out in the Atlantic on exercises and they made us go out with one engine only working and we just had to press on until we got the other going.
In another letter penned a few days later, Bennington described ‘another crazy day, no sleep, just diving, surfacing, attacking and snorting. Water and oil pouring everywhere and everything falling over. I feel just about all in now and everyone is very, very threadbare.’ ‘Falling over’ is a naval phrase used when pistons break down and engines grind to a stop.
The same letter relates to
another awful day at sea – we went off at 5 this morning and after continuous exercises all day we should have been in at 7 tonight. The usual thing happened though, one engine fell over and we limped in on one, and just as we arrived in the other went and we are now left with another pile of work. This is getting serious as every time we go to sea now they fall over. It really is a terrible boat and I feel very sorry for our engineer. When I get home I’ll try and describe scares and pandemonium that reign at times in our engine room. Looking back on them they seem very funny but they are not as funny when they are actually happening . . . I wish they would send us home right away as I think this boat is just about finished.
According to Bennington, Affray’s engines continued in ‘a pretty awful state’ once the submarine arrived in Gibraltar in early November 1950 for the final part of Exercise Crafty Corsair, taking it onto Casablanca for two weeks. In this latest letter home, Bennington told his father:
At present the powers that be are deciding what shall be done . . . She is being used so much that we have no time to keep her in good running repair. She leaks like a sieve and when doing a deep dive the other day the water poured into the engine room faster than we could keep it out, so we had to surface with all speed . . . In my view the blasted thing rolls alarmingly.
Leading Stoker Mechanic William Day joined Affray’s crew in March 1950 and left the boat when she re-entered the dockyard for more repairs in January 1951. His job in the engine room was to raise, lower, open and close the snort mast’s induction tube and he recalled a list of defects encountered on the submarine during Exercise Crafty Corsair:
The starter of the ballast pump always broke down and we had to call in an electrician every so often . . . The snort induction would close much slower than it should have. The reason is because the fixed hollow ram had a leak. I know this because once when I was bending over to do a job underneath the engine room induction, there was always a drop of oil coming out . . . As regards the engine room, as soon as we surfaced from snorting there was always a lot of water in the engine. We had to blow several times to get the water out of the engine before starting off again.
Once Exercise Crafty Corsair had been completed on 16 November, Affray left Gibraltar and limped back to HMS Dolphin, diving to a depth of 300ft for part of the journey. Her crew was ready for Christmas leave, although some would return early to be present when the submarine was again booked into HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, for a full engine refit starting on 1 January 1951. She would remain there for several weeks before taking part in another manoeuvre called Exercise Training Spring with a new commander in charge, Lieutenant-Commander John Blackburn.
Blackburn, age 28 and from York, was an experienced submariner and by 1951 had been in the Royal Navy for nine years. He was the son of a famous seafaring father, Captain J.A.P. Blackburn who had commanded the armed merchant cruiser Voltaire when she was sunk defending a convoy in 1941 and was taken prisoner.
Blackburn was awarded the DSC in 1943 for ‘great daring enterprise and skill in successful patrols in one of HM submarines’. The submarine in question was HMS Safari, an ‘S’ class boat responsible for sinking over 30,000 tons of enemy shipping in Mediterranean waters. The award was published in the London Gazette on 6 July 1943. Blackburn was also mentioned in dispatches for gallantry, skill and outstanding devotion to duty while serving in submarines in numerous successful patrols, often in trying climatic conditions in the Pacific, frequently carried out in shallow or difficult waters and under enemy fire.
After the war, Blackburn spent eleven months in charge of the snort-fitted submarine HMS Token before taking up an eighteen-month appointment on the training ship HMS Devonshire, including duties as a member of the submarine training staff at HMS Dolphin. Blackburn was no stranger to working with trainees and during command of HMS Sea Scout during Exercise March Flight in the spring of 1950 had regularly taken trainee classes to sea in submarines for two days each week.
While on leave in 1944, Blackburn had married a young Wren, Jean Cowan, and now the couple were living in Gosport with their two children, Anthony, 6, and Jill, 4. Their home was conveniently situated close to HMS Dolphin and his new command of Affray began on 17 March while the boat was still in the dockyard at Portsmouth undergoing repairs. An Admiralty report on Blackburn’s character noted that his ‘considerable wartime experience, peacetime training experience and his sterling character’ made him ‘perfectly suitable’ for his new command of Affray.
Work returning the submarine to good health moved slowly during the early months of 1951. Dave Lowe from Portsmouth, who worked as a ship’s civilian fitter apprentice at the dockyard in the early 1950s, recalls that the facility employed non-naval staff to work alongside service personnel – and there were often hostilities between the two factions.
‘Naval staff working up on the bridge sometimes peed on civilian dockyard staff from a “pee tube” – a little device allowing submariners working up top while at sea to take a pee without having to go down below or have the wind blow it back at them.’ Lowe remembers. ‘The tube channelled the pee directly down – and when a sub was in the dockyard, it pointed down to civilians working below.’
Dave remembers that when no officers were present, Navy personnel often went to sleep on the job, or spent time sunbathing on deck. ‘On one occasion I needed to lower the snort mast, causing a group of submarine sailors to come running down looking for the person responsible for spoiling their sunbathing session. Naturally, I didn’t own up.’
There was also conflict between the many different trades working at the dockyard and a general lack of coordination between naval and civilian staff. ‘When we were trying to fit hydraulics, painters would turn up at the same time to do their work in the same place,’ says Dave.
Many repair jobs were conducted by civilian personnel ‘on the note’, requiring a written purchase order be drafted and the Navy later invoiced for the work. According to Dave, if the Navy could short cut this by doing the job themselves or manage with a half-finished job, they were happy to do so, creating more friction with civilian staff.
During this time, David Bennington was still at work down in Affray’s engine room helping with repairs. On 5 February he wrote to his father: ‘I simply had to see the doctor today and he said I had flu and was in need of a rest. I was never so glad to see the last of anything as I was to see the last of the Affray.’ Bennington was sent to hospital and when discharged sent on home leave, returning to HMS Dolphin on 8 April ‘to find that the Affray is still in the dockyard. I am wondering if she will ever get out of there.’ Affray’s logbooks confirm that repair and maintenance work was, indeed, taking far too long. Logbook entries for most of March 1951 show that practically no repairs were completed although there are numerous entries stating that ‘cleaning’ had been taking place.
Able Seaman George Cook joined Affray’s crew from the submarine Amphion on Friday 13 April 1951. He had been loaned out to Affray for two weeks while another sailor was given leave to represent submariners in a shooting contest. In a letter to his wife Joy, George said he had been reunited with school friend David ‘Jim’ Bennington on the Affray. Mrs Cook said: ‘The letter said that they were rushing about cleaning up the boat ready for sailing and while he was trying to clean up the control room, Jim was making a mess with his oil can.’
Electrical Artificer 2nd Class Alexander Duncombe joined Affray’s crew at the dockyard on Monday 2 April. Speaking about working in the engine room while Affray was in the dockyard he later recalled:
We had one or two teething troubles at first, but the main one was the number one battery tank. On Friday April 6 when I was duty Petty Officer, oil was found in the number one battery tank. I put some waste down on a line and cleaned it out. I reported to the First Lieutenant and kept the waste to show the Engineer Officer in the morning. I was told that we would very likely go and have the battery lifted. We looked in every four or five hours after but we did not see any more trace of oil fuel.
When asked how much oil had been found and where it might have come from, Duncombe said:
Mixed with water, I should say about a quarter of a bucketful . . . The First Lieutenant told me that the oil fuel valve outside of the Chief and Petty Officer’s Mess had been refitted while in dock and the fuel might have leaked out through one of the battery boards and so we lifted up the battery board and inspected the tops of the cells. We found no trace of oil on the cells and the seals were quite alright.
Leading Seaman John Goddard was on duty that same night, sitting in the mess with four other ratings. He remembered:
Leading Electrician ‘Slinger’ Wood came into the mess and said, ‘We won’t be leaving the dockyard for a while just yet.’ So we asked why and he said that oil had been found in the number one battery sump. The following day a mass of engineering officers and dockyard supervisors came on board. Discussions were held in various messes between the officers and then we took the batteries out and the various dockyard inspectors and naval engineering officers went into the battery tank and everything was checked out with different instruments.
A series of meetings followed on shore while the crew waited to discover what was happening. ‘At 4’o clock we got the word that we were going to put the batteries back and go out as planned,’ said Goddard. ‘We were most surprised thinking that the problem was so severe that they wouldn’t let us leave the dockyard until it was repaired.’
Following Blackburn’s arrival on Affray in mid-March, other senior officers and ratings began reporting to the dockyard ready for service. Some were old hands who had taken part in Affray’s previous exercise in the Mediterranean and many were surprised to discover her engine still in pieces.
On 3 April 1951 Blackburn received orders from Captain Hugh Browne, Commander-in-Chief of the 5th Submarine Flotilla, that following short sea trials on Wednesday 11 April, Affray would put to sea at 1700 hours on Monday 16 April for a week-long ‘practice war patrol’ in the English Channel. The name given to the operation was Exercise Training Spring and its objective was to provide trainee executive and executive officers with submarine experience at sea under wartime conditions. She would also carry a small number of commando cadets from the Royal Marine Amphibious School, Eastney.
For many crew already gathered, the submarine was nowhere near fit to put to sea. They worked long hours attempting to repair the faulty engine plus scores of other tasks that needed to be passed as perfect ‘in accordance with regulations in the Engineering Manual RN16’ before undertaking trials in eight days time, including at least one dive. Before being released from the dockyard, inspectors also needed to examine her hull, propellers and on-board equipment.
Affray’s popular First Officer, Lieutenant Derek Foster – known to the crew as ‘Number One’ – had his own concerns about the state of Affray at this time. He had served on the submarine for a year and was an experienced submariner with six years’ service under his belt. Aged 25 and married with a son, Foster shared his fears with his young wife, Mary, who recalls:
We were building a house in Petersfield and living in a flat at the time and regularly went up to the new house to dig the garden at weekends. I remember that Derek was so unhappy that weekend and I asked him what was the matter? And he said he didn’t want to go to sea on Monday as the submarine wasn’t seaworthy. They were to take cadets on board who would get in the way. He said that the men at the dockyard were ‘just tatting about with her’. That’s the term he used. It seemed that nobody got on and actually did anything.
This was the first time I had ever heard Derek say anything like that because he absolutely loved the Navy and submarine life. Derek and Engineer Officer Lieutenant James Alston were on board each day during the repairs, which they noticed were carried out rather half-heartedly. They were amazed when one day the ‘brass hats’ came down and said, ‘This boat goes out on Monday.’
Many crew were new to Affray and had never done a ‘work up’ (a team-building practice exercise) which is supposed to happen before a dive. Derek was very unhappy about everything.
On the day before Affray was due to leave the dockyard and go out on sea trials, Bennington told his father: ‘We go to sea tomorrow with half a crew for trials and then go on that big exercise on the 16th. When that is finished we come back into the dockyard for another three weeks as another defect has cropped up.’ In another short note to Oscar Bennington in Devon, his son stated:
What a day it’s been getting ready for sea tomorrow. We have only half a crew and we are taking out twenty ‘subbies’ (inexperienced sailors) in place of seamen, so I wonder what it will be like. I can imagine everything falling over and all in one big panic. I think the boat is in a worse state than before . . .
Ready or not, on the night of Thursday 10 April a small crew brought Affray out of Portsmouth dockyard and across to Dolphin where she was secured for the night. The next morning she was cleaned and enough provisions and equipment for her day at sea stowed on board. Only half of her crew would be taking part, the rest were either still on Easter leave or working their time out on other boats.
As the submarine left Portsmouth dockyard an official report stated: ‘There are no known defects or inherent weaknesses in Affray likely to prejudice her safety and no previous history of recurring defects, breakdown or damage likely to lead to trouble later.’ The submarine’s safety certificate was updated from 9 May 1950 (when she last visited the dockyard) to 10 April 1951.
As far as the submarine’s Commander, Lieutenant John Blackburn, and Commander-in-Chief of the 5th Submarine Flotilla, Captain Hugh Browne, were concerned, Affray was as near perfect as she could be and fit for sea.
Many of her crew felt otherwise.