There was egg on the faces of Admiralty officials on the morning of Thursday 19 April when they read the front page of the Daily Mirror. The paper’s headline ‘Six Mysteries of the Affray’ sought answers to questions that many readers across the country were also asking that morning – why was the Navy, with all its ships, technology, experience and know-how, unable to resolve a series of mysteries surrounding the submarine’s disappearance? The paper challenged the Admiralty to address each mystery in turn:
1. The Affray was equipped with marker buoys, which could be released to the surface within seconds if she was unable to rise. Why hasn’t she released any?
2. Why, if she suffered an underwater explosion or hit a wreck or a mine, has neither oil nor wreckage been found?
3. Why has nothing more been heard from members of her crew who were thought to be alive in her control room when signals were picked up by underwater supersonic telephone in the search submarine Sea Devil?
4. Why was there no response to the 12 explosive grenade signals made a few hours later by surface vessels over the spot from which the Affray was thought to have sent out the signals? The explosions were to tell her rescuers were above her.
5. She was equipped with Davis escape apparatus sufficient for every man on board. Why has none of her men escaped by this method?
6. Why have nearly 50 surface and undersea vessels and planes, between them carrying every known submarine detection device and scientific aid, failed to place her position?
The paper added: ‘The fate of the Affray has, in fact, become one of the biggest riddles in submarine history. The only explanation that can be advanced is that she may have lost her trim in diving, nosed over and crashed upside down on the sea bottom.’
The Admiralty had no answers. They had no idea what had happened to Affray and bitterly regretted issuing misleading statements declaring that communication had been established with Affray – claims repeated in Parliament by James Callaghan. Twenty-four hours earlier, the nation rejoiced in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before the missing submarine would be found and its seventy-five officers and men brought to the surface. Now, the whole prospect of saving the men and their submarine had been cast into doubt.
Matters were made worse by rumours in circulation for the past thirty-six hours that Affray’s crew had been captured and forced to sail at gunpoint to a Russian port. It had become common gossip in Portsmouth Dockyard that some merchant seamen had actually seen the Affray in Vladivostok, close to Russia’s frontier with China and North Korea and home of the USSR’s Pacific Fleet. It was also a fact that a Russian warship had been travelling outside territorial waters through the English Channel on the night of 16 April.
Another version of the rumour was that the submarine had been sent on a secret mission to the White Sea – an inlet of the Barents Sea on the north-west coast of Russia – where the Soviet Navy had captured it and the story about a submarine accident in the English Channel was a smoke screen put out for diplomatic reasons. Rumours proliferated to such an extent that the Admiralty was forced to release a statement:
It can be stated categorically that these rumours are without the slightest foundation. All relatives are assured that, if there were the slightest hope of the men being alive, they would have been told by the Admiralty.
We are well aware of these malicious rumours and are most concerned with the effects they may have on relatives. It is shocking to add to their grief.
The stories are, of course, preposterous. It is inconceivable that seventy-five officers and men of the Royal Navy would allow themselves to be forced at the point of a pistol to sail their submarine to Russia. Anybody knowing the interior of a submarine would know the whole idea is ludicrous.
Fifty-six years after the tragedy, Ron Leakey, whose older brother George, was on board Affray, remembers the Russian rumours. ‘Sometimes we wished they had been true because there was always hope that he would come back one day. Alas, it was not to be,’ he said.
Joy Cook, wife of Able Seaman George Cook, said: ‘Rumours about being captured at gunpoint by the Russians kept our hopes up. It kept us going for a while longer. Prisoners they may have been, but at least our men might still be alive and the government in a position to negotiate their safe release.’
Other families and friends of the Affray’s crew also preferred to believe the rumours. The thought of their husbands, sons and boyfriends as prisoners in a Russia gulag were preferable to thoughts of them lying dead at the bottom of the sea.
It seems to have passed everyone’s notice that it would not have been possible for Affray to have reached the White Sea, let alone far-flung Vladivostok, within hours of sailing from Gosport. But the western world’s growing fear of communism and the ‘red menace’ threat was a passable excuse for any unsolved mystery and the Affray’s disappearance provided rumour-mongers with perfect material for their fantastic stories.
Knowing that the Admiralty was dangerously close to cancelling the Subsmash search-and-rescue operation, a Daily Express leader article, under the headline ‘The Flame Burns Low’, told its 4 million readers:
For HMS Affray, the flame of hope has dwindled in these last hours to near exhaustion.
With the grief that all will feel if the fatal pronouncement is made and Operation Subsmash is ended comes a sense of frustration and bewilderment.
For it is on these occasions that the layman realises the vast organisation, the array of safety devices employed to avert such tragedies.
How can they all have failed? The ships, the aircraft have combed and recombed the area in which Affray must lie, with all the instruments of power and delicacy that have been evolved in war for the detection of submarines.
The Affray itself is fitted with a multitude of safety devices, both for showing her position on the seabed and for saving the lives of the crew if the submarine is abandoned.
You would think that in the time that has passed since Tuesday morning the contact would have been made and developed into some hopeful effort at rescue.
Yet the news of sound signals is followed by long silence – a silence which may never be broken.
It is at times like these that the proud ingenuity of man stands chastened, amid the sorrow and despair of the fathers, mothers, wives and children of the brave men the sea has claimed.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin – his control
Stops with the shore (Lord Byron)
Is it true? If it is, Man will never believe it. He will go on striving for mastery, even in the ocean depths.
Today let us honour all men who choose the Submarine Service. And all the women who wait for them at home.
At first light, HM ships Welfare, Pluto, Marvel, Squirrel and minesweeper 1788 were ordered to form the 5th Minesweeping Flotilla and carry out a ‘bottomed search’ of the ‘best probability area, 6 miles either side of her last known diving position’ – a system whereby sound waves were sent through an underwater transmitter on the bottom of the ship down to the seabed. The highly pitched sound – beyond human hearing – strikes the seabed and bounces back as an echo to a receiver. The time taken for the sound to reach the seabed and return dictates depth of the water.
Bursts of sound are fired as ships move forward so that objects on the seabed can be monitored and recorded on a chart. A submarine lying on the bottom would show up clearly as a cigar-shaped shadow. The system was far from perfect, but it made sense to give it a try even though the seabed was littered with everything from large rock formations and shoals of fish to a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon or a stricken submarine a few days late in reporting her position.
By the end of the day the minesweeping flotilla had covered a strip of just 11 miles long by half-a-mile wide and recorded just one possible contact, found to have been too small for a submarine.
At 0840 hours the 3,300-ton merchant ship SS Andalusian found itself ploughing through a massive oil slick in the English Channel. It radioed that the slick was located 10 miles away from The Casquets, a group of small rocky islands about seven miles west of Alderney – for centuries the graveyard of many unwary mariners. A searching aircraft from Coastal Command flew to the area, dropped a marker buoy and the American destroyers USS Perry and Ellison were sent to investigate.
Before the American vessels arrived, a second aircraft flew over the site, unaware that the slick had already been reported, spotted the marker buoy and reported that he had found the spot where Affray had gone missing. Hopes soared once again, to be quashed moments later when the confusion was discovered.
USS Perry and Ellison found the slick to be 15 miles long but narrow in breadth. Sailors on board the Perry scooped up a sample of oil and took it below to be tested. It was discovered to be bunker oil and not the hoped-for diesel oil used on Affray.
During the previous night, the Admiralty had begun the task of drafting a statement containing the news that nobody wanted to hear, particularly the mothers, wives, girlfriends, friends and neighbours of the crew of Affray. If there was no further positive news to report by 1000 hours and once they were absolutely sure nothing more could be done to find survivors from the Affray, it would be released to the BBC, Press Association and Exchange Telegraph news agencies. Once it was confirmed that the statement would be made public, it was agreed that next-of-kin, HM the King and the Prime Minister would be informed one hour before the rest of the world. The draft statement read as follows:
Full-scale operations have been conducted throughout the night and are continuing. In addition to other means of search, sweeping the seabed is now being carried out.
It is with the deepest regret that Their Lordships must state that there is now no reasonable hope of their being any survivors.
The statement was sent to Rear Admiral Raw for comment and he immediately insisted that only the first paragraph be issued to the press with no mention of there being ‘no reasonable hope’ of finding survivors delayed until the last possible moment. The Navy had had their fingers burned badly the previous day. Raw was determined not to let it happen again.
By lunchtime the search flotilla was no nearer locating the lost submarine and at 1300 hours Admiral Power telephoned Rear Admiral Raw and asked if he agreed that ‘a very sad signal’ should now be made.
Where possible, next-of-kin were informed personally by HMS Dolphin staff not necessarily known to grief stricken families. Mary Henry remembers:
The Navy sent a complete stranger to see me at my home in Petersfield and told me to give up hope as my husband Derek and the rest of the crew could not possibly be alive after all this time. I had many friends at HMS Dolphin who could have been sent to break the news in a much kinder way. But they sent a total stranger.
That, plus hearing the news that the submarine had gone missing over the radio instead from a naval person, was heartless. I thought so then and still feel the same after all these years.
An official messenger informed the Prime Minister, still in his hospital bed at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, recovering from a duodenal ulcer operation. As soon as the message had been delivered a nursing sister ordered the messenger out of the Prime Minister’s private room, but Atlee ordered him to stay while he dictated a telegram to the Admiralty that could also be issued as a press statement:
Please accept my most sincere condolence on the heavy loss of life which the Royal Navy has suffered in the sinking of HM Submarine Affray. I shall be glad if you will send a message of sympathy on my behalf to the relatives of the officers and men involved in this tragedy.
King George asked the Admiralty to
please convey the heartfelt sympathy of the Queen and myself to the relatives of all those who have lost their lives in the tragic disaster that has befallen the submarine Affray – signed George R.
In a telegram to Admiral Power, First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Hall, said:
I am most deeply distressed by the tragic news that all hope has now been abandoned for the survival of the personnel in HM Submarine Affray. Please convey to the relatives of all those gallant officers and men who have lost their lives in the execution of their duty the sincerest sympathy of myself and my colleagues on the Board of the Admiralty.
Joseph Francis, the Navy Minister, said that he
trusted that the families of those lost would find some consolation in the fact that they had died in the service of their country while learning to defend it and, as so many other men in the Navy had done through succeeding generations, had sacrificed their lives in the cause of duty. They are deserving of the highest tribute, for they have given all they had, just as men who had died in the war.
As soon as the BBC reported the tragic news, telegrams began flooding into the Admiralty from the great, the good, the powerful and ordinary men and women. They came from heads of state, foreign governments and navies, commercial companies, associations, clubs and individuals across Great Britain and the rest of the world. And after the telegrams came letters – thousands of them – many wanting to know how they could contribute to a fund which would help the widows and children of those lost at sea in Affray.
At 1945 on Thursday 19 April, sixty-nine hours after Affray had dived for the last time, Subsmash was cancelled. The searching ships and aircraft, salvage vessels and tugs, divers and doctors returned to shore after which a systematic search would begin for the wreck of a submarine containing seventy-five dead men, whose pay was officially stopped that day. Affray’s officers and men were officially ‘discharged dead’ on the same date.
The search had cost over £1 million and ships taking part had steamed 24,000 miles and covered an area the size of Kent. They had made 120 underwater contacts, 24 of them wrecks, each one offering the glimmer of a chance that Affray had been found and each one ending in disappointment.
Aircraft and helicopters had flown a total 475 hours on 258 different sorties over the search area. On the way back to the airfield at Hamble an Avro Anson search aircraft developed a mechanical fault over Torbay and ditched into the Channel. The Brixham Lifeboat rescued its crew of four who had managed to abandon the Anson and climb into an inflatable dinghy before the aircraft sank.
In a message to the Admiralty, Rear Admiral Raw said:
The disappearance of HMS Affray is a complete mystery. In spite of widespread sea and air searches in good weather conditions, not a trace of her was sighted. Neither wreckage of a submarine character, nor tell-tale slick of diesel oil, nor indicator buoys, nor smoke candles, nor bodies were seen. It is the considered opinion of officers in surface vessels and aircraft taking part in the search that any of the indications mentioned above must have been sighted in the weather conditions prevailing. It is idle speculation even to guess at the cause of the disaster and the mystery must remain unsolved until HMS Affray has been located and examined. It can, however, be stated with full confidence that submarines of the ‘A’ class, which have operated successfully and without loss for five years in most parts of the world and in all extreme weather and climate, are in every way satisfactory operational ships on the surface, submerged or resting on the bottom. The cause of the disaster must have been an accident; it could not have resulted from any inherent defect in material or design.
Lieutenant-Commander Douggie Elliott, a member of 705 Naval Air Squadron, which had flown multiple helicopter sorties over the Channel hoping to spot members of Affray’s crew in the sea, describes the end of the search as ‘the most disappointing time of our lives’.
David Dyer, a member of the same squadron, recalls the frustration he and his colleagues experienced when the mission was cancelled:
We were crushed, deflated. Of course, we were all looking and searching in what turned out to be the wrong place. So the helicopter maintenance crew packed up their equipment and returned to base in their truck, the helicopter went back to its base at HMS Siskin – and the rest is history.
Gordon Chatburn, part of HMS Agincourt’s search crew, recalls the ship returning to port ‘with everyone’s spirits at rock bottom’. He remembers:
Our skipper, Captain Martin Evans, spoke to the ship’s company over the Tannoy and informed us that the Admiralty had reluctantly decided to call off the search. The atmosphere on board was absolutely dreadful and on entering Portsmouth Harbour our spirits were as low as they could possibly go. Our crew, to a man, realised that seventy-five brave companions would never enter that same harbour again. It was such a dreadful loss of life and the realisation that families and friends of the Affray crew would soon be told that the search had all been in vain really hurt us.
I’m now 76 years old and I have never forgotten the search for Affray and I’m sure there are many others who still feel the same. We thought we could find her, rescue her men and bring them home. Instead, they tragically lost their lives. This is the memory that I’m left with fifty-six years later.
Although search and rescue crews were exhausted and discouraged, they were still determined to find Affray because they knew she was out there. Somewhere.
As the luxury liner RMS Queen Mary made its stately passage from Southampton towards the Atlantic and New York, a passenger named Eric Thompson leaned over the railings and observed all the activity in the English Channel. He knew what was going on and later in his cabin he wrote the following lines:
Salute to the Men of the Affray
Hail Submariners! Gone to rest below,
Not in the throes of battle bravely borne
Thro’ green-tinged depths our signal halliards fly
‘Blow Negative!’ – and rise to greet the morn.
Another silent victim of your calling’s fate,
Where liest now the ‘Boat’ which bore you down?
And we who pass o’erhead and stand and wait
All help to share the burden of your crown.
Farewell, our comrades of the heaving deep,
Bless’d with the key of Neptune’s high estates;
Farewell you ‘Pigboat’ men and may you sleep
In peace below until you stand before the Golden Gate.
So let each one stand stalwart there and proud,
Commander, Coxswain, ratings – British men,
Drop not your heads, but lift them high and say
‘We did our solemn duty, as we saw it then.’
Come to salute! My shipmates standing in to land,
Our island gateway lights have raised their loom,
Whilst, neath our keel the yellow moving sand
Drifts quietly round your mystic silent tomb.