Just when it looked as if news about the disaster might slip from newspaper front pages, a new Admiralty statement ensured that the story would remain there for the time being. On 22 April, it was announced that all fifteen of the Royal Navy’s remaining ‘A’ class submarines would be prevented from going to sea until further notice, ‘pending investigations into the reasons for the loss of Affray’. Construction of up to thirty more submarines at Cammell Laird’s Birkenhead shipyard was also put on hold.
Like the Affray, all ‘A’ class vessels in the fleet were given names beginning with the letter ‘A’ – Anchorite, Artemis, Astute, Aeneas, Alaric, Artful, Alcide, Alderney, Alliance, Ambush, Amphion, Andrew, Auriga, Aurochs and Acheron.
The statement gave little away and the Admiralty refused to elaborate when questioned by the press. However, a top-secret communication from the First Sea Lord, Sir Bruce Fraser, to Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, James Callaghan, is more revealing:
Submarines from the ‘A’ class were stopped from going to sea because further detailed calculations of their stability when flooded and on the bottom showed that if two-thirds or more of the submarine were flooded, she might lie over at such a large angle that escape in the ordinary way would become extremely difficult – and in some cases impossible.
It has always been known (and accepted in the Navy) that if a submarine sinks in over 150ft of water or if she is badly flooded, escape by any means is rendered most difficult and hazardous. At depths greater than 300ft it is impossible to escape and survive. This fact is not generally known outside of naval circles and the public believe that escape by Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus is possible at much greater depths. While the cause of the loss of HMS Affray is as yet not known, the fact that no survivors, wreckage or indicator buoys have been sighted suggests that the submarine was so rapidly and extensively flooded that no escape was possible by any means.
After full examination of all possibilities, it is confirmed that ‘A’ class submarines are operationally safe under all undamaged conditions (surface, diving or on the bottom).
From the escape aspect, it is confirmed that ‘A’ class submarines suffer as compared with other British ships because with their fine underwater lines they have a tendency, if heavily flooded, to take up a large list on the bottom.’
While the ‘A’ class submarines stayed in port, the search out in the English Channel went on using fourteen ships attempting to cover an area of about 1,000 square miles of water. They included four frigates, minesweepers and two groups of survey and salvage ships.
A helicopter and eight naval aircraft from Lee-on-Solent and the naval station at Ford, Sussex, maintained dawn-to-dusk searches. A civilian Handley Page Hermes aircraft equipped with a new magnetic detection device was brought in to fly over the search area and attempt to make ‘contacts’ with any large metal objects lying on the seabed. On its first day out, the four-engine research plane recorded five contacts. By the end of the week this had increased to thirteen with three of the positions designated as priority diving areas.
On closer investigation divers discovered the barnacle-covered wreck of a First World War submarine, remains of a coasting steamer thought to have sunk a century before, a merchant vessel lost in the 1920s, the fuselage of a wartime bomber and a pair of D-Day landing barges all lying in their weed entangled underwater graves. Every positive contact was investigated and divers went over the side in some of the roughest April sea conditions recorded for many years. Every contact was a possibility and every possibility offered the chance of locating the lost submarine. Captain Shelford, on Reclaim, remembered this time as
a tough one for the divers who took incredible risks, often going down in conditions never before thought possible. I saw them diving one night in such rough weather that the seas were sweeping waist-deep over the sill of the big door in her side through which the diving ladders were rigged.
In the huge diving compartment under her fore well-deck, we stood knee deep in water and watched the angry white horses (waves) rearing suddenly from the darkness in the glare of the deck lights and come cascading through the door. The whines of the electric pumps picking up the water and chucking in back in the sea, the clatter of sea boots on the steel deck, shouted orders and curses and the hiss of the compressed air in the diving machinery almost drowned the metallic voice of the diver coming from the loudspeaker telephone. Two hundred feet down in the black water under this fury, a lone and grotesque figure groped his way over a rusted and barnacled wreck and told us the depressing news that once again we had not found the Affray.
One diver nearly lost his life in a watery grave while searching a wreck thought to be the Affray. During one of his dives, Petty Officer Robert ‘Nobby’ Hall, Chief Bosun’s Mate on Reclaim had the unbelievable experience of being blown to the surface from a depth of nearly 200ft after a cable linked to his voice-piece had been wrenched from his diving helmet. The incident occurred when Nobby was about to leave the wreck. His voice-piece cable – allowing him to speak to Reclaim’s crew on the surface – became entangled with a jagged piece of wreck and he became trapped with his feet higher than his head. His voice grew fainter through the voice-piece as he began to lose consciousness in his efforts to free himself.
Nobby managed to tell Reclaim’s commanding officer, Captain Jack Bathurst, that he might just clear the wreck if everyone pulled hard together on the cable. This was done with such vigour that the cable suddenly went slack and instead of finding Nobby on the end, they discovered the mouthpiece wrenched from the diver’s helmet, leaving a hole 1in wide through which seawater began to enter. Fortunately, Captain Bathurst knew what to do, even though communication with Nobby had now been severed. He ordered his crew to increase the amount of air being pumped down to the diver and within moments there was a huge cloud of bubbles alongside Reclaim, in the middle of which Nobby appeared – feet first.
The diver was rapidly hauled on board, unconscious but alive. The fact that he had come up feet first had caused air in his diving suit to blow water out of the hole in his helmet. Had he come up the correct way, he would undoubtedly have drowned.
‘It’s all in the day’s work,’ Nobby later told the Portsmouth Evening News with a huge grin on his face. ‘I thought for a while that I might be a gonner. I suddenly found myself upside down looking up through the hold of the ship. Then I realised that I couldn’t move my head. My chums on the ship saved my life. They sent down so much air that it kept the water out of my suit.’ The brave diver was later affectionately re-named by his shipmates Nobby ‘All In A Day’s Work’ Hall.
On Sunday 22 April special prayers were offered and silent tributes paid to Affray’s officers and ratings in churches and chapels in Portsmouth and Gosport. All ceremony was cancelled during a visit to HMS Sheffield by the Duchess of Kent at Portsmouth. Royal salutes were to have been fired from naval batteries around the port while warships should have been dressed overall in special colours. But pomp and ceremony was put to one side while the shadow of mourning for Affray continued to hang over the country.
The following morning, Kirkcaldy Police in Scotland was alerted that two notes written on the back of empty cigarette packets stuffed inside a bottle had been found on Pathhead Sands. The first note read:
We have been submerged for eight days. Air supply exhausted. Two of the crew ill, six of the crew dead. Fumes in escape hatch. Signed P.O. Nigel. Captain is dead, has been for three days. Please send help. HMS Affray.
The second note read:
62 degrees 6 mins W of Bass Rock. Escape hatch out of order.
The police alerted the Flag Officer Scotland at the HM Naval base on the Clyde, who forwarded the information to the Admiralty with the following note: ‘This is considered to be a disgraceful hoax and the information is communicated in view of possible press enquiries.’
The ban on ‘A’ class submarines leaving port was announced in Parliament a few days later by Callaghan, who spoke about the escape options available to Affray’s crew members. He conveniently avoided mentioning that it would be impossible to escape from a submarine stranded in over 300ft of water. This was too much information for the Affray widows and children left behind and hundreds of submariners about to return to ‘A’ class submarines and dive deep beneath the waves.
Out at sea a diver gazed from the deck of Reclaim and told the Daily Mail: ‘Somewhere down there is the Affray. And we mean to find her.’