One week after the disaster had seized the headlines, the Festival of Britain was back on the front pages again. The fact that a large flotilla of ships and aircraft were still engaged in attempting to find the missing submarine was no longer news and only a few smaller stories about the Affray search found their way onto the inside pages of the country’s newspapers. News that HM The King would be opening the Festival of Britain in London on 3 May was deemed a better – and much happier – story.
Out at sea three destroyers, four minesweepers, a radar ship, salvage vessel and Reclaim had begun sweeping an area shaped like an oblong box 90 miles long and 14 miles wide. This latest ‘area of probability’ was split into twenty-eight different ‘boxes’ – measuring seven square miles – and each thoroughly searched. It was similar to searching for something underwater measuring 290ft long and 25ft wide and sitting who-knows-where on the sea bottom somewhere along a 14-mile long corridor between Southampton and Exeter.
It was announced that a memorial service for the crew of Affray would be held at Portsmouth Cathedral on 2 May 1951. Admiralty top brass would be there with Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, Admiral Sir Arthur Power – aide-decamp to HM The King – who would be representing His Majesty, now too busy preparing his Festival of Britain inauguration speech to attend in person. The Army and Air Force would also be represented along with MPs and twenty-six attachés from Dominion and foreign navies – including two from the USSR.
The Revd Douglas Wanstall, a senior naval chaplain, told a packed cathedral that the tragedy ‘is deeply embedded in our hearts because it has occurred so near home. Perhaps it is wise to view the disaster in the context of what is happening in Korea and elsewhere where so many young men are giving their lives in the cause of freedom, which is the very essence of Christianity.’
As a remembrance wreath was placed on the altar by two ratings as a token of remembrance, the words of the Navy Prayer was spoken:
O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; who has compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end; be pleased to receive into thy Almighty and most gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the fleet in which we serve.
They then sang the hymn synonymous with tragedy at sea:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
No relatives of those who had died in Affray were present in the cathedral. A private service for immediate family and crew members dismissed from the submarine before she sailed was held at the same time in a wardroom at HMS Dolphin, close to the jetty from where Affray had set out on her final voyage. Drawn together in a common grief and with no graves over which to mourn their loved ones, the wives, parents, fatherless children and mates of Affray’s crew heard the Last Post sounded, interwoven by a ship’s band playing Rock of Ages, followed by reveille.
John Goddard, one of the seamen left on the quay when Affray sailed, remembered the occasion as ‘a heart-rendering experience, especially when the Last Post was played, which will never be forgotten by anyone who was there’.
Many attending the services wondered what might happen if – and when – the submarine was discovered. Would she be brought up to the surface? Would the remains of husbands and sons be buried in a mass grave somewhere or allowed to finally rest in family graves closer to home? It was a question the Navy would only address once the missing submarine was located – and the depth of water in which she was found.
Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb was still on Reclaim during the early days of May – and most of her crew wished he was elsewhere. Crabb was disparaging of his fellow divers and their reliance on heavy diving suits that slowed them down. He considered himself superior as a ‘frogman,’ someone who dived using a lightweight rubber wetsuit, face mask, flippers, air tubes giving him the ability to swim underwater with ease and speed.
Seventeen other divers on Reclaim were suspicious of Crabb’s methods because they had yet to see him in action. Until then, they had to go over the side in their heavy gear, taking three to five minutes to sink to the bottom, holding onto their 4½in thick guide rope and staying on the bottom for half an hour or less if tides were strong. It took five minutes for a diver to return to the surface, but he then had to stay in Reclaim’s decompression chamber for a further half hour.
Underwater conditions were difficult and hazardous. On the seabed, silt and mud was often so thick that even strong lights were unable to pierce the gloom. Startled fish would often peer through the diver’s glass visor and have to be repeatedly waved away – an exhausting job in itself. A diver’s only equipment was a knife to help him out of trouble. Wrecks had to be investigated by divers feeling their way around, often leading them into danger, making the extra 4d a day they earned a small price for situations they often encountered.
Crabb was on board Reclaim in the event of Affray being found in shallow waters. That was his speciality and he was probably the best and fastest diver in the country when it came to swimming down to depths of no more than 20 fathoms – or 120ft. But the search for Affray, so far, had been in waters much deeper than those that Crabb was used to. So the civilian diver spent his days on Reclaim sleeping late, staying dry, enjoying leisurely breakfasts and lunches while deep-sea divers worked around the clock investigating every possible wreck which demanded examination.
Crabb later admitted: ‘I’m afraid there was a certain amount of backchat between myself and the other divers.’ But he also accepted that the world’s diving record – to a depth of 535ft – had been made from the decks of Reclaim ‘and here was I coming aboard with a pair of swimfins (flippers) and a few bottles of air’.
Reclaim’s crew were glad when Crabb left the ship and hoped to have seen the last of him. It was not to be. Instead of going home, Crabb made his way to the Thameside town of Teddington and headquarters of the Admiralty’s top secret Research Laboratory, home of the Royal Naval Scientific Services, where he had arranged to meet a staff scientic officer called Walter Rosse Stamp.
For some time at Teddington, Stamp had been investigating the performance of state-of-the-art television, something very few people had in their homes in 1951. But it was not the transmission of news, entertainment or sport that Stamp was interested in, but using TV equipment for secret research – both above and below the water.
Stamp and his colleagues had kicked the idea of underwater television around for some time, but had initially rejected it as being far too clumsy and poor in definition for any application they had in mind. Crabb, however, had other ideas and thought that a television camera, placed inside a special waterproof container, could do the job of a deep-sea diver faster, more efficiently – and just possibly help locate the lost submarine. He also knew that getting permission to use an underwater television camera in the search would take forever – and speed was of the essence.
In an attempt to by-pass naval bureaucracy, he called a meeting with Dr. Nyman Levin, head of the Admiralty Research Laboratory, Stamp and a pair of lively Scotsmen – R.B. ‘Jock’ Phillips and John ‘Jack’ Revie. Levin suggested that the team should by-pass all red tape and use their own efforts to get a working camera underwater. Stamp recalls:
We dived in head first as Dr. Levin knew we would because we were all inclined toward unorthodoxy. We had been working with a television camera that had been hired from the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Chelmsford, Essex, and another was due to be delivered any day under a new contract complete with long lengths of camera cable covered in an extra PVC sheath to make it extra watertight. Each camera, made from steel, Bakelite and other assorted metals, cost £5,000 – so expensive in fact that BBC Television had to lease the equipment from Marconi in 1951 for its outside broadcasts.
It was then that we met the first blow. Dr. Levin had, of course, to tell higher authority of our intention. Their immediate reaction was to declare the whole process ‘top secret’. To make it still more pompous, it was given a codeword -‘Lacquer’. The navy loves codewords. It was classed as top secret in case it failed to work. It did, however, help to keep the media away.
The team wanted to know if the navy might be interested in using the television equipment. It would mean that each time underwater contact was made with a large object, a television camera would be lowered over the side instead of a diver and everyone on board would see the images transmitted back. The camera could be operated for several hours, whereas divers were limited to just three-quarters of an hour or less on the sea bottom at any one time. It also meant that as soon as an image of an old barnacled wreck was transmitted back to a television screen, no further time was wasted. Once images confirmed that Affray had been found, deep-sea divers could then be sent for further investigation.
Crabb used the shore-to-ship telephone link to talk to Captain Bathurst on Reclaim – but not to divulge his own involvement at this stage. He was worried that if word got around that he was returning to the ship, there might be withdrawal of goodwill – or even a mutiny.
The Marconi people were intrigued by Stamp’s idea of using one of their cameras for such an unusual purpose. They agreed to loan the camera to the Royal Navy on the grounds that it might help locate the Affray’s final resting place. If the exercise was successful, however, they made it clear they would attempt to interest the Navy in purchasing a camera outright for use on Reclaim. Television technicians at Chelmsford viewed the loan as an experiment, a sprat to catch a mackerel and, if successful, provide Marconi with an excellent shop window from which to sell their products to non-broadcasting organisations.
Stamp designed a specially welded watertight metal cylinder for the camera with a special stiffened hard top, which would send pictures from the bottom of the sea illuminated by a 1.5kW tungsten diver’s lamp lashed to the side. The entire rig would be operated by remote controls and Stamp persuaded a local garage to weld it all together for him. Although it looked like a giant dustbin, it would allow the camera to work in depths of up to 200ft. If lowered any deeper, there was every chance that water pressure would crush the camera and its case – meaning that the Navy would have to compensate Marconi for thousands of pounds.
Unlike other outside broadcast television cameras in 1951 with four lenses, the one to be used searching for Affray had a single lens, 1in thick and encased in 5/8in thick plate glass which peeked out from the bottom of the ‘dustbin’ casing.
As well as providing a camera, Marconi also offered a television monitor on which to view pictures transmitted back through a cable along with a remote ‘joystick’ to control the lens in any direction – forwards, backwards, sideways, up and down. They also offered a technician to work alongside Stamp, installing it and keeping it all in running order. The camera would be lowered into the sea from a derrick mounted to Reclaim’s well-deck to pay out 500ft of multicore cable supplied by the British Insulated Cable Company and covered in an extra heavy protective sheathing of PVC.
It was time for Stamp to contact Bathurst and Shelford on Reclaim and offer them the underwater television kit. Shelford remembered:
I was extremely sceptical and told them so, but by then I was ready to try anything and arranged for the camera to be installed aboard Reclaim. It was accompanied by a small team of experts headed by Commander Crabb and a young scientist called Rosse Stamp, who in the next few weeks hardly left the side of his beloved camera.
Reclaim returned to Portsmouth so that the camera and special frame allowing it to be turned in any direction could be loaded on board. By now the entire kit weighed in at around one ton, described by Stamp as ‘a marvellous piece of knitting’. He, in fact, had no idea if it would work – but he believed that it would and he was going to give it his best shot.
Three weeks after the equipment had been delivered to Teddington, the completed underwater television apparatus had been installed on Reclaim. Stamp did not claim to know much about television, but he was a born optimist. He recalled:
Since speed was an essential factor in the construction, no attempt was made to refine the design beyond the bare essentials. Indeed the design of the casing was influenced more by expediency than elegance, but the resultant contraption – nicknamed the ‘ugly duckling’ – justified the methods used.
No information was available, of course, on the design or performance of underwater television . . . but our extensive experience of underwater cine photography enabled the work to proceed with some hope of success.
Before departing for Portsmouth, Stamp put his ‘ugly duckling’ and rigging through its paces – and found that the watertight casing was far from leakproof. In a desperate bid to have everything ready for the following day when the equipment was to be delivered to Portsmouth, Stamp and his colleagues worked through the night lining the inside of the ‘dustbin’ casing with specially cut screws and rubber mountings bound together with pints of household Bostic glue.
One of the team quickly devised a ‘dampometer’ to ensure that if the case leaked again they could hoist it out of the sea before the camera was ruined. At one end of the case he placed a piece of ordinary blotting paper. If it became wet it would create a short-circuit which would show up on a voltmeter rigged to the control box on Reclaim.
When Reclaim returned to Portsmouth to collect Crabb, Stamp, Phillips, Revie and the television equipment on 27 May, Shelford was informed that two young girls had asked to see him and were sitting in the waiting room. They claimed to be the young wife and sister of a man lost on Affray and begged Shelford to take them to sea where they were certain to know when they were directly above the lost submarine.
Shelford gently led them across the room to a window and told them to look out to sea. ‘Look in any direction,’ he told them. ‘Do you really think you could find the Affray if it was anywhere out there?’ The girls shook their heads. ‘All of that is about 20 square miles. We’re looking for Affray in over 1,500 square miles of water.’ The girls thanked him for listening and quietly left the building.
Reclaim’s divers were not best pleased to hear that Crabb would be rejoining the ship, bringing equipment that would make their jobs almost redundant. What were they supposed to do while the television camera was sent to the bottom of the sea to do their job for them? Learn how to knit? Write poetry? Read cookery books?
At sea, Reclaim’s crew soon found that the camera allowed them to speed up their search. It worked like a dream, sending back images of the sea bottom, wrecks and marine life at least 15ft away from the lens when a diver’s normal visibility was usually around 5ft. By the end of the month Reclaim had had completely covered the original ‘probability area’ and opened up another one further south – without once ever having to send a diver overboard to check contacts.
Crabb insisted on being placed in charge of coordinating underwater television surveillance and personally supervised lowering and raising the derrick on which the camera rig was attached. As soon as the camera began to beam images back to the television monitor in Captain Bathurst’s cabin, he would join Stamp and together they carefully scanned the screen in the hope of spotting something that looked like part of a submarine stranded on the seabed.
Stamp was violently seasick almost from the moment Reclaim pulled out of port and the only time he felt well was when seated in front of the monitor – sometimes for up to twelve hours at a time.
By 12 June, Reclaim and other ships were searching an area on the edge of the latest ‘probability area’, to the south of Affray’s expected route and 30 miles from the Channel Island of Alderney. At 1911 hours the frigate HMS Loch Insh made contact with a large object on the seabed – a contact which, for some reason, had previously been missed when the American ship USS Ulysses and HMS Contest passed over the spot at 1705 while conducting a visual search on 17 April and within twelve hours of the accident. Ships from the 4th Destroyer Flotilla and the two American destroyers had also been within one mile of the site at 1900 hours on 18 April and carried out ASDIC searches for over an hour at 2040.
A printout of HMS Loch Insh’s ASDIC reading revealed a long cigar-shaped object, estimated to be approximately 260ft long (Affray was 281ft) and 20ft at its highest point (Affray was 19ft) and sitting in approximately 300ft of water.
There had been so many disappointments and false alarms during the past weeks that everyone on the search flotilla that day expected this latest contact to be yet another rusting wreck. They knew they were directly over the northern edge of Hurd Deep – a 70-mile long underwater valley, the bottom of which plunges to a depth of 564ft below the surface of the sea. It stretched from the western coast of Guernsey to an area three miles north of Alderney before continuing along the English Channel to a point north-west of the Cherbourg peninsula. It was known as ‘Wreck Valley’ and the ‘graveyard of the English Channel’ thanks to the number of hulks littering the sea bottom.
Hurd Deep had also been used after both world wars for dumping redundant weapons and drums full of chemical and radioactive waste. Thousands of tons of unwanted ammunition, guns and tanks from two German divisions garrisoned on the Channel Islands during the Second World War ended up at the bottom of the undersea valley after the War Office decided it would be quicker and cheaper to dispose of it this way instead of taking it to smelters on the mainland.
This was the first time since the Affray search had begun that ASDIC equipment had generated an image that matched the shape and – more or less – dimensions of a submarine so closely. Underwater visibility was poor and it was decided that before sending the television camera down to take a closer look, an observation chamber containing three divers would be lowered over the side at first light on 13 June. The site was named ‘Contact J for Jig’ for future reference.
As the chamber slowly travelled to the bottom, powerful searchlights attached to the side were switched on to illuminate the gloom. At first the divers saw nothing more than fish, but as the chamber came closer to the seabed, Lieutenant Bill Filer, Reclaim’s Chief Diving Officer, suddenly saw a gleaming white rail emerge from the gloom – the first time anyone searching for Affray had seen something on the seabed not smothered in barnacles, rust or weeds.
For the next seventy-five minutes, the divers relayed comprehensive reports back to Reclaim through their telephone link, describing in detail what they were seeing and the state of the stricken submarine.
When it was time for the observation chamber to be hauled up, Crabb ordered the ‘ugly duckling’ to be hoisted into position and gave the signal for the cable to be lowered. There was every risk that the container holding the camera might buckle under the weight of water at 300ft, but he was prepared to take that chance as he gave the signal for it to be lowered away. The rest of Reclaim’s crew then shouldered their way into the Captain’s cabin to catch a glimpse of pictures about to come back to the small monitor.
Crabb watched the cable pay out at the rate of 10ft at a time . . . 100ft . . . 150ft . . . 200ft . . . 210ft . . .
‘Stop lowering, stop, stop, stop,’ yelled Stamp from his chair in front of the monitor. The cable yanked to a halt and the safety brake applied. ‘By one of those rare strokes of good fortune, the camera had arrived above a conning tower and then we got a glimpse of a periscope and radar aerials,’ remembers Stamp.
Crabb burst into the cabin where he found the crew totally silent as they bent over to make sense of what they were seeing on the black and white screen: a set of white painted railings of the kind running around the top of the hull on ‘A’ class submarines. Then, without any assistance from the surface, a current caused the camera to swing forward revealing large letters on the starboard side: Y – A – R – F – F – A.
Jack Revie produced a camera and began taking still photographs of what was appearing on the monitor. Once processed, they were found to be poor quality images, yet clear enough to reveal a section of a once proud ‘A’ class submarine – and the last resting place for seventy-five brave men. The pictures were never shown to the public and found their way into a ‘top secret’ file.
The search was over. The missing submarine had been found fifty-nine days after her final dive. The ‘ugly duckling’ had withstood pressure in what was later confirmed to be 278ft of water – 78ft deeper than the camera was designed to withstand.
A signal was hastily sent back to the Admiralty: ‘Contact J for Jig is the Affray.’ Wisely, the Admiralty sat on the information for the time being until further underwater investigations were undertaken – just in case.