Sixty years after the loss of the Affray, people are still angry and many are demanding to know what happened to the doomed submarine. They want to know why Affray was sent to sea when she was reported to be ‘leaking like a sieve’ and why the submarine was not declared unseaworthy and removed from service. They want to know what mission the four marines were ordered to accomplish had they secretly – and successfully – landed on a beach during Exercise Training Spring. And, most of all, they are curious to know how much money is still locked away and out of sight in the HM Submarine Affray Disaster Relief Fund.
Georgina ‘Gina’ Gander, from Hayes, Middlesex, is the youngest daughter of Able Seaman George ‘Ginger’ Leakey who in December 1945 joined the Royal Navy at the age of 17 and volunteered to serve on submarines the following summer. When the Affray was lost at sea in April 1951, George’s wife, Eileen, was four months pregnant with Gina – later christened Georgina in memory of her father.
Gina’s interest in the father she never knew has grown over the years. And so has her anger and frustration at being unable to get to the bottom of why he lost his life on what she calls ‘the death ship Affray’.
Eileen Leakey never spoke about her late husband to daughters Yvonne and Gina when they were children, so it was left to Gina to piece together a secret jigsaw picture of her father from her grandparents and uncle over the next five decades.
Gina learned that her father had been a freckle-faced, auburn-haired lad – hence the nickname ‘Ginger’ – with a cheeky grin. He was just over 5ft 3in tall when he joined the Navy as a boy sailor. He loved boxing, both before and after joining the Navy and had been involved in a number of scraps with his pals while at school. Over the next five years George trained to become a submariner through various postings, including attachment to the submarine depot ship HMS Montclare in the Firth of Forth, where he met the girl who would become his wife. He also served on HMS Alderney, which travelled under the Arctic in 1949. He returned to HMS Dolphin at Gosport in 1950 and on 2 February 1951 George joined the crew of HMS Affray while the submarine was still in HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, undergoing her extended refit.
Gina insists that her father was never meant to be a part of Exercise Training Spring on board the Affray. A few days before the submarine was due to sail, George was still on official shore leave at home with his pregnant wife and 16-month old daughter. By the time he was due to return to HMS Dolphin, the Affray would have sailed and he would have rejoined her crew when the submarine returned to base on 23 April. But an urgent telegram summoning him back to Gosport put paid to the remainder of his leave and when he kissed his wife and baby goodbye on that April morning to catch the Portsmouth train, it would be the last time they would ever see his freckled face and cheeky grin again.
As a member of Affray’s stand-by crew, George had to make himself available at short notice in case he was required for any reason. So George returned to Gosport to take over from another sailor who had been suffering from toothache and deemed unfit to take part in the exercise. By the time Affray had left her jetty at HMS Dolphin on 16 April, the sailor with toothache was still waiting to see the dentist and George had taken his place on board.
Gina picks up the story:
I was very young when I realised that I didn’t have a dad at home like everyone else. We lived in Scotland, where I went to school and all the other children had dads who would come to the school – but we didn’t. That’s when I realised that we were somehow different to the other children.
We used to get yearly visits from the Affray Fund trustees and they seemed to have a lot of say in what we did in our house. My mother would tell us that the representative was coming and we had to be on our best behaviour. Mum would clean the house from top to bottom ready for the visit. My earliest recollection of a visit was when I would have been about age 5.
The lady who used to come and visit us was a lovely lady – although I can’t recall her name – who reminded me of a schoolteacher, rather prim and proper with her hair tied back. She wore a suit and carried a briefcase. She would sit my sister and I down and ask how we were and what had we been doing. Then we were sent out of the room while she spoke to my mother, who gave her reports on how we were doing at school.
The fund used to pay my mother £25 a month – a lot of money in the 1950s – and that was to cover all our needs. At Christmas and on our birthdays they used to send my sister and I £5 which later rose to £10 as a present from the trustees. Money was paid directly into the Trustee Savings Bank and if my mother needed money for anything else, we had to write and ask for it. But what money we received from the fund had to last us until the next payment.
The trustee representative always asked my mother if she needed more money for anything and they paid all of our school fees and also for our school uniforms.
My mother used to go out to work at two jobs – cleaning in the morning at a local army barracks and later in the day as a cashier in a local tea room. When she bought anything for us, she always bought the best. There used to be a shop in Glasgow called Goldberg’s – a 1950s equivalent of Debenhams – and she would think nothing of paying £30 for a new coat for my sister and myself. She always wanted us to be dressed the best. Just because we didn’t have a father didn’t mean that we had to go without anything.
My sister and I had started dancing classes. My sister wanted to be a ballerina and we used to go to lessons every week. My sister had decided that dancing was going to be her chosen profession, so my mother contacted the trustees and they came to see us and our dancing teacher and it was decided that Yvonne could go for a ballet career. This meant moving from Scotland as Yvonne was going to the Arts Educational School in Tring, Hertfordshire, and we came to live in Hayes, where my dad’s family originated.
Prior to this we used to come down to Hayes from Scotland once or twice a year on the ‘Flying Scotsman’ and spend a few weeks with my grandparents. But of course, although we knew them, we didn’t know them particularly well as you would if you saw them every day, like I do with my own grandchildren. When we arrived in Hayes, my mother had this big idea that we would become part of a close-knit family, but this didn’t work because my father’s family had their own lives and my mother’s lifestyle was very different. For example, we never went out, my mother kept everything to herself and wouldn’t talk about anything – and never talked about my dad. We never had any photographs of him on show. We only ever heard her cry for him at Christmas and New Year and the anniversary of the accident. Then we would hear her crying at night.
All of the information I have collected about my father and HMS Affray came from my grandparents. Whenever I saw them they would tell stories about my dad when he was a young ginger-haired lad who used to pinch apples from trees in an orchard, get into fights and started boxing, which is something I never knew.
My mother remarried a bachelor when I was age 21. The trust gave my mother the chance to either buy the house in Hayes the trustees had provided or move out. My mother chose to buy the house and as far as I’m aware, the money – £12,300 – went back into the Affray Relief Fund.
Years later my grandmother died in Auckland, New Zealand, where she had gone to join her other son – my dad’s older brother. I remember she had a certificate framed commemorating my dad’s visit to the Antarctic with the Royal Navy and she always said I could have it one day after she had died. She wouldn’t let me make a copy or even take it off the wall. She used to decorate around the frame and under no circumstances would she allow it to be taken down. After she died I went to New Zealand to visit my uncle and collected a lot of material about my dad – including the Antarctic certificate.
On that visit my uncle told me a lot about my dad, things my mum had never spoken about. We spent the best part of my ten days in New Zealand just talking about my dad.
At the age of 18, money paid to children by the relief fund stopped. After that, we heard nothing more from either the Admiralty or the trust fund right up until the time I got in touch with them to get more official information about my dad. I wanted this for my own daughter. I felt she had a right to know what happened to her grandfather, so I began a quest to get to the bottom of what had really happened to him, his mates, the submarine and remaining money in the trust fund.
In the last twenty years or so I have written to the Admiralty, Portsmouth Council and the trust fund to find out what is going to happen to money in the fund once they stop paying money out to dependants. Only a few widows of men lost on the Affray are still alive today and most – but not all – have remarried.
I believe that any remaining money in the fund should be divided between remaining Affray families, including children and grandchildren of officers and ratings who lost their lives. Widows who have not remarried will still be receiving payments, but I believe their children and grandchildren should also be entitled to some of the money. At the end of the day, we children were deprived of our fathers – and so have our own children and grandchildren.
The appointed trustees and administrators of the trust fund cannot be allowed to get away with sitting on other people’s money for a day longer. Think of all the things we lost out on by not having a father to provide for us. Money donated to the fund was contributed for us, the wives, sons and daughters of our fathers. It should, therefore, be returned to the Affray’s fatherless children or grandchildren for them to do something in the name of our fathers. They might want to set up a memorial somewhere, a little place of their own where they can go to remember their father or the grandfather they never knew.
If there is still a lot of money in the fund – and I believe there is – some of it could go to a worthy cause such as a seaman’s widows and orphans charity or the Lifeboat fund. But some should also go to the sons, daughters and grandchildren of those who died on the Affray. That’s what the money was given for in the first place.
I have always wanted to go to the place above where Affray lies and stop for a moment over the top of the submarine. I don’t know how much it would cost, but I’m sure many relatives would also welcome an opportunity to do that. The Navy certainly won’t do it for us; I asked them at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster when a service was held at Gosport, organised by George Malcolmson of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum. But perhaps the trust fund could afford to pay for it. Many came to that service in Gosport, proving there are still people around today who can relate to someone lost in the tragedy.
Since 1978 I have written dozens of letters seeking answers to what really happened to the Affray back in 1951 and what will happen to money in the trust fund. I have received very few replies and those who did bother to respond were negative. The Navy and the trust fund just want me to go away. But I’ll keep on writing. One of these days someone is going to get fed up with my letters and, hopefully, give me a straight answer.
The public trustees passed my letter across to a solicitor for reply. Now, I’m just an ordinary person and couldn’t understand their letter. It was very ‘legal’ and as far as I can make it out, it states that I’m not entitled to know anything more about this fund, because its existence is no longer any of my business. Well, I happen to think that it is my business. As the daughter of someone who lost their dad on Affray and one of the people that thousands of good, honest people donated their hard-earned money to helping, I have every right to know where all the money has gone or what’s to be done with it.
I went to see my local MP, John McDonnell (Labour, Hayes & Harlington and twice a Labour Party Leadership candidate), and took all my Affray files with me. I asked him to investigate why the Affray was sent to sea when she was reported to be leaking like a sieve, why nobody had bothered to declare the submarine unseaworthy, what kind of mission the marines were on – it would appear to have been something very mysterious and secret – and how much money remains in the fund after all these years (I’ve heard it could be as much as £250,000). I want him to get to the bottom of the whole thing.
I also want Mr McDonnell to find out why my dad was called back from leave to risk his life and go out on a death ship. Who had the right to make that decision back in 1951?
Mr McDonnell has agreed to look into all these things on my behalf and I understand this will be done some time in 2007. It will be interesting to see if he can get some answers after all these years.
Gina Gander and this author sat in the public gallery at the House of Commons on 14 November 2007 to witness John McDonnell, MP stand up to ask Mr. Bob Ainsworth, Minister for the Armed Forces to meet with Affray relatives and other MPs to discuss re-opening the lost submarine’s case file. McDonnell told Ainsworth that he ‘welcomed an opportunity to discuss all issues’ surrounding the 1951 disaster, allow relatives to express their views and ‘examine whether further evidence can be found to determine what happened to those who lost their lives onboard the submarine’. He added: ‘In my view we owe nothing less to the memory of those who lost their lives so tragically in the service of their country.’
In reply, Ainsworth referred to the first edition of this book ‘and suggestions that it makes’, adding ‘a study of those suggestions has been carried out by the navel historical branch, and it has been concluded that there is no reason to disagree with the findings of the Board of Inquiry . . . I do not think re-opening the investigation will give scope for learning significant lessons today. After such a huge length of time, I really do not think that there is reason to do so (re-open the inquiry).’
McDonnell stated that he was not asking for a formal request to re-open the inquiry, but a meeting that might lead to a request that divers using today’s technology might investigate the submarine site ‘so that we can have complete clarity for the relations about what had happened’.
Ainsworth refused to take McDonnell’s request any further. Sixty years ago, many politicians hearing about the Affray disaster in parliament did exactly the same thing, blindly accepting the findings of Board of Inquiry (heavily criticised by the Admiralty) as the reason why the submarine failed, rather than pushing the government to re-open the case.
This author offered to make his entire HMS Affray archive freely available to either a government department or specialist navel branch who might have missed the Admiralty’s critical comments and conclusions about the inquiry. Four years later, he still awaits someone to accept this invitation.