Three different people claimed responsibility for locating Affray’s final resting place in June 1951. One of them was still making his claim in press interviews given forty years after the accident. At the age of 87, former submariner Rear Admiral Roy Foster-Brown told a newspaper that he still felt ‘the burning injustice’ for never receiving official credit for solving the problem of where the submarine lay beneath the sea. Without him, the disaster would have remained a mystery forever, he said.
Sitting in his garden in Henley-on-Thames, Foster-Brown told a reporter that at the time of the loss of HMS Affray he had been commander of the 6th Frigate Flotilla searching for the submarine. He said that the search flotilla had made 250 ASDIC detections, examined 34 wrecks, 74 rocks, 34 tidal rips and steamed 23,800 nautical miles over a 6,000 square-mile area ‘and had not the slightest trace or hint of where Affray might be’.
Even though there was no hope of finding anyone alive in the submarine, Foster-Brown ‘was determined that the fate of those men would not remain unknown’. He said that in desperation, he ‘switched to good old submarine logic and, if you like, my own intuition’. He decided to widen the search area and, drawing on his own submarine experience, was convinced that the Affray must be further down-Channel, taking an old route used by submarines in wartime to avoid enemy shipping. Foster-Brown ordered his flotilla 60 miles to the south-west of the original search area – roughly halfway between Portsmouth and Cherbourg – to concentrate on a small square of sea between Start Point and Guernsey.
As the flotilla steamed towards their new position, Foster-Brown retreated to his cabin below the bridge on HMS Loch Insh ‘and thought himself’ into what he considered would have been the position Lieutenant Blackburn would have reached the morning after sailing. Working with a compass, a pair of dividers and a chart, he calculated that after diving on the night of 16 April, Blackburn had continued fully submerged for eight hours at a speed of four knots. He then rose to periscope depth at dawn on 17 April to fix his position by sighting the Casquets lighthouse in the Channel Islands.
Foster-Brown then marked an X in the chart and returned to the bridge. On one occasion HMS Loch Insh actually passed over Affray, but rough weather prevented the sonar from locating her. Foster-Brown was determined and took the ship back to the search area in better weather.
Knowing that the following day – 12 June 1951 – was going to be fine, Foster-Brown told his navigator, James Diggie: ‘Tomorrow we shall search the Hurd Deep and we shall find Affray.’ One hour after criss-crossing the site and sending sonar signals down to the underwater valley, the ASDIC produced a crude image of a cigar-shaped object, roughly the same dimensions as Affray, on the sea bottom.
The Admiralty failed to acknowledge Foster-Brown’s report about finally finding the Affray, which puzzled him for two years until, as the Navy’s newly appointed Director of Signals, he asked to see Affray’s file. ‘I was shocked and disgusted by what I found,’ he told the newspaperman.
A colleague, Captain G.F. Maunsell, Director of Torpedo, Anti-Submarine and Mine Warfare (the second person to claim to have ‘discovered’ Affray’s last resting place) had claimed the credit for himself without ever playing any major part in the search for Affray. The final insult was that he even said any action by Foster-Brown was on his orders.
Foster-Brown complained to the Admiralty, but their Lordships were not prepared to listen, preferring to forget the Affray affair. ‘In effect, they were calling me a liar and this has always hurt me deeply,’ he said. At the age of 87, the old rear admiral asked nothing more than to be credited with official recognition of (what he claimed to be) his pivotal role in finding the ill-fated Affray. When he died in January 1999, an obituary in The Times gave him that credit.
The third person credited for finding the Affray never claimed the glory for himself – but for someone else. Seven years after the Affray tragedy, British author Marshall Pugh – who wrote the story of Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb’s wartime diving exploits The Silent Enemy – penned a series of newspaper articles retelling the story of the search for the missing submarine. One of the articles states that Captain Bill Shelford, who played a major part in the search from the deck of Reclaim, was responsible for the find. Pugh wrote:
Very early in the search, one of the frigates must have swept right over the Affray and missed the contact. It was just outside the original area of the search and right on the line, which Shelford had worked out as the Affray’s true path. The line, known as ‘Shelford’s Blue Line’, was partly based on a hunch which Shelford had, by putting himself in the Affray Commander’s place, and mainly by extreme hard work and logical deductions which he had made from a pile of signals four and a half inches thick.
Sounds familiar?
Captain Shelford never made any such claims for himself in his own memoirs or later writings and was probably highly embarrassed by Pugh’s articles when they appeared. But he never made any attempt to have the claim corrected in future editions of the newspaper.
On Tuesday 17 April 2001, fifty years after the disappearance of HMS Affray, a memorial service was held at Holy Trinity Church, Gosport, for remaining family and friends of those lost on the submarine. Despite the passage of time, there were dozens of people who still remembered the submarine or who, as children, heard stories about their fathers or grandfathers from grieving mothers or grandparents. The service was followed by a wreath-laying ceremony in front of the submarine HMS Alliance at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum. Wreaths were laid in remembrance of husbands, granddads, uncles and old comrades. A note in the order of service for the occasion stated that this part of the ceremony ‘dedicated these wreaths to the remembrance of those who lost their lives in the submarine Affray as a tribute to their calm fortitude and courage. May there never be found wanting in this realm a like succession of men of spirit, humble and unafraid. Amen.’
Everyone attending the memorial service found it moving, meaningful and a worthy tribute to the men who died in 1951. It was also a good time to reflect on what had happened to husbands and friends lost with the submarine on that fateful day – and remind the world that the accident should never have happened and facts surrounding the tragedy kept out of the public eye for half a century.
On the same day as the memorial service, an article appeared in The Times with the headline ‘Survivor Says Navy Hushed Up Sub Disaster’. The article, written by the newspaper’s defence editor, was based on an interview with John Goddard, one of the ratings ordered to disembark the submarine shortly before she left on her final voyage. The article said that ‘concern is growing that the Admiralty covered up the reasons behind the sinking of the submarine’. It quoted Goddard as saying he believed the Admiralty, in a face-saving exercise, deliberately distorted official documents before sending them to the Public Record Office (now known as The National Archives).
‘The loss of HMS Affray in April 1951 gripped Britain in the same way that the sinking of the Kursk in the Baltic absorbed Russia last year [2000],’ said the story, which went on to outline how Affray had left for her exercise with ‘an unusually high proportion of inexperienced young officers’, had failed to surface, was the subject of the largest sea-air search ever mounted in Britain, was eventually discovered on the seabed and ‘in spite of the wishes of relatives’ never recovered.
Goddard, who left the Navy as a lieutenant after twenty-two years’ service, told the newspaper that he ‘remained convinced that there was an explosion on board the vessel’ and that the House of Commons reported that the two strongest theories for the accident were a battery explosion or the snort mast breaking. ‘All records then became Cabinet secrets for thirty years and since 1981 have been released only in small amounts,’ said Goddard. ‘At the end of 1951 the Navy dropped all reference to the battery explosion and has consistently claimed that the tragedy was most likely caused by the snort mast snapping.’
Goddard told the newspaper that he had given evidence to the Board of Inquiry (reproduced in full in an earlier chapter) and mentioned the faulty battery – ‘but when I saw the document in the Public Record Office, the wording was all different. It doesn’t mention the battery, but just has me being asked whether I was aware of any other defects, to which I replied “no”.’
Official documents relating to the loss and search for the submarine, Board of Inquiry findings and evidence given by witnesses, plus numerous copies of orders, signals, letters, memorandum – even scrappily written notes in pencil – plus maps and photographs are contained in more than seventy different files at Kew. All have been available for public inspection since the 1980s and are stamped ‘Top Secret’ or ‘Classified’.
Two different files contain reports produced by the Board of Inquiry and verbal transcripts given by individual ‘witnesses’ – but they differ. One file contains the ‘interim report’ demanded from the Board by the Admiralty after the inquiry had only been in session for a short time. It has been produced in fading blue fluid ink having been copied using a primitive duplicating machine after the text had been typed onto a wax stencil, later attached to a revolving drum which produced copies. The interim report is difficult – often impossible – to read in places. Another much fatter file contains the full and finished report and appears to be the original typescript version. It is clear and easy to read.
Goddard almost certainly – yet unintentionally – examined the wrong file, unaware that a second one existed. Had he perused the completed report, he would have seen the full transcript of his appearance before the board – including his reference to the faulty battery. The report clearly states:
QUESTION: You had been in the ship a month, you say, did you hear of any trouble or difficulty of any sort?
LEADING SEAMAN GODDARD: Yes, Sir. Once we were in the dockyard, I was living down the after end with Leading Electrician’s Mate Herbert Woods – he was on the boat when it went down. He came aft one night and said there was a possibility of our refit being extended as part of the number one battery tank was faulty and he said in doing rounds had found some oil in them and reported it to Lieutenant Foster.’
Over the years the Admiralty has been accused of a ‘cover up’ over the loss of Affray and the flames of conspiracy have been fanned by some well-intentioned people as well as sensation-seeking journalists. And they are not far wrong.
The Admiralty of 1951 must take responsibility for allowing Affray to put to sea in a far from perfect condition. This is underlined by the letter sent to Captain Browne, who was quietly, yet never publicly, blamed for the accident by allowing a submarine to go to sea ‘in circumstances considered by naval staff to have been unacceptable’.
Senior officers at HMS Dolphin were told about the boat’s condition by members of the crew who had been working on her for weeks; men who knew the boat like the backs of their hands, men with knowledge of what the submarine was capable of, what it could and could not do in its current condition. The officers discussed the situation, appeared to ignore the warnings and signed a death warrant for seventy-five men by sending her to sea in an unfit state.
In 1951 the Navy wanted the incident swept under the carpet, locked away and forgotten for all time in order to protect the reputation of its Submarine Service. Thanks to the top secret nature of the Board of Inquiry and official documents produced during and after the search for Affray, the Admiralty succeeded in hiding the truth and not taking any collective blame for the tragic accident.
Today the Royal Navy is a very different type of organisation from the one that sent Affray to sea in 1951. Safety is paramount in everything it does at sea and on land. No one who served as a senior officer at HMS Dolphin in 1951 is still alive to reflect on what happened over five decades ago. And that is exactly the direction the Admiralty of the day envisaged the Affray story would go. They knew that in time, people would forget.
The broken snort was a red herring, a convenient cover for an Admiralty who knew it would be impossible to identify any other reason for the accident, unless the Navy raised the submarine from the seabed – which they had no intention of doing on grounds of cost. Fortunately, correspondence shooting the snort mast theory down still exists and examples of it have appeared elsewhere in this book. But if the broken snort mast was not to blame for the loss of HMS Affray, how and why was the submarine doomed to sink?
It’s time to consult the experts . . .