Commander Jeff Tall, OBE, MNI, RN, joined the submarine service in 1966, served in all types of submarines and commanded four of them following a command course in 1974 – two in conventionally powered vessels (HMS Olympus and Finwhale) and two nuclear powered (Churchill and Repulse). He also served with the United States Navy (USS Pearl Harbor) and was Admiral Woodward’s submarine staff officer in HMS Hermes during the Falklands Conflict. He retired to take the position of Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum at Gosport 1994, where visitors can trace the history of the British Submarine Service from the tiny Holland 1 to the nuclear powered Vanguard class – the Navy’s present-day peacekeepers.
Reflecting on his four submarine commands, Commander Tall can point to specific occurrences where ‘it all might have started to go wrong, but where good training, good kit, leadership – and luck – played major parts in averting disasters, bearing in mind that the submarine is always – repeat always – operating in a hostile environment.’
When first approached by this author and asked if he would be willing to answer some questions about the Affray disaster from his professional viewpoint, Commander Tall declared he was ‘personally unenthused [by your book] because there are still many raw nerves around concerning the loss, not least to relatives’. However, after learning that many Affray relatives and friends were cooperating with the project, Commander Tall kindly agreed to share his thoughts, which appear in a question-and-answer format.
QUESTION: Numerous Admiralty experts dismissed the broken snort mast theory after reading the report produced by the Board of Inquiry in 1951. What do you, as an experienced submariner, think happened to the Affray? I appreciate that we will (probably) never know, so any thoughts you might wish to share will be your own personal hypothesis. If it was ‘human error’, what might have happened? Do you think there might have been a chain of events leading up to the disaster (bearing in mind that there were so many inexperienced men on board)?
COMMANDER TALL: Unless you have been a submariner in a conventional submarine conducting a snort at night in rough seas, then it is hard to imagine the debilitating effects it can have on individuals. With the snort mast dipping regularly beneath the surface – either because of waves crashing over it or ship control struggling to keep the boat shallow enough to avoid ‘dipping’ – then there is a constant change in the vacuum sucking on your ears.
On top of this discomfort, it is physically hard work keeping one’s balance. It is also likely that the charge will have to be broken because of excessive vacuum on a regular basis. This entails instituting the whole preparation routine every time you try again (draining down the snort system, preparing the engine room, lining up the electrics). This is both frustrating, and once again, very tiring.
In these circumstances, it is essential for everyone to recognise the growing risks to efficiency and alertness – something that only experience and regular training can instil.
In such circumstances, a boat becomes vulnerable to the dreaded ‘three in a row’ of failures/mistakes. Could the submarine be getting heavier and heavier because of the accumulated water coming down the snort mast (noting that there was no automatic emergency flap valve)? And could this accumulation have finally exceeded the boat’s reserve of buoyancy? Could there have been an uncontrolled flood down the exhaust mast? Could there have been another flood elsewhere (cooling water hull valve)? Could there have been an electrical failure that would have knocked off supplies to the hydraulic pumps? Could there have been a telemotor failure that would have denied control over the hydroplanes? Perm any three from a dozen possibilities and you are in real trouble!
Flooding (possibly cumulative, possibly uncontrollable, combined with a steep angle on the boat which prevented shutting the snort mast back-up valve) seems to be the probable cause.
QUESTION: Several people put forward the ‘battery explosion’ theory quite forcefully after the report was circulated for comment. Water and oil had been found in a battery sump while Affray was in HM Dockyard a few days before her sea trials. Do you personally rule the battery explosion out as a possible cause?
COMMANDER TALL: A number of ‘A’ class submarines suffered battery explosions, with occasional loss of life. These explosions invariably occurred when the battery was gassing (being overcharged to maintain its efficiency), and came about because someone foolishly lit a cigarette or the battery ventilation system had not been properly lined up allowing a build-up of hydrogen.
I can think of no reason why Affray should be conducting a gassing charge so soon after leaving harbour. Although a sign of poor maintenance, the water/oil issue was sorted out before she sailed. I therefore rule out the battery explosion philosophy.
QUESTION: In your opinion, was Affray carrying too many men on board when she set out on her last exercise – or was it normal for an ‘A’ class submarine at that time to carry seventy-five men on board?
COMMANDER TALL: Seventy-five is not an excessive number to have on board. There has to be some doubt about the level of expertise onboard, however, noting the number of trainees being carried. That is the Commanding Officer’s call.
QUESTION: Many commented at the time – and since – that it was strange to have found Affray so far away from her last known diving position and where she was expected to surface the following day. What are your own thoughts about why she was so far away from where everyone expected her to be – including most of the search and rescue team? Could there have been some kind of compass failure?
COMMANDER TALL: Why strange if she was within (or very close to) her allocated subnote moving haven/exercise area?
Had the Commanding Officer deliberately moved away from busy shipping lanes in order to conduct his snorting routine, thereby reducing the risk of collision with a merchant ship? Alternatively there may indeed have been a navigation cock-up . . .
QUESTION: What about the so-called ‘hull tappings’ and SST signals that several sources within the search and rescue party claimed to have heard? Do you have any thoughts on what may – or may not – have been heard?
COMMANDER TALL: Morbid curiosity? Being a member of the club, and knowing full well the risks, I prefer to think that death came quickly to all on board. QUESTION: Lieutenant Blackburn was given a great deal of flexibility in how he interpreted his orders for Exercise Training Spring. Is it likely that Affray might have been undertaking a rather different kind of exercise/operation than laid out in the orders? I appreciate that, if this was the case, a certain security aspect would have surrounded the exercise. Is this likely?
COMMANDER TALL: The conspiracy theory? Quite simply – no!
Engineer Lieutenant Mike Draper, who retired from the service in 1990, has different ideas about what might have happened to the submarine. In April 1951, Mike was a 21-year-old Leading Electrician’s Mate serving on the ‘A’ class submarine HMS Aurochs, from where his friend John Denny, an electrician, had recently been drafted to the Affray. Mike put in a request to join his pal and would have transferred in May if Affray had not gone missing. He remembers:
We in the Aurochs were sent to assist in the search and sailed the day after the Subsmash had been promulgated. My guess is that during the early hours of the day Affray was lost. We were in the area for at least a week, possibly ten days, with no results. From the many modifications that took place on all ‘A’ Class boats following this tragedy, I offer the following possible cause of the mystery.
Affray was due for a battery equalising charge which involved about a six-hour overcharge. During the weekend she would have been charging batteries and a long overcharge causes a lot of hydrogen to be liberated.
My guess is that during the early hours of Tuesday 17 April, she dipped below periscope depth and the snort mast float valve closed. The action of the engine room would have been to shut the ‘hand-operated’ snort mast induction valve and at the same time disconnect the engine/motor clutch.
The action by the person shutting the hull valve was very fast, using a large wheel. Like all actions on submarines, we did things as fast as was humanly possible. It is easy to surmise that the valve was nearly closed before the diesels actually shut down. This often caused the engine relief valves – one on each cylinder – to lift and great flashes of flames to shoot out. With all the hydrogen throughout the boat, an instant flash/explosion would have occurred – sufficient to kill, stun or confuse the crew and also possibly fracturing the weakest point of the snort mast (bearing in mind the float valve was closed and the mast was not meant to be capable of full diving pressure). The hull valve only being ‘almost shut’ would continue to allow a fair flood of water.
With the crew incapable of taking action, the main motors, possibly at half ahead group up – the name given to the speed setting for the main electric motors – the boat would have continued on course slowly getting deeper until it grounded in the Hurd Deep.
Following the disaster, all boats were modified and routines were changed. All overcharges were prohibited when snorting. The hand-operated induction hull valves became hydraulically operated, battery compartment fans were always to be run at full speed, hydrogen detectors were mounted throughout the boat and snort masts were reinforced.
I do not feel that human error was the cause. If anything, it was a procedural error, allowing equalising charges to be carried out while snorting. I agree with Commander Tall that circumstances can accumulate very quickly. However, in my own experience, we never allowed trainees to act without supervision.
We will obviously never know the full facts, even if the boat was to be recovered, which of course should not happen. My summary is based on events which we undertook after the event.
In a 1999 interview with the BBC, Admiral Tony Whetstone – like Jeff Tall, a former submarine commander and a past Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum – was asked what he thought might have happened to the Affray. He said:
Somebody could have been slow to react to an emergency or could have come to the wrong conclusion for the cause of the emergency, which is a very likely thing. At night, in semi-darkness, the engine room is noisy, in the control room one officer is intent on the periscope and it is quite possible that reactions would have been just that bit slower.
Probably by the time most people were awake, the situation would have passed the point of no return.
In the magazine Ships Monthly (April 2001) Roger Fry observed that the Admiralty’s priority
was to convince its own sailors that British submarines were safe and also to convey to world leaders, and the general public, that Royal Naval submarines were highly effective weapons systems, tasked by efficient leaders and crewed by highly trained experts. The Navy played down their knowledge of Affray’s known defects prior to sailing. Questions of negligence in sending the boat to sea were ignored, as were certain aspects of the first search and even recommendations of court martial. The Navy believed it best if the incident was forgotten.
What is clear is that the Affray was not run down by a passing ship, nor involved in some Cold War conspiracy, was not overloaded and was not off course. The fractured snort must be considered a red herring, the break occurring as she hit the bottom with some force.
It seems that Lieutenant Blackburn, an experienced submarine officer, was diligently carrying out his orders as safely as the hazardous operation would allow. With Affray tooling along at periscope depth, most likely snorting, some situation within the boat started a train of events which once rolling, no one was able to stop.