Jim Perks – Role of the Comms Officer

I was sent to Spartan next, as the Communications Officer, which was fairly normal. You start as the SCO, the Comms Officer and then after a period of time when the Navigator left, you’d move up the bed and become the Navigator.

Simon: What does the Communication Officer do then? That’s going in and out is it?

That’s a good question. Not really. He’s the custodian of the cryptographic material.

Simon: That means encrypted messages.

The crypto material for the guys in the Comms Shack, but when it came to actual Comms, might be any Comms, you know I was the Divisional Officer of the Comms Department, what I knew about Comms I could have written on the back of a fag packet. Technical, in technical terms, so and we had lots of other little jobs to do. You’re still very much learning. In fact, you are all the way through the Submarine Service, and the way that the career structure for Warfare Officers certainly is set out to this day, means that you go to sea, you learn, you do a Course, you go back to sea, you enhance that, you continue to learn, make sure you can do that bit of it, and then start training for the next Course. And as I say, the COs I had and the XOs and COs that I had were all brilliant at understanding that ‘cos they’d all done it themselves, but also very quickly adding more responsibility that didn’t come with the job you were currently in but it would prepare you for the next Course, so as the Communicator I was doing some navigation, for example, to prepare me …

Simon: ‘Cos they knew that …

‘Cos they knew that was the … so they threw you in. You know, ‘Right, you have a go, you take the boat in to Port, to Harbour this time.’