Duration: 2 hours 13 minutes 20 Seconds
Simon: My name is Simon Perry, and I’m here for the Submariner’s Stories Oral History project. I’m in Gosport, and it is the 4th of April 2022, and I’m with …
Colin: Colin Clarke.
Simon: Colin, can you tell me your date and place of birth?
Colin: Yes, so 1962, Ashford in Kent.
Simon: And what’s the name of your mum and dad?
Colin: So, both my parents are deceased, but it was Dorothy and John Clarke.
Simon: And what did they do?
Colin: So, mother was really a housewife and father was a Carpenter.
Simon: Ok. And how was home life?
Colin: Probably I suppose to people today would think it was quite tough. We didn’t have a lot of money, lived in a Council house as it would have been called back then, it was three stories actually but it was two, two and two actually quite bizarre. But it was fine really. Had a sister, still got a sister that still lives down in Kent, and schooling, wasn’t a fan of school particularly. What I was good at was all the practical stuff, so the Woodwork, Metalwork, the Technical Drawings and all the creative sort of things really. Wasn’t a big fan of sport back then I can remember, and a lot of close family around as well, so my mother’s brothers and sisters and my dads who was one of five brothers. Three of those lived fairly locally as well, but I now find myself along with my sister, as the elder statespersons if you like of the Clarke family as was then.
Simon: Right. So, it sounds like a tight family unit with lots of … everybody being close …
Colin: Close because they all worked fairly local, so one of my uncles was a farmer. My mother’s brother, which is one of the reasons why I joined the Navy, he was in the Navy. Didn’t see very much of him but on my mother’s side, two sisters still lived in home town etc, so growing up there were cousins around and all that sort of stuff. I suppose, looking back on it, maybe we didn’t see as much of each other as we probably could have done, given the fact that we all lived within two or three miles of each other, but I don’t feel sort of deprived if you like of not seeing my cousins and that. I had one particular cousin that I used to play a lot with, Stephen, still lives in the same town, but you drift apart don’t you? Life goes in different directions, so haven’t spoken to him for probably a number of years now to be fair.
Simon: And then so school, you decided to leave at what sort of age?
Colin: I left at 16 and already set on a path of joining the Navy at that time.
Simon: How did that come … what set in you mind? Was it the relative thing and that?
Colin: It was yes, so there was a photograph. I’ll never forget it, that my mother had, of my uncle on the Flight Deck of one of the big Warships back in the day and he was in his full tropical uniform, greeting Princess Anne, so I thought I’d like some of that, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in the latter days of schooling anyway, and I just kind of fixated on that.
Simon: What did he think about you wanting to get in the Navy?
Colin: He thought it was quite good actually. Clearly he wasn’t a Submariner and I didn’t intend to be a Submariner when I joined up. I was thinking about being a Clearance Diver, I think they call them Saturation Divers.
Simon: Still in the water.
Colin: Oh yeah.
Simon: What does a Clearance Diver do?
Colin: So that’s like a Saturation Diver today I suppose that you kind of call it I guess. The Navy don’t have them anymore as such, so there would be more than just your sort of sport diver, it would be a full-time job. But I did a sort of a … on joining I did, you’d almost call it an Acquaint I guess, and I just thought ‘oh, I don’t like that very much’ (laughs).
Simon: Right.
Colin: What am I going to do now sort of thing and chatting with one of the other guys, it was as simple as this. He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’ve read up about this Submarine Sonar. I’m going to give that a go” and that’s kind of I thought, in lieu of anything else, let’s give it a whirl, and here we are.
Simon: So, you then did the sort of equivalent of sticking your hand up and saying, “I’d like to go onto Submarine Sonar please.”
5 minutes 12 seconds
Colin: Yeah. So, if I recall back in the day, there was a … we’d joined what was the Seaman Branch in Basic Training, and as opposed to being an Engineer, or someone in the Supply and Resource sort of branches, and there were eight categories in the Seaman Branch that you could opt for, and one of them was Submarine Sonar.
Simon: Ok.
Colin: And back then, it was the only way from the Seaman Branch of getting into the submarine world.
Simon: Right. Why was that the only way then?
Colin: To this day, I don’t really know. It’s just how it was. Certainly, from the Seaman Branch, different from the Engineering world, but if you joined back then in ’78, into the Seaman Branch of the Navy, one of those categories of operators was Submarine Sonar.
Simon: Ok. So, where did you do your … you did your Submarine Training at Dolphin did you?
Colin: My initial training was done at HMS Raleigh, so basic Naval Training, and then that was Phase 1 and Phase 2, and then initial Submarine Training was HMS Dolphin, which is now known as Fort Blockhouse.
Simon: And what was your experience at Dolphin, your initial experience like?
Colin: Well, it’s just so different from coming out of Basic Training. You get a level of freedom that hadn’t been afforded to you for the last sort of three months, give or take.
Simon: And you’ve felt some freedom there?
Colin: Yeah, so clearly in Basic Training it was far more regimented to some extent, although initial training down there was still regimented as far as that early Submarine Training was concerned. I was still what you would have called a Junior Seaman back then, ‘cos I was still under the age of 17 ½ so I still had other sort of restrictions placed upon me.
Simon: What were they then, the other restrictions?
Colin: Well that would be like you had to be back on Base by a certain time in the evening, ‘cos we had things called Station Cards back then which was a way of tracking who was on Base or off Base, and as a Junior, and your ID cards, as I recall now, were also … there was like a red cross put across them so it was instantly obvious to the person checking your ID Card that you were a Junior and therefore, I suppose today you would be treated far more leniently for want of a better phrase. It wouldn’t be quite so robust as you would do an adult. As I say, that lasted until you were 17 ½ and then that’s when the Junior sort of status flipped.
Simon: What do you remember of the time around … because this is funded by the Gosport High Street Action Zone, so they’re very keen to hear about memories of Gosport as well. What about those early days?
Colin: Well, I wouldn’t have left the Base that much in those early days ‘cos it would have all been a lot of training, even on Saturday mornings and things like that. The initial Basic Training was 6 weeks in the Submarine School back then, so I didn’t probably go in to Gosport that much in those early days. Occasionally one of the things I used to do, they used to have some recreation equipment, some canoes, and at the weekends, you could take those out and go canoeing round what is Fareham Lake and Creek as it were, so that was quite nice, but actually I didn’t really use the Town at all in those early days to my recollection.
Simon: You’re focussed on training.
Colin: It was yeah, and of course at that time, I’m still a Junior, so Pubs were kind of out of bounds’ish as it were. A lot of my other colleagues who were slightly older maybe going through the training. Yeah, so Gosport is not something I remember that well from those early days ‘cos I left my Submarine Training in early summer of ’79 and I went to Plymouth to join my first submarine, and I wouldn’t come back to Gosport until ’82, so I was away for about three years, working on a submarine down in Plymouth.
10 minutes 5 seconds
Simon: And which was your first submarine?
Colin: HMS Olympus. So, an Odin Class submarine, crew of 70.
Simon: Diesel?
Colin: Yeah diesel submarine yeah. She was in a Maintenance Period when I first joined her, and we spent probably the first four or five months of my career time on her whilst she was still undergoing maintenance, and I would be doing my early days of learning about the submarine during that period of time. So, we used to get given a docket, it was called a Part 3 Book, so you’d done your Part 1 and Part 2 Training in shoreside, now you’re Part 3 Training was actually about learning to be a Submariner onboard your submarine, and this docket covered all the different systems onboard the submarine, and various other sorts of Drills and Procedures to learn etc and you just went through it kind of systematically really. Working through the systems, learning to understand them. So, it might be the Hydraulic System, it might be the Electrical System, and then you’d get tested on that by one of the Engineers onboard, get that signed off and at the end of it you then have got this whole document signed off and you would sit a formal examination to pass your Submarine Qualification Board and get your submarine Dolphins. Which is a great sense of achievement eventually to do that, and it took a little bit longer than would be the norm because the submarine was doing alongside. It was alongside for a lot of maintenance, so some of the stuff you needed to do at sea, that you couldn’t do, so that’s why I say it took a bit longer than normal.
Simon: And with your … why does it take more time when it’s having maintenance, because you’re having to work …
Colin: Well, there are some things you can’t do alongside that you need to do at sea. The submarine can only do certain activities when it’s actually at sea, and therefore … so qualifying as a Bridge Lookout for example. You actually physically have to be at sea, learning how to report ships to the Officer of the Watch etc. So, there are a number of activities that you couldn’t qualify on until you had actually been at sea.
Simon: And what about the actual Part 3 test? Was it the anticipation of it was high?
Colin: Oh, it’s daunting, those sorts of things, you know. Two or three of the Naval Officers onboard the submarine, usually the 1st Lieutenant or one of the Seaman Officers, an Engineer, or Weapons Engineer just giving you a bit of a grilling, making sure you have got a firm grasp of the basic systems and how the submarine operates. What your role is, what you would do in emergencies, and how you just complement the rest of the crew really.
Simon: I had heard of a story of somebody having their Part 3 done from the back of the sub. He’d learnt it from the front going back and they were like, “Well let’s start at the back” and he sort of panicked. Did you have any of that stuff?
Colin: No, mine was pretty good. As I say, because we’d spent a long time in the maintenance period, and also Olympus unfortunately at that time, she did suffer a number of defects. So, we would go to sea, wouldn’t be out very long and we’d have to come back, put things right, go to sea, and this went on for quite a protracted number of months, so by the time actually they arranged my exam, for want of a better phrase, I’d been doing a lot of this stuff quite regularly, and I was fairly confident in a number of areas. It was still, as any exam, there was still a bit of anticipation, a bit of nervousness, but it was fine and it went ok. And then you get the … one of the Ordinary Seaman Clerk by then I would have been, I wouldn’t have been an Able Seaman then, a set of Dolphins in a tumbler, three fingers of rum, knock it back in one, yeah.
Simon: So, do they still do that?
Colin: No. That has been … like a number of traditions in many walks of life, has been my understanding is that that doesn’t happen quite that same way. I believe there was an unfortunate incident where the idea is that you catch the Dolphins in your teeth. I believe there was an incident where somebody didn’t do that and then I think they needed to have some kind of medical attention, with a set of lodged Dolphins down here somewhere.
15 minutes 16 seconds
Simon: But as you say, a sort of feeling of pride of completing the Part 3.
Colin: Absolutely, yeah.
Simon: So, what was it like the first time … I guess if you were alongside, probably the first experience of going out when they closed the hatch and you were then off out to sea, what was that like?
Colin: Bizarrely, I’d always recall that one, I felt fine about it ‘cos a lot of people talk about claustrophobia, although your basic submarine training is designed to weed out those people that would suffer from claustrophobia because they put you in situations through escape training, but if you couldn’t cope with that, then it was pretty obvious that you weren’t going to be very happy onboard a submarine, so there may have been some interventions that would happen at that stage, but I was fine with all of that. I do remember the first time we ever went and dived, and they shut the hatch and everything, so I’m at my Watch, keeping position for Diving Stations, and the submarine dives, and it was just like a bit of an anti-climax really. ‘Well, is that it? I feel exactly the same as if we were sat alongside the wall.’ Yeah, that’s one of those early sort of memories that you think, ‘Oh well, this is alright’ and of course, I was never a very good sailor, as in suffering from sea sickness, so all the time underwater was good for me ‘cos it wasn’t very rough (laughs).
Simon: Right, ‘cos you’re sort of beyond the waves, beneath the waves.
Colin: Yeah, although, depending on how rough the sea was, you could still feel yourself being thrown around, all be it much slower. It wasn’t that juddering and shuddering that you’d get if you were on the surface, crashing about. I mean of course, if you think about it, a submarine doesn’t really have a keel as such, so she does tend to roll a bit like a barrel.
Simon: Right. And then so how long was that first … what was your responsibility when you were on there?
Colin: Just as a Junior Sonar Operator, so learning my trade as a Sonar Operator. That was the core role, and then other duties would be qualifying as a Helmsman, Bridge Lookout, Messenger, so information to be passed from the Bridge down to the Captain or somebody else in the ship’s company.
Simon: Physically transferred or …
Colin: Yeah, so back in then we’d have white boards, a small sort of white board with a China graph doing ship reports or just passing general messages to other senior members of the crew. Also, being the Messenger, of course you want your relief to come and relieve you, so you’d go and do the shakes in the Messes, make the tea, make sure they’re up and about, so along with your core skill job of being a Sonar Operator, actually almost a bigger percentage of it in those early days was about just manging domestic life onboard as well. You’ve still got to clean the submarine, still got to manage all those issues, get rid of the waste and restock, if you like, your consumables for the Sound Room and all that sort of stuff, so it’s not just about operating the equipment, there’s all these other ancillary tasks that actually eat up quite a large percentage of your working day really, and then somewhere around that, you’ve got to eat and sleep as well. So yeah, early days as a Junior, learning your trade. You look back on it now and think I didn’t get a lot of sleep, I wasn’t treated particularly kindly, if you were to try and compare it to today I think, but actually it’s just how life was back then, and everybody had been through it, everybody before you. And obviously banter was absolutely rife (laughs) and you did need to be a bit thick skinned and like a lot of these things, if you’ve got some kind of … I’m not going to call it a weakness but if you’ve got something about you then you know, that’s going to become your nickname or you’re not going to be picked on for it but it’s just going to be something you’re known for.
Simon: Incessantly reminded of it (laughs).
Colin: Yeah, particularly if you mess up spectacularly and it’s highly amusing to everybody else. That tends to hang around for … it can hang around for ever ‘cos some people can end up carrying that through as a nickname for the whole of their career, but you kind of just suck it up as it were and get on with it.
20 minutes 13 seconds
Simon: What was your nickname?
Colin: So I’m just generally ‘Nobby’ ‘cos of Clerks and that comes out of only the nobles and the nobility could afford to have Clerks as writers, so that’s where that comes from, if you track it back.
Simon: Oh is it? I thought it was a footballer called that but maybe for that same reason?
Colin: Yeah it would be. That’s if you look at nicknames, that’s where if your surname is Clarke, it’s because the nobility could afford Clerks, so you’re a ‘Nobby Clarke’.
Simon: So, what happened … were you ever on a boat where there was another ‘Nobby’ Clarke?
Colin: Yeah, I was on … so Olympus, actually spookily enough, so there was a Mark Clarke, so was the guy who actually became … I was his Best Man in later life, and there were … one of the Marine Engineering Mechanics, he was a Clarke as well, so you all end up being ‘Nobbys.’
Simon: Oh, you don’t get an extended nickname?
Colin: No.
Simon: Nobby 1 or Nobby 2.
Colin: No. Well actually that’s spooky enough. The two of us that were in the Seaman Branch, so I was a Sonar Operator, and then latterly back then you’d pass a sort of a minor exam if you want to be … what they called an Underwater Controller, which means you were just taking charge of all the sonars realistically, so I became ‘Nobby the UC’ and the other Clarke, he was working on Tactical Systems Equipment, so he was ‘Nobby the TS’, so that’s the general definition, or how we were discriminated between us.
Simon: Picked between. So, for people that don’t know, can you explain what the Sonar side does on a submarine?
Colin: In effect, a lot of people would say it’s like underwater radar, so what it’s really doing is it’s just listening all the time for noise in the Ocean, and it’s able to give you a bearing of where it’s coming from and as Operators, you’re listening to those noises and you get trained to understand what ships sound like, submarines are like. What ice noise is , what fish sound like, what whales sound like. So, what Chesil Beach sounds like, so Chesil Beach in Portland, if you are off it, the waves rushing up and down all that shingle, you can hear that on a sonar and you can know exactly what it is.
Simon: And what you hear, is it the sound of the pebbles or is an electronic version of that or …?
Colin: No, you’re just listening to the actual sound that’s in the Ocean, and the system is just receiving it. It’s just a hydrophone that’s just listening all the time.
Simon: So, a hydrophone is an underwater microphone is it?
Colin: Yeah.
Simon: And those are … you have an array of those or …?
Colin: Yes, so there will be a number of different sonar arrays that would do different tasks. Some would be for long-range listening and be for shorter=range listening.
Simon: That’s down to the sensitivity of the microphone is it in some way? Long and short distance.
Colin: Well, they are designed for specific roles, so the short-range stuff tends to work at the higher frequencies as well. It’s all to do with the wavelengths, and then the long-range stuff works at the lower frequencies, so that’s listening for the sound that’s travelling … likely to travel the furthest in effect but it will be at the lower frequency.
Simon: Would that be an engine blade, a propeller, sorry.
Colin: Yeah, so you will be able to discriminate between the engines, the shafts, the blades. Sometimes you can even hear turbines wind up on the back of a ship, depending upon the quality of your sensor and where you are within the water column.
Simon: So, you differentiating between the engine, the shaft and the propellor, you could tell if it had been refitted with a different propellor or …
Colin: Well certainly if you’d had that same ship before and you knew it was that same ship. So, the thing with operating sonar is, you are classifying on what you’re listening to and what you’re seeing. And when I say what you’re seeing, it’s what the sonar is doing its processing and presenting you with the information. So, you’re basing your classification of that vessel on what you’re listening to and what the sonar’s processing. It doesn’t mean that you’re right. The only way of almost 100% knowing that you’re right sticking the periscope up and having a look at it. However, there are other techniques and refineries that you can eventually get down and say, “Well, I’m pretty sure this has got to be this, because we’ve seen it before, we’ve got databases etc.” And so, if you know that that’s that vessel, so going back to your propellor, an analogy there has it changed, if you are looking at it and say well, that’s that ship, but now for example it’s exhibiting 5 propellors, whereas last time it only had 4 propellors, so that would be like an intelligence type piece of activity and you can note that down and get your publications updated for example.
25 minutes 44 seconds
Simon: Ok. So, you then send that back and say, “Hey, something may have changed.”
Colin: Yeah, so, you’d send all your recorded information off and that would go back to a shore side analysis. So, you do onboard analysis for the here and now if you like, you write your reports up, but you send your information shore side and then they’ve got longer to scrutinise it and apply even more analysis techniques that’s not available to you onboard the submarine at the time, but they are available shore side with far greater processing etc. So, eventually that information gets converted to reference material.
Simon: Ok. And when you did your first Sonar Training, that was on the land or you did that …?
Colin: Yesh, so that would have been at HMS Dolphin and by today’s standards, incredibly rudimentary and on reel-to-reel tape machine, and there’d be half a dozen of us sat in room, you’d have the Instructor and it would just be coming out over the speaker of the tape machine. We’d all be sitting there and go, “Right, now you’re listening to this. Now you’re listening to this.” And then he’d teach you how to take a propellor count …
Simon: That’s rotations?
Colin: Yeah, the number of times that the propeller’s turning. Teach you how to calculate the number of blades on the propellor and the number of shafts etc until you eventually just keep on repeating this, different scenarios, different recordings, but slowly but surely just building up your understanding and confidence to be able to do this sonar analysis technique as it were.
Simon: So, it’s audio pattern matching I guess?
Colin: Yes. So, there’s two parts of it. There’s the audio side and there’s a visual side. Part of that information that the hydrophone’s picking up is being processed by the sonars as well, and it will present you a picture version of what you’re listening to, for want of a better phrase.
Simon: So like waves in a graph sort of … like a Joy Division cover.
Colin: Yeah, exactly. There can be some A-scan information or there will be what we call B-scan, which is a waterfall information, so that’s updating the live information depending upon what the rate that the system has been set at, and then there are other processing techniques, one of them being DEMON which is demodulation of noise, that in effect match the piece you are always looking for that would help you understand the number of blades and shafts fitted a contact, a ship for example. But you would back that up with what you’re listening to as well, so the two together would give you this confidence, yeah, I am listening to a propellor shaft that’s going this many revolutions per minute and it appears to be just one propellor shaft and it’s fitted with 3,4,5,6 blades etc. So, that was the basic techniques you were being taught, through repetition really within the classroom environment, and then you would get a test at the end of that. So, there was another six weeks of that realistically was the main sort of … Submarine Initial Training was the submarine itself, so learn about submarines, how they were constructed, all the systems onboard, and then the other half of that would be about, as a Sonar Operator, actually learning about how to interpret sonar information.
Simon: Is it hard to pick up initially?
Colin: I’m going to say yes. I clearly, looking back at my …
Simon: I can’t think of anything in quotes, ‘normal life’ where you have that really. Something of that detail that you have to listen to.
Colin: Well, I think initially there are quite obvious training examples that you go through, and then when you start going to sea as a Sonar Operator, you’re on Watch, time is pretty much spent with a set of earphones on operating sonar, and the later edition submarines I was on, we worked a 6 hours on, 6 hours off regime, so in theory for 12 hours a day, you’d be operating as a Sonar Operator, you’d actually be operating sonar, you’d be doing your core skill job, so as you can imagine, after a number of years, you kind of get pretty good at what you’re listening to. So, I guess, like you were just saying there, in a number of other career or pursuits, how often would you do just 12 hours a day, day in day out?
30 minutes 50 seconds
Simon: It’s totally focussed on that.
Colin: Yeah, and one of the key things you’re doing, as much as detecting all those sounds and other ships or whatever’s in the Ocean, you’re actually … you’re the ears and eyes of the submarine when it’s dived, so you’re keeping that submarine safe as well, so that’s why they’re always being operated by the sonar team, as soon as that submarine dives, those sonars are operated 24/7.
Simon: And so with you communicating … you’ve got a view of where you are and what’s around you …
Colin: Yeah, there’s like an intelligence picture that gets updated that will come through.
Simon: That’s then shared with the Captain or whoever.
Colin: Yeah, and that will get passed down to us. You know, ‘we’re going over here now.’ You get regular Watch Briefs to update you on situation awareness, where you’re going, what the plan is for the next 6 hours, 2 days etc. Where you fit into the plan, what they’re expecting the Sonar Department to do and achieve, and like anything, you know, intelligence comes in and your knowledge of what you’re doing and what’s out there gets updated. And then what is it that you should be looking for, what do you expect to see on your sonars.
Simon: Right, have a listen out for this or …ok. And what is that like living in the 6-hour packages then?
Colin: Generally that take about, for me it used to take about three days to get into the swing of it ‘cos of course you’ve got to get you’re, like I said earlier, there’s also all the domestic stuff that’s got to be done, so you can’t really do that on Watch, so you’ve got to do it on off Watch, whether that’s the eating, the sleeping, taking in a movie, writing up a Report.
Simon: And you’ve got to squeeze that in 6 hours?
Colin: Yeah, so from a sleeping perspective, I used to try and get 5 hours in on one off Watch period, and maybe 2 or 3 maximum on the second off Watch period, and for me it took about 2 -3 days to get into that routine and then I was fine. But the first 48 hours, for me it used to be difficult for me to get into that sleep pattern as well. And of course, that could go on for 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 2 months, and it’s quite surprising, like anything in life, you think it’s dragging but all of a sudden you look back and you go, “We’ve been doing this for 6 weeks already.”
Simon: Oh right, that’s interesting isn’t it? It’s almost like being in a hypnotic state ‘cos you’re in that regular balance.
Colin: Yeah, nice drumbeat, and it’s all very much, very regimented in that respect, you know. Go on Watch at a certain time, get your Briefs, do this, do that, and then at the end of the Watch, you’re preparing to hand-over to the other guys that you just took over from 6 hours ago, and it’s just constantly rotating that round really.
Simon: So, you’ve got a strong relationship … it’s always the same person that takes over from you is it?
Colin: Well, you might not be sitting on the exact same piece of equipment but … for example, if there are 12 of you in your Sonar Department, there will be 6 in one Watch and 6 in the other.
Simon: Oh there’s that many? Of course, if you’re the eyes and ears then of course there’s that many, right.
Colin: So, you’re always being relieved by 1 of the 6 that you relieved, and as I say, not necessarily you’d be on the same sonar equipment that time, but you pretty much would be working with 2 or 3 of then that you’d handed over to, they’ve come back to you and sometimes if it was quiet, you’d basically be handing them back what you’d got from them. Nothings changed. No change to the plan, nothing out there. I had it, you’ve got it, I’m off to bed sort of thing.
Simon: And that would be if you’re in the middle of a big Ocean somewhere?
Colin: Well, we still do the 6 on, 6 off regardless of whatever activity you’re doing.
Simon: I was thinking about the lack of updates, you know, same as it was when …
35 minutes 16 seconds
Colin: Yeah, so from a ‘same as it was last Watch’, there’s what you’ve got on your sonars, and of course you’re also handing over if you’ve got any particular defects on the kit, any problems. You know, the Maintainer might still be trying to get something back up and running, so you’d be passing that sort of information over as well. If you’ve got a defect or you’ve not got access to part of your sonar suite, which means you’ve got part of your capability missing, it’s also ‘what have you done to bridge that gap in the meantime while that defect is being rectified.’ And understanding what your deficiencies are at that moment in time. What does that translate to in your searching for the threat as it were, or whatever your tasking is. How are you compensating for this loss of capability at this moment in time? So, that’s all part of that hand-over as well. If you like, the larger picture, so the intelligence picture or any other sort of information that’s coming in, that would come in to the Command Team and that would then get filtered down to the Sonar Team and we would respond accordingly.
Simon: Ok. And you mentioned this Sonar Suite. Were there different bits of kit related to the frequencies you were talking to?
Colin: Yeah, exactly.
Simon: So you’d have one high, middle and low frequency.
Colin: Yeah, and then there’s active sonars as well, so those … a bit on the movies where you constantly hearing ‘ping’, we don’t do that. That’s all theatre, that doesn’t happen ‘cos if you’re transmitting, you’re just telling someone where you are, you’re just a beacon aren’t you? You’re telling that listening platform where you are, so the idea is to remain stealthy and just use passive sonar, so just listen for the noise in the Ocean, not go active. You’re active sonar helps you with confirming a range and bearing of something ‘cos you can just transmit straight out, get a reflection, it’s definitely down that bearing and now I’ve got a range through the passive sonar, that’s the bit you’re struggling for. You can classify if you’ve got enough information on your sonar, what you’re hearing, what you’re seeing, you know what the bearing is because your sonar’s pointed at that bearing. What you don’t know early on, is what it’s range is. And what you need to do then is, do what they call, ‘Ranging Manoeuvres’ and basically carry out some trigonometry at the end of the day.
Simon: Ok. So go round the side, see if it’s …
Colin: Increase speed. Oh, there are a number of things you can do on the submarine, and my memory eludes me exactly, but there are a number of approaches that you can do to start calculating the range of a contact in the Ocean.
Simon: So, it’s the active only gets used if you’re …
Colin: Yeah, and it was also part of that safety thing as well, because if al of a sudden you’ve lost confidence in how close you might be to something else, you go active and it will tell you how close you are, and where it is, straight away.
Simon: And then you’d move suddenly to get away.
Colin: You may not need to move because you might be fine, but if you need to, then the Captain or whoever is in command at that moment in time can take the relevant action required to keep the submarine safe.
Simon: On of the other interviews it was spoken about that the active was used against them. They were doing a sneaky look at a new Aircraft Carrier and the Russians went active to basically say, “We know you’re there so it’s time to skip off now.”
Colin: Yeah that’s right. So that happens and then again that will depend on what the Captain’s got in his rules of engagement, on how he reacts to that. Generally speaking, the simple philosophy is that for active sonar, depending on how again, how the Sonar Operators are receiving that active transmission from if you like in this case the Russians as you said then, they interpret that information and pass back a Report as to whether they felt the Russians were actually in contact with own submarine, or it might be recommending turning towards the transmission because if you got a big broadside transmission, you’d be giving yourself a big echo but if you turn towards, and they talk about … earlier on before I think we started recording, we were talking about signal reduction activity, so if you point it and you’ve not got flat faces of your submarine, now you’ve got very sharp angles where you’re getting glancing reflections from the active sonar that’s transmitting you, there’s not a lot of it being returned back to the person that’s prosecuting you with his active sonar, so again there are a few techniques to employ that sometimes means you can stay on station quite close, or you might decide it’s time to turn and run, depending on your level of risk you’re willing to take at that moment in time.
40 minutes 36 seconds
Simon: Just going back to the arrays briefly, they’re different microphones. What do you call them? Aquaphones or …?
Colin: Hydrophones.
Simon: Hydrophones. They’re down the hull?
Colin: So, some are down the hull, some are fitted into the fin of a submarine. In the older Class Submarines, on the diesel boats, you would have seen a dome on the front of the bow, there was a Sonar Array in there. There’s what we call a ‘Chinstrap Array.’ So, there’s a Sonar Array that runs round the front of a nuclear submarine. That’s what we call it, a ‘Chinstrap Array’ because it round there. There’s a Towed Arrays as well, so Towed Sonar Systems, so there’s a number of hydrophones configured to make up different Array types to do different tasks really.
Simon: And I guess having it down the side or if you’re trailing something out the back, that then gives you a better idea of … it’s not the ability to listen more, it’s just maybe of finding direction is it?
Colin: Well one of the things that if you’re towing a sonar, a passive sonar, what you’re doing is you’re removing it from all the own ship’s noise in the ship, so you’re actually improving it’s sensitivity and giving it a fighting chance, otherwise it’s got to fight through all own ship’s noise, so that’s one reason for having a towed sonar. Towed sonars are also very good because you can slow down and allow them to sink and explore a different depth in the Ocean, which you might want to do tactically. The sonars that are down the side of a submarine, much improved today, but in the early days they were plagued with having lots of own ship’s noise coming in through the back of the hydrophones in effect, so there’s a lot of work on modern sonars that have reduced that issue.
Simon: Ok. So, can we talk about the noise onboard and these things of people …
Colin: Clanging around? “Keep quiet!” Yeah, so three key tenets to a submarine. Stay safe, remain undetected, complete the aim. Under the second one of remain undetected, everything you do needs to be … if it’s going to make a noise, and any noise could be exploited by your enemy as a detection opportunity, you need to ask permission to do. From opening a hull valve, clearly to running up engines, changing over things like fresh water tanks, to even, back in the old days, and still depending on where you are and what your task is, to watching movies, it all makes noise.
Simon: So, that’s what the playing of the VHS tape or the noise coming out the speaker or …
Colin: Absolutely, yeah. So, ask permission to do that. So, basically, given where you are, what your operational stance is, is that an acceptable activity to undertake to increase that overall noise volume of your own platform?
Simon: Yeah, and if you notice things that were sort of going in then you’d pass on the …
Colin: Yeah exactly, so we’d be looking for what we call ‘own ship’s noise’ as a Sonar Operator, so not only are we all listening to everything else that’s going on in the Ocean, we’re also, part of our role is to monitor ourselves to make sure that we aren’t making any undue noise that could be exploited by somebody looking for us.
Simon: And if it is something within the own ship noise as you said, is that really obvious because it’s so loud in the headphones?
Colin: Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the headphones. It could just be actually on the processes information that the sonar’s displaying with you. So it might be out of your normal hearing range, but the processor in the sonar can still see it which means another sonar system can still see it at the low frequencies or specifically high frequencies. So, it’s a constant monitoring, a constant watch I suppose for a better phrase, to keep an eye on yourself. So, just keep checking your own self noise and make sure you’re not putting it out there. So, you know that certain pumps and certain things are going to run. They have to run; they’re supplying things called the ‘Hotel Load’ so your electrical supplies etc. Anything that rotates, will give off a frequency and make a noise. You need to look at that and it’s got a tolerance. You’re just looking for that to make sure it’s still in tolerance, and you can see these things increasing in intensity and you’d report that through. That would then trigger the Maintenance to go and investigate, maybe run some vibration monitoring checks on it etc to see if it’s still in tolerance. You might find it’s a simple thing that one of the rubber mounts has broken down, and that’s now transmitting more noise than it normally would ‘cos the rubber’s no longer doing its job.
46 minutes 11 seconds
Simon: That’s quite mad that you’re spotting maintenance issues by hearing or watching them.
Colin: Yeah, I know. It happens. There’s normally a … clearly a Maintenance Regime that runs on throughout the platform, but things happen obscurely and that’s one of the things that might crop up. Clearly one of the biggest noise source is always the Chef, clanging and banging pots and pans around, dropping stuff, and if you drop something metal against a metal hull, that’s going to travel quite a long way into the Ocean, so …
Simon: Right. So, what was your relationship like with the Chefs then?
Colin: That was fine. Yeah, and like anything, as I said earlier, every now and again one of them would mess up, drop something. You just go and give them a bit of a hard time for a while.
Simon: So they get the nickname ‘clanger’ then (laughs).
Colin: Whatever yeah (laughs).
Simon: Speaking to different people, they’ve got different relationships with the food onboard as well. What was your relationship with the food?
Colin: Generally it’s been pretty ok. There’s been a few odd things I can think of. I always remember one of the Chef’s deciding that heating pork pies would be a good idea, the old cold pork pie, and he heated them up for some reason, so I didn’t quite understand that, but generally …
Simon: What did you end up with? Food poisoning there or …?
Colin: Well, I don’t know quite what his reason was. On a diesel submarine, well any submarine really, your fresh food doesn’t last that long and after about a couple of weeks, you’re starting to move in to the tinned stuff and the processed stuff more and more. It still tended to be pretty good on the whole I think. Certainly, my last experience onboard a nuclear submarine, in the latter stages of my career, I can’t think I had any complaints really about food at all.
Simon: But was it a highlight for you? Some people are saying how key it was.
Colin: It does tend to be a bit of a highlight for some … I’m not saying it would be a highlight for me, but you certainly knew that it was steak on a Saturday night, fish was Friday, pizza was probably Sunday.
Simon: I did an interview with a Chef why pizzas were on Sunday. It’s because they used to use all the stuff left over from the roast (laughs).
Colin: You’ve got to maximise what you’ve got onboard definitely. One of the things, it was always quite nice was once you’d run out of all the bread you’d brought on, when they start making fresh bread every day, overnight, and you’d end up with a Day Chef and a Night Chef in effect so, one would work overnight making bread and preparing everything for the meals the following day. They’d go off to bed after breakfast, not to be seen again until probably, you know, 11 o’clock at night, while the other couple of Chefs would do the meals through the day as it were.
Simon: And with the … one thing that you mentioned was the other team members on the sonar. The relationship between the different teams that taking over from, that seems that would be a very important thing. You’ve got to be really tight knit.
Colin: On a diesel submarine, we only had 6 Sonar Operators and there was a different regime then. So, go back to the early career, in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s there was diesel submarines and a lot of the time we would only be in that two Watch system if we were doing a particular tasks, we would otherwise be in a three Watch system. On a nuclear submarine, the Warfare Branch as they now call us all, they were always in a two Watch system regardless of whatever you were doing, so they gave you the maximum amount of capability all of the time by having half of the Warfare Branch up and about, on Watch, managing the submarine, whereas the Engineering World, so the guys looking after the reactor and that, they would be in a 1 in 3, 1 in 4 regime but that’s all to do with restrictions on their Watch Keeping hours and the legal requirements of running a nuclear plant as well, so they would be a different Watch Keeping regime than the other half of the submarine. However, the timings would mean that everybody was still changing over at meal times, typically 7, 1 and 7, so breakfast, lunch and evening meal, and then through the night they’d be a bit different.
51 minutes 34 seconds
Simon: Ok.
Colin: But that thing about in the Sonar Department, because you are still a small Department, whether you’re on a modern nuclear submarine, which is 12-15 odd people, or back in the days of a diesel submarine with a much smaller Sonar Department. That hand-over was crucial, all your Logs were up to date, the sonar picture that’s on your sonars was up to date and you’d handed it over. You’d sit there with your headphones on, the guy would come in, a guy back then, clearly it could be a lady today ‘cos we’ve got females onboard submarines, plonk another set of headphones on them, say, “Right, this is contact so and so, it’s a fishing vessel, happy? Right, this one’s that, it’s doing this many revs, happy?” So, a proper round the clock as it were, round the compass, suite. “You happy?” “Yep, I’ve got it” and then off you go.
Simon: How far off can you hear stuff then?
Colin: That is totally dependent on so many things. How noisy is what you’re listening to in the first place, how good are your own sonars and what’s the environment between what you’re listening to and yourselves and that is clearly the Ocean, so is the sea noisy at the moment? Is it raining up top? Because rain puts an awful lot of noise into the Ocean, and that will really reduce your detection ranges. Is there a lot of fish activity? Especially marine mammals, dolphins and whales, squeaking and crying about, they can absolutely blank the sonars. Snapping shrimps for example, you know all these things.
Simon: Whating shrimp?
Colin: Snapping shrimps. Just shrimps, the noise they make when they’re in … a huge shoal of shrimps, they make an awful lot of noise.
Simon: That’s them communicating is it, or eating?
Colin: Yeah, so very intense noise, quite in close proximity to your own sonars, basically you can’t hear anything other than them, so there’s a lot of variables in the Ocean that are going to contribute to how far you can hear something.
Simon: Actually, while you’re on the diesels, that idea of coming home after being on a diesel sub, and you know you’re coming home with your clothes and other people say it feels like the diesel is impregnated in the skin. Did you have that thing of leaving the bag outside and then going to it a few days later to try and wash stuff?
Colin: Definitely. Yeah, so I remember one time coming back off a trip fairly late in the evening. We got in at night, earlier than we should have done, and I lived almost with walking distance of HMS Dolphin back in those days, so we’d come in, I got home late in the evening and I remember my wife just going, “Hello, stand there, strip off, I’ll run the bath.” Literally …
Simon: So she knew you’d turned up because of the smell that …
55 minutes 2 seconds
Colin: It does get in your skin and there’s no doubt about it, you could have long bath, 10 showers, put a clean shirt on, go out, pick it up the following morning and it would just smell rancid. And it would just take a number of days for that to sort of work its way out. That is definitely true.
Simon: I’d heard other stories of Pubs around there. This was during the Cold War Period, if someone walked into a Submariner’s Pub and they didn’t smell of diesel, they were looked at suspiciously (laughs).
Colin: Well, that might be the case. I can’t say I remember that myself, but yeah, I can understand that (laughs).
Simon: So, how long were you on diesels then?
Colin: So, from early ’79 through to ’92.
Simon: And you made the decision to move to nuclear?
Colin: Well, no, the Navy kind of did that ‘cos it started to change from a split fleet of diesel and nuclear submarines to an all-nuclear submarine flotilla.
Simon: Ok. So then from what you were saying about the sound of the craft, that’s a whole new learning experience with you shifting to nuclear.
Colin: Definitely, yeah. It was definitely an experience that’s for sure.
Simon: Ok, can you talk about that?
Colin: So, I left my last diesel submarine in ’92. I went as a Chief teaching in the Submarine School for 3 years and then it was my time to go back to sea and I was selected to go to HMS Trenchant, a Trafalgar-class submarine out of Devonport, down in Plymouth there, and I was afforded one piece of what you might call cross-training, from diesel submarines which I knew like the back of my hand, to nuclear submarines, and they sent me to do a [inaudible] Watches Navigation Course, which I didn’t need because I was a qualified PIOLA Watch, with the latest kit because we had it on the last boat I was on, so the same stuff that they had [inaudible] Navigation on Trafalgar-class submarines I was already used to using. So, I’m joining HMS Trenchant as the Chief of the Sonar Department, and I’ve never operated any of the sonars on it, and I’ve had no training in the School on any of these sonars. However, it might sound slightly I suppose glib, but sonar actually is quite simple from an Operator’s perspective. There’s some noise out there somewhere. You’ve got a 360-degree display, and it will appear on there and you’ve got some headphones, and it kind of doesn’t matter what that sonar system is, to a lesser or greater degree, ‘cos they all do the same thing. They present you with some noise in the Ocean down a bearing, so yes, you’ve got a lot of different knobs and switches and the line-ups are different and setting up is different and understanding it’s capability is different, but the basic operation is quite simple. Which sounds easy to say but for me it is quite simple.
Simon: It’s the same sounds coming through …
Colin: Absolutely. The basic function of that sonar is doing the same thing as the very first one I learnt on back in 1979. It’s just presented differently because it’s on more modern displays, you need to operate the sonar differently, but in effect it’s like, you know, my first car was a Mk 1 Ford Escort. There’s an Audi sat out there, it’s basically the same.
Simon: Right.
Colin: It’s just the knobs and switches and the kind of things they do are a bit different, but they’re all doing the same function.
Simon: And the sort of analogy with sound, the inputs the same, there’s still a road and your eyes are taking in information.
Colin: Absolutely, yeah. But it was quite interesting. I remember having my Joining Brief with the Captain on there and I’m in his cabin and he’s telling me what he expects from his Chief of Sonar, and all I can think is, I can only operate this one piece of kit in your submarine. That’s all that was going through my head, and he’s telling me all these wonderful things he expects me to do and I’m just going, ‘Yeah, I can only operate that’ ‘cos that’s on a diesel submarine as well. But then that’s where the team thing comes into it. So, they all knew that I’d been in a submarine before but now I’m in charge, you just get it right. You guys need to help me get through this and I’ll look after you, and that’s how it works. So, I stopped the grief falling on them and they basically trained me (laughs). Which was fine. And then the same thing happened 14 month later. I went to HMS Trafalgar after leaving Trenchant, and there was a whole new Sonar Suite on there and again I got no training to the latest and greatest sonar that they were filling onboard nuclear submarines at that time, but again, it’s just another sonar in my view.
60 minutes 35 seconds
Simon: So, do you think they went through that thought process of well, it’s sonar, it’s going to be …
Colin: No, I don’t think so. I think back then I think there was a mindset in the sort of drafting and world that you are already are a Chief Op Sonar. This is a submarine with sonar on it. You don’t need to know anything else. Well, I suppose I kind of supported that theory in the end, by just getting on there and getting on with it.
Simon: And the sounds were different. Ship sounds were different for the nuclear because you’ve not got engines the same …
Colin: Yeah, so again if you go back to monitoring your own sounds, it’s a different set of sounds. The information on the frequency spectrum arrives in different parts of the frequency spectrum ‘cos machines are doing different things at different speeds and you don’t run your diesel engines specifically on a nuclear submarine ‘cos your main power is coming from your reactor. Again, you’re applying the same principles but you’ve got a different frequency spectrum, so where all this noise of your own ship is falling, is falling in different places and you’ve got parts of your own ship’s noise you’ve got on a nuclear submarine that you wouldn’t even have on a diesel submarine and vice versa, because of different components and different bits of machinery.
Simon: And Trenchant and Trafalgar are … is that called SSNs?
Colin: They’re SSNs yeah.
Simon: So they’re the ones that sort of … they don’t hold the nuclear weapons.
Colin: No.
Simon: What would they do then, the SSNs?
Colin: So, they are the … we used to call them FOSM’s Ferraris.
Simon: Call them what?
Colin: FOSM’s Ferraris. So, FOSM was Flag Officer Submarines and obviously a Ferrari is a smart fast car and T-Boats were the latest and the greatest back in the day, so we nicknamed them FOSM’s Ferraris ‘cos they could go fast, and they were al nicely decked and kitted out. So, they are just underwater Warships at the end of the day, carrying torpedoes and Tomahawk Cruise Missiles, so that was their payload.
Simon: Ok, right. So, the kind of mission they would do would be go off and gather intel in places and that sort of stuff.
Colin: Yeah, it could be that, again it depends on whatever the tasking was, from doing, you mentioned sort of … another guy had mentioned about doing sneakies etc, so you could be going and doing some clandestine op if you like to stand a Patrol of the Falklands, just maintaining a presence down there, you could be part of a Task Force, so in support of what would be today, Queen Elizabeth or Prince of Wales. You might be required just to do some trials and drills or development of the next generation of submarines, so many, many things. From training the next future submarine Captains, testing new equipment as I said, and sometimes part of your role was just ‘flying the flag’ on the odd occasion. Now on your way back from a certain trip, mission, it might be that I guess the Foreign Commonwealth Office would like a bit of RN presence in Port X, which is always a welcome after you’d been underwater for a few weeks.
Simon: So, you then turn up there and as you say, ‘fly the flag’ to show that you are around.
Colin: Yeah, there will be a little old Cocktail Party onboard Day 1. Maybe there was a requirement for a small contingent to go and meet the Mayor or do a bit of a parade type thing. So, when I was on Trenchant, I was actually part of the Parade that we did the handing over of Hong Kong back to the authorities there.
Simon: In ’97 was that?
Colin: Yeah, that was ’97 and we also did something in ’95. Was it VJ Parade in ’95, the Victory over Japan Parade. So, when I was on Trenchant, I did two trips to the Far East on her. Long haul, long old trips. To some people being away 7 months was probably not as long as some have been away, but that was long enough for me personally.
65 minutes 16 seconds
Simon: That’s under the water?
Colin: Well, the vast majority of it yeah, ‘cos for an SSN, that’s where it was designed to be. So, as soon as you can, that’s where you’ll go.
Simon: And what does being on a 7-month mission … is it a different mindset or you just get into that rhythm you were talking about?
Colin: Yeah, well it gets broken up a lot as well because you’ve got the probably the initial going out, having a bit of refresher training, bit of Safety Training with some Safety Teams onboard. Just getting a tick in the box to say you’re still safe to operate this platform after it had been alongside for a number of months maybe, having maintenance, upgrades, whatever. You’ll have probably had a crew change; you’ve got other people just need to get back into the rhythm of being at sea. Some will be brand new people, never been to sea before, be able to get them trained up, so part of that … if you’re talking about going on a long trip as I say out to the Far East, part of that is going to involve getting the platform almost up to speed, and the crew back to being a proper capable fighting machine again, but you’re doing most of that dive on an SSN ‘cos that’s where they’re designed to be. And that’s where it operates best. You can go faster underwater than you can on the surface anyway, and you might get into the Mediterranean, maybe you would have an exercise with, I don’t know, the Italians or the French or something. You might be doing something out there as part of a NATO support activity. The next thing you’ve got to go through the Suez Canal, so that’s a different sort of way of operating the platform. Get out the other side, get into the Red Sea, get deep again, plough along as fast as you can, ‘cos you need to get where you’ve got to get as quick as you can, so of course now you’re back into being dive routine again, 6 on, 6 off. Then you might end up doing a task maybe in the Gulf, especially if you think of recent activities over the two Gulf Wars, so working again maybe in a coalition with another Task Group and some Americans. You might have had a Port visit put in so you might pull into Bahrain for example, get some repairs done, restock on food. Off you go again, so on a long trip, there’s a fair bit of transition from being alongside, being on the surface, most of the time is underwater, but then there’s time when you are just getting from A to B so you are on your own, or there might be times when you’re working as I say with a Task Group. You might be doing specific exercises with another Nation. Then you’ve got your Port visits that will come in to that. If you go through somewhere like the Malacca Straits, then you’ve got to think about pirates who even attack submarines on the surface.
Simon: Really?
Colin: Oh yes, so you’ve got a whole set of Drills and Procedures for your own submarine’s Ship’s Company to deal with that activity, so if you were just on the surface coming up the Channel, you’re not thinking about pirates, but if you’re out that neck of the woods, you’ve got to factor that in to your Operating Procedures, so that happens as well.
Simon: You mentioning that it seems like they’re on a hiding to nothing to try and get onboard a submarine. To stop them trying I guess.
Colin: Well I think if you were to Google it, they did actually get onboard an American submarine at one time.
Simon: The top was open and somehow they got in?
Colin: My understanding is, again I’m sure you can find this on Google, they just came flashing up alongside at speed. No one was expecting it, caught unawares and before you knew it, they were there. So, we used to have proper Anti-piracy Drills and Procedures if you’re in that sort of part of the world and you’re on the surface.
Simon: And what about when you came into Port, you’d been focussed 6 hours on, 6 hours off, is it quite a wild release to be in Port?
Colin: Can be. It depends on what you’re doing and how long you’re there for. If you were going for a proper jolly, as in if you are going to be 3,4,5,10 days even, whatever, that would normally start especially if you’d had a decent period dive, say 6 weeks or more, there would usually be a Harbour Station’s Cocktail going on, as you’re making your way alongside, a fair amount of drinking before you even left the submarine, and go off to your accommodation. Some would have to stay onboard obviously because you’ve got to have your Duty Watch onboard every day, you’ve still got to manage and run the submarine alongside, so part of the Ship’s Company …
70 minutes 30 seconds
Simon: Even the Sonar side.
Colin: Well, you would have some Sonar Rates would be part of the overall Duty Watch, mainly because they’d be doing Guard duties. You still got to clean it, so all this husbandry goes on 24/7 onboard a submarine, whether it’s alongside or at sea. Someone’s got to keep it clean, got to keep it ticking over, there are systems to be checked, procedures to be adopted. One of the things you do every morning in Port is you put some air back into the Ballast Tanks just to make sure you’re fully buoyant when you’re alongside ‘cos during the course of the day, and as things cool down, you can lose some air, so one of the things first thing in the morning, start a blower and pump some more air back in just to make sure you are fully buoyant for the day ahead. Things like that. So, as I say, there’s a constant drip-feed of activities that need to be done whether you’re at sea or alongside and that needs a minimum number of qualifies people to be onboard at any one time.
Simon: So, that’s effectively the short straw. Everyone else is off having a good time.
Colin: But then of course, you’ve probably got say 15 who make up a Duty Watch alongside because you’ve always got to have t your Nuclear Watch Keepers onboard ‘cos someone’s got to be looking after the reactor 24/7. A number of Engineers in that respect, so there’s a various number of disciplines onboard from Marine Engineers, Weapons Engineers, the Warfare Branch, so the Sailors, the Officers of the Watch, the Engineering Officer of the day etc, so there’s a number of skill sets onboard, so that if you to deal with any kind of activity or incident, somebody onboard has got the skills to manage that and deal with it. So, from an emergency, to even berthing another vessel that wants to come alongside you.
Simon: Which was your favourite Port to spend time in then? Did you …
Colin: Well, I did alright in the Caribbean actually for a Submariner. I ended up there quite a lot which was quite nice. I always did like laying in the sun drinking a cocktail. They were all good realistically, but for different reasons, even to the fact that in the early days, on two occasions, we went to Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis for a 7-day jolly. One was in the winter, so a bit bleak, but a Pub’s a Pub and you still turn it into fun regardless, so yeah clearly going to the Caribbean was nice. I spent a lot of time on and off in Singapore, and I’m going to say I’m not bothered if I don’t go back to Singapore again, as nice as it is (laughs) I’ve been there enough times courtesy of the Navy, but that’s another nice place to go. But actually, Port visiting round the UK is really good fun as well, whether it was in Hull, or Cardiff. I even to a boat up the Manchester Ship Canal back in the days. Yeah, all good. We’re all pretty good at just making it fun regardless, and you know you’re going to have your social secs (secretary) onboard as well who are … you know you’re going to visit this Port; they are going to be in contact with people a long time beforehand, and very often you could turn up somewhere and you’re going to have people on the Jetty going, “Right, we knew you were coming in and we’ve laid on some cocktails and stuff. If you want to come to this, we’ll see you there guys, alright?”
Simon: Right.
Colin: Yeah, you get quite a bit of that actually. I certainly remember going to … one of the, I suppose thinking back, so after the Gulf War of 1991, I was on HMS Osiris, and we did a bit of that, we went to the Falklands, we came back via the Caribbean, and our last Port of call was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and we were the first UK Warship … you know whether you’re a submarine or a ship, you’re still a UK Warship, to visit Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for many a year and we had a host submarine ‘cos they refit the American Los Angeles Class submarines in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and they just laid so much on for us. You know, we were met by their sort of Welcoming Committee, and it was quite difficult at times to have to say, “Now look, I’ve had enough drink now, can I have a day off please?” and that sort of thing, so yeah, it was really good.
75 minutes 36 seconds
Simon: Sorry, I was involved with the story you were telling. So, you mentioned, go off at a tangent on this one, you mentioned that you were married, which year did you get married?
Colin: ’84.
Simon: And did your wife know … well I guess knew you beforehand to some degree.
Colin: Yeah, I met her in 1980. I was a serving Submariner then. Yeah, I met her, I think it was the Bank Holiday weekend. So, the Farnborough Air Show was big back in those days for those that can remember it, and she lived in Farnborough, and the reason I met her was because a guy I was serving with on HMS Olympus with, we used to share a 4-man cabin shoreside back in the day, and he was going home to Farnborough for this long weekend, but he was going to a Birthday Party of one of the girls he used to be at school with. And me and the other Nobby I mentioned earlier, ‘Nobby the TS’ we had the whole Bank Holiday weekend off. A couple of young, free and single Submariners, money in our pockets etc, so we basically coerced him into taking us down to Farnborough for the weekend, and we arrived, none of had been to Farnborough before, we had to find some accommodation which was really difficult ‘cos we didn’t appreciate it was the Farnborough Air Show, it’s August Bank Holiday. Anyway, we managed to find a small Hotel in the back streets that had some rooms in it, and then the following night was this girl’s 18th Birthday Party that this other guy had gone to school with, and her best mate is now my wife. So, that’s how I met her, by gate-crashing somebody else’s Birthday Party really.
Simon: It’s always the best way to meet people (laughs). So, had she had dealings … knowledge of the Submariner world at all?
Colin: No, not at all ‘cos Aldershot’s just down the road isn’t it, so it was all Army really around there back in the day.
Simon: And is that … I mean did she know what she was getting into effectively.
Colin: I don’t think so back then, no.
Simon: In the way of you being away, although she understood the Military life perhaps?
Colin: Yeah, ‘cos her father was in the RAF, but not in the early months I wouldn’t have thought, by a long chalk. But then in ’82, she came down here and we got a place. We rented our own flat for a couple of years and then got married subsequently. So, she was used to me being away before we got married anyway.
Simon: Yeah, ok. So, that … a lot of people lived in accommodation that’s not shared or on Base sort of stuff, but you were outside that, ‘cos it seems like that particularly for wives who’ve got husbands away at the time, that can be a support network but it can also be … well, it’s not all positive, because there’s a sort of different pressures I guess, but she didn’t have that because you were up in different parts of Gosport.
Colin: Yeah, so we were only about a mile away from HMS Dolphin, as it was, and then she got a job locally in Gosport, so she was occupied when I was away anyway with work.
Simon: Right, ok. And do you have children?
Colin: Yeah, so I’ve got a son whose 35, works for IBM, lives in Newbury and a daughter , 33, who spookily enough works at the same place as me these days at Dstl. She’s up in Waterlooville.
Simon: And how was the being a father remotely work out?
80 minutes
Colin: Yeah, not so great I don’t think, looking back on it. You miss a lot, I certainly did, their early years anyway. Very emotional going away. Once I was away it was probably ok ‘cos I was busy all the time, preoccupied with work etc. But not so great. My wife was really good at keeping them occupied and not focussing on ‘where’s daddy’ sort of thing all the time. She did a really great job of that I think, looking back on these things as you do now. I stopped going away in their early teens really. It got to that stage in my career where I was doing shoreside jobs here in the Portsmouth area.
Simon: Funnily enough, that’s the sort of time that children can be the hardest to deal with as well isn’t it? That they go through a rebellious period at some time or another to varying degrees.
Colin: Yeah, Kate would say that, you know, she teaches in Nursery still at the moment, and knows a lot more families locally than I do, and she would always say we had absolutely no problems with our kids compared to some of the things that she’s aware of, so yeah, very lucky in that respect.
Simon: Yes I guess whatever any of us do for a job there’s compromises perhaps in family life. It’s interesting what you were saying about the hardest part was going away, but you know that’s coming so you make the most of the time that you’re with them I guess do you?
Colin: Yeah, it’s all you can do really.
Simon: Ok. When you were at … you came back to Dolphin to be a Teacher or a Trainer.
Colin: Yeah, an Instructor in the Submarine School, yeah. So, that was a really good time actually, so there was a bunch of us Instructors at the time who would … nothing was too much trouble. So, if I needed to go somewhere and I had a course running, I could say, “Ginge, can you just take these guys this afternoon ‘cos I need to go and take the car down the garage” or whatever, and it was just nothing was too much trouble, and it was also a period when the Navy in early ‘90s, it stopped recruiting. It was trying to shrink the size of the Navy, and so we also found ourselves as Instructors devoid of any classes to teach, so that sharpened our card skills quite a lot it’s got to be said, or we’d go off and one of them would say, “Right, I need my fence putting up” and you’ve have a working party of Instructors who’d go off and help somebody in their garden and things like that because we generally didn’t have the students, because the Navy had stopped bringing them through. And what they called that ‘black hole’ interestingly enough, that carried through for about 2 or 3 decades. It’s only … it’s not that long that it’s passed through the system because if you don’t keep bottom feeding your recruitment and your succession plan, then eventually that hole is there isn’t it and you can’t just fill it ‘cos Submariners don’t live on a shelf in ASDA. You can’t just go and buy one, you’ve got to train it and grow it, but it was a good time and I had a lot of fun. In that period where we didn’t have many courses to teach, me and another guy called Paddy Coolahan, another Instructor there with me, we used to go and play a lot of tennis first thing in the morning. We would turn up, we’d got nothing to do, well we’ll go and play some tennis then, and the Physical Training Instructors, one day, we had probably been doing it for about a month, like nearly every morning we were out playing tennis for a couple of hours and he comes over and he says, “You two guys play a lot of tennis.” We said, “Well you know …” just explained what was going on. He said, “Right, we’re a bit short for the Dolphin Team, do you want to play for us.” We’d just got recruited by, you know, default because we were just out on the courts a lot. We weren’t any good (laughs). I remember the very first game we played, we went and played a team from HMS Collingwood, and you may or may not be aware but they have quite a lot of foreign national students that go through the training at Collingwood and HMS Sultan, certainly back then. They had a couple of International guys on one of the courses we were playing for them and I think they had some guy from Pakistan on the course. I never saw the ball this guy was hitting. It was just flying by me. Got absolutely annihilated. I don’t think we got a point the whole of the match, because of the quality of these guys that we were playing against, but it was fun. And also during that period, I just go back to the fact that I had the time, I qualified as a Level 3 cricket Umpire and football Referee, so I used to referee a couple of the sort of inter games between different Establishments. So, it could be Collingwood and Dolphin, Dolphin, Sultan etc back in the day. Did try and utilise my time relatively usefully I suppose, filling those voids of not having anybody to Instruct as such, but yeah, a really good time, a lot of fun actually, ‘cos everyone was great and I genuinely mean that. It was fun to come to work. You wanted to go to work, and we could find ourselves … I talked about playing cards, going, “Well it is 4 o’clock, we ought to go home really, but just another round then.” It was just great fun.
86 minutes 15 seconds
Simon: So that’s almost the sort of camaraderie that was on the boats, then taken onto the land.
Colin: Yeah, definitely.
Simon: And that’s something that for people who’ve been in the Navy and then submarines, their view of the Surface Fleet was people are sort of siloed. ‘I’m doing this at the moment, this is my role, and there isn’t the cross-feeding of ‘Oh, let me help you out with that’ but whereas in the submarines they said that was completely different, because everyone is relying on each other.
Colin: Yeah, exactly, and I made that reference earlier on about all sleeping, eating and breathing the same crap as it were. So, we’re all suffering the same level of, if you like, indignities, but euphoria as well. It’s very much a team game. We all sink or swim together.
Simon: Can you describe or encapsulate that camaraderie?
Colin: I suppose it’s best encompassed with the fact that just when you come alongside, say you’re doing a Port visit, just because you don’t work with these people day in and day out, you’re going to have a beer with them. Wouldn’t think twice about not drinking with them, for example. Doesn’t matter whether they’re an Engineer, one of the Chefs etc, just because they’re not your normal Watch Keeping buddies, and that 6-hour clique that you get at other tightness with, it’s just something you do without thinking. And actually it’s quite a nice release to talk to somebody else, they’re your ship’s mates, but you’ve not really spoken to them for 3 months because they go and work back aft, you see them in the Mess Room for a meal but you don’t get to have those long sort of quiet moment discussions where you might get into something, dare I say it, a bit philosophical and set the world to rights, but now you can do that over a pint or whatever, so yeah, definitely something that I think in the Submarine Service, it doesn’t matter which particular Branch you are, what your job is onboard, you are much more likely to have this bond that … you potentially don’t get in the Surface Ships world. Now I’ve never served on a Surface Ship. I spent all 34 years from 16 ½ through to 50, in the Submarine Service. So, maybe I missed something there. You know, there’s a bit of me that has often said, “I wouldn’t have minded 1 trip on a ship, just to see how the other half are doing it.”
Simon: Can I take you back to Gosport, where we were talking about the Training. So, when you then had time in Gosport, you were saying that when you started off you were probably too young for the Pubs, were there particular Pubs that you used to go to?
Colin: Yeah, so what is now a Weatherspoon’s, or is called The Star, so that used to be , back in the ‘80s, that was a specific Submarine Pub, The Star.
Simon: Is that The Star name, rather than the location is it, because there was something weird about Weatherspoon’s came in and said, “We want the name The Star and …”
Colin: That’s right, yeah.
Simon: Ok. So, it’s the location of the old Star.
Colin: The location is now not The Star, it’s now called Nelson’s, but that was The Star back in the day which is almost next door to where Weatherspoon’s is now, which is called The Star.
Simon: Right.
Colin: And then there was the George and Dragon and the other one was the Royal Naval Arms, up Stoke Road, another submarine haunt. That’s the one where they’ve just recently repaired the Victorian frontage on it. It’s been left derelict for a number of years now that boozer, but some Heritage money I think just recently been spent on that to try and give it a bit of a face lift, but they were the three sort of main Submariner sort of Pubs, back in the day. And Kate and I. when we used to rent our flat, if we were going to go out in the evening, quite happily stroll from one to the other, have a drink or two and stroll back, yeah.
90 minutes 45 seconds
Simon: And they were welcoming to Kate as well?
Colin: Oh yeah.
Simon: ‘Cos it’s all part of a sort of extended family.
Colin: Yeah, that was fine. No problem with that.
Simon: And what about the Landlords? Were there any particular memories of those?
Colin: Not for me personally, no. I never sort of … I wasn’t one of those guys that became really pally with Landlords, so although like a lot of the Services and the drinking culture, which is clearly different today than it was back then …
Simon: Generally in society I think.
Colin: Yeah, I was not in the Pubs as much as others, let’s just put that way is the best way so, I didn’t really make any close sort of affiliations with Landlords etc. I mean I’d know them by name and they’d know me by name but it would just be that social pleasantries, it wouldn’t be to have any sort of friendship with as such I guess. It was more of a transactional thing isn’t it? I’ve come here to buy some of your beer. I’m happy buying your beer (laughs).
Simon: How many times did you do your training at SETT?
Colin: Oh, let’s have a think. So, there’s the initial one when you’re on initial Submarine Training, and then every 3 ½ years was it after that? 3 or 4 years, so I’ve probably did it about half a dozen times I’d guess overall.
Simon: And what’s your memories of the experience?
Colin: Brilliant. Fantastic. The best memory is always the first time for me. I was definitely nervous, doing the formal 100-foot ascent, when you actually put your Escape Suit on as well, but I remember getting to the top of the … it’s the best ride in town, it’s fantastic fun. Getting to the top, and what you had to do was climb out the … it was very, very regimented for Health and Safety reasons as you can imagine, and you’re just basically being talked at very loudly. “Do this, do this, do this” and there was a line at the top of the Tank that each student had to go and stand on. They had to stand there, saying nothing, but being monitored by the Medics to make sure you’re not about to keel over. I think it was 2 minutes you had to stand still for, and then you just get, “Right, go” and you walk off and get changed. And I remember … I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but there is a guy called the Tank Top Chief, and he was in charge of everything. Never mind the Officer that was over there, the Tank Top Chief was in charge and you were left under no illusion that this guy was in charge. And he said something to me, and I said … he probably said something like, “You alright lad?” and I went, “Yes Chief, can I go again?” and I clearly got, “No, you bloody can’t, stand still.”
Simon: That has been, many people have said that they had sort of got to the top and they were like, “Yeah, again, again, again” (laughs).
Colin: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of fun. Really sad to see that it’s shut down and empty, and think there is a small video kicking around of how it all is now inside ‘cos the water is all drained out, so it’s all starting to decay etc. But the new facility is up in Scotland now, up in Faslane. They’ve not built a water column anymore. I think it’s only the American’s and Australian’s that have still got those.
Simon: We did a trip just before the end of the year, last year, ’21, and got a tour of the place and did a 360 photo at the top, full of water then at that point. I’ll send you a link to that.
Colin: Oh, that’s kind yeah. I took a … how long ago are we going to go now, probably 4 years ago now, I took the people I work with now from Dstl, about 50 of us down to the SETT, ‘cos I knew the Warrant Officer in charge at the time and arranged a day out there so they could all see it in operation, so they did some training runs with the Staff and then they took us round to see the …
Simon: Actually in the water?
Colin: Oh yes, the Staff were in the water. They did some escape runs and explained how the kit worked etc. And then we got a couple of the people that went with me, they didn’t do any escape runs but we got them to dress up in suits and float around on the top of the water etc, so that was all good fun, really enjoyable.
95 minutes 31 seconds
Simon: I’s funny ‘cos I guess not many people get to see the inside of it. A lot of people see the outside, but then to have the privilege of seeing the inside.
Colin: Yeah, a good day it was. And then there’s also the sadness of HMS Dolphin, the spiritual home of Submarine Flotilla, in the state of disrepair it’s in today. I used to love, sitting on the sea walls in the summer, just walking down the sea wall, you know, to the Fort area from the Submarine School area at the top. Just a great place to walk around and the little Yacht Pool in the middle of it where people have got a few boats moored up, just great fun. A very homely, comforting kind of Establishment, very much a place to belong, you know, without a shadow of doubt, but now, and it’s been like it for many years since the Submariners moved out, it’s all just left and decaying and yeah, it’s sad. But everything changes, so.
Simon: When you were onboard doing the missions, was there any time there you felt concerned for your safety, or any … other people have described them being chased down by the Russians and depth charging and things along those lines? Did you have any of that?
Colin: No, not me personally, I never felt unsafe. There was one particular Captain that I always said, “If we’re going to war, I want to go with him.” Just absolutely filled me with total confidence that he’d get it right every time.
Simon: That’s from calls he’d made previously?
Colin: Yeah, and him being working on his submarine, so he’s no longer with us unfortunately, he died too young, as many people do, but I never felt unsafe on any of the submarines I’ve been on. Not once did I feel unsafe, ‘cos I just generally believed that, as I said earlier, a team game and we’re all in it and we’re all doing our best to keep us all safe and get on with the job, so no, not me personally. Other people have different experiences of course.
Simon: Sure. Is there any sort of exciting stories that you can tell during you time onboard?
Colin: Exciting stories?
Simon: Well I guess it’s all in a day’s work for you.
Colin: I suppose one of the things that I really did enjoy … I’ve been down to the Falklands four times on submarines, three times on HMS Osiris spookily enough, on the same diesel boat and then once on HMS Trafalgar, but on the first occasion, of going down there on Osiris, which I think was over the Christmas of ’84, as we were leaving in the sort of February time to come back to the UK, the Helicopter Squadron down there wanted to practice what we call ‘highline transfers’ so that’s taking people on and off the submarine from the Bridge, and at the time, as the ‘Scratcher’, so that’s kind of like the Bosun’s Mate in effect in submarine terms, so the guy responsible for looking after the upper deck, its fixtures and fittings, coming alongside, ropes, and helo transfers comes under your bailiwick as well, so I’m standing there with the old hook to get all the static electricity off the line, to grab the line, get the first person all stropped up, off you go. So, we’re coming away from the Falklands heading north, and the Helicopter Squadron had just … I think there were 2 helicopters, they were just constantly for about 6 hours, just practicing high line transfers and then we got to the point and I went, “Right, I’ve had enough of this, it’s about time I went up” so we all went up, rotated ourselves round as well, so that was good fun. I’ve had it also where I think it was a Lynx helicopter did a mail transfer onto the back end of a diesel submarine, I think that was Osiris as well, and there’s not a lot of space on the back of a diesel submarine and now I’ve got a Lynx with 1 wheel balancing on the back end of a submarine and I’m, again as the ‘Scratcher’, crawling out with my Scratcher’s dickie, who is my mate and that’s just his nickname, getting the mail to get onboard the submarine, and it’s all a bit like. ’this is a bit hairy.’ Rotor blades are giving it like that. Something you wouldn’t do today I’m pretty sure but yeah, there’s some interesting times.
100 minutes 41 seconds
Simon: So the physical mail arriving, I’d heard of family grams and things along those lines, but that was actually physical stuff turning up?
Colin: Oh yeah, definitely.
Simon: And was that regular was it?
Colin: Not that regular, no. Occasionally you’d get a mail drop like that. They were pretty rare to be fair. Most of the time you’d pick it up when you got into Port, but family grams, yeah.
Simon: What was your memory of family grams?
Colin: Um, uneventful, because of …
Simon: They’d been so filtered.
Colin: Well and not only that, just so little words. For me personally it was almost like a ‘why are we bothering here?’ but for other people they were much more impacted I think by the separation that they needed it more. I personally … as I say, apart from that initial emotional wrench going away, I kind of like, ‘this is what I do now’ and it was ok. I wasn’t overly say upset by all of that once were away. Just get on with the job. Sounds a little bit harsh I think, but that’s what it was.
Simon: It sounds like an eminently sensible way of dealing with it (laughs) to me anyway. When you were involved with the Perisher Course …
Colin: Yeah, so there’s been a number of occasions when that’s happened. Only once though in my time on nuclear submarines, but 2 or 3 times when I was on diesel submarines. And my best memory really was I think the second one we did, we spent a month on Perisher, so this is the Submarine Command Course where we’re training the next generation of Submarine Captains, and it was always done on diesel submarines before you would go to a nuclear submarine and it was actually, just to finish this bit of the story, when I was on HMS Trafalgar, my first Captain on HMS Trafalgar was the very first Submarine Captain who had not served on a diesel submarine, so just getting to that generation by then, but we were, I think it was us and HMS Otus at the time, so there were two diesel submarines doing the Perisher what was back in its usual haunt back then around the Isle of Arran and Rothesay, up the north-west of Scotland there. We used to get a mix of students back then, not just the UK students, but also Dutch, Norwegian, occasionally an Australian or a Canadian sort of student as well. And they’d all take it in turns over a course of a number of months, so a lot of shoreside training, then slowly they get to sea and then they get to actually take over the submarine and do various attack and drills and procedures as if they were the actual Captain. So, they would be called the Duty Captain at that period of time and then the Instructor was known as Teacher. He was teaching his students, so he was always called Teacher, and then the Captains, the Duty Captain if they had the submarine at that time. But the submarine’s actual Captain always had submarine safety and control at any time as well, so he could instantly come out and if he was unhappy with anything, he’d just go, “Captain has command” and then all the focus is back on him, not the Duty Captain. But generally speaking, I don’t ever recall that happening, unless Teacher, ‘cos he used to sleep as well, he’d given his teaching duties to the actual Captain of the submarine. So, very often, certainly in the early days, you’d see Teachers take back control of the submarine, because the Duty Captain is not getting it right yet. There’s a safety issue potentially in the offing, so that’s kind of how that sort of played out, but there are a couple of key elements to the Perisher. There was the Weapons Weeks, where you’re actually conducting attacks with practice weapons on Warships, and there was what they called the ‘Inshore Ops’ phase so this is where you were trying to gather intelligence, or maybe you were trying to get through a minefield, you were being prosecuted by helicopters, other Warships. They’d put small boats out just to make life difficult for the Trainee from the better phase. One of the things, as I say, with those two activities, which were quite different really, each submarine would have 4 practice weapons onboard, and during the course of the Weapons Weeks, you’d start with single ships, so 1 ship against the submarine, then it would work up to 2, then 3, and eventually you’d be at 4 ships all prosecuting the submarine, making life more and more difficult and each day, one of the Duty Captains would get to fire all 4 of those torpedoes. And then they’d have to be recovered, so a Torpedo Recovery vessel would be part of that overall activity. They’d go and recover the torpedoes and then they’d go to a buoy, and we’d go to a buoy with them and we’d reload from the Torpedo Recovery vessel back down to the submarine, then the Weapons Engineering Team would recharge those practice torpedoes ready for the following morning. So, part of my role back in those days as the Upper Deck Party, the Casing Party, would be part of the Weapons Loading Party as well, so not only did you have a 5 0’clock start in the morning, you were now in the dark hours, loading weapons ready for them to be charged overnight ready to do it all again the following day, but once you’d finished your loading those weapons, then the Liberty boat which was running, would take you into Rothesay for example or into Brodick, depending where you were, and of course you’d have to have a few beers. Then we’d get back onboard about midnight, not 100 percent, ready for a 5 o’clock start and you’d do that day in day out.
107 minutes 34 seconds
Simon: So the Perisher is not just for the training Captains.
Colin: No, it’s hard work on the crew, trust me (laughs). So, that’s quite a tough time for the crew …
Simon: One, because the Captain is learning how to do it effectively, and you are kind of having to carry him a little bit?
Colin: Yeah, to a certain extent to start with , and you’d often be told by the Teacher to make life even more difficult for that trainee Captain as well.
Simon: What misreporting or …?
Colin: Well, to some extent, a bit of misreporting or not reporting, or because they can get so fixated on the periscope, ‘cos they’re constantly looking at the periscope, making what they call an ‘eyes only attack’ then they’d start removing people from Watch Keeping positions in the Control Room.
Simon: Oh really?
Colin: Absolutely, and I remember one of them where it got down to the Helmsman and Teacher in the Control Room. The Teacher had got rid of everybody else out of the Control Room …
Simon: And there would be normally how many people there?
Colin: Oh, at least half a dozen. So, he hadn’t even worked out that the guy raising and lowering the mast had gone. It was incredible to watch actually, ‘cos the sonar on that boat at the time was in the corner of the Control Room and you could look out across the Control Room, although a diesel class Control Room was about the size of where we’re sat now realistically. Two masts and then kit round the outside, but that corner over there, that would have been the centre and I was looking and there was just nobody and this guy was absolutely fixated on it. So, that’s part of the … that training is not all happening out here, what about all of this? Constantly situation awareness. You’ve got to understand and own everything all of the time Captain. And then the other bit I used to like, when we did the ‘Inshore Op’ phase of Perisher, we were working with the Royal Marines, the SBS for example, so we’d be practicing clandestine operations at a beach head or something, so we’d have a bunch of Royal Marines onboard with maybe canoes or sometimes rigid inflatable boats as well, and they would have to go through a nice procedure in the dark of surfacing and breaking the boats out and releasing the Marines to go off and do their dastardly deed, you know, whatever that was. The submarine would dive again, and then a bit later on, we’d come back in close, do some kind of recovery drill, and be that fully surfaced or snag. So, if it was a couple of canoes for example, they would put a piece of rope between the two canoes, and then the submarine would stick a mast up and come between the two, snag them and drag them back out to sea. Then you can surface ‘cos you’re out the way of prying eyes and the threat shoreside and pick them up. Those things didn’t always go well, trust me. I remember, once we surfaced and one of the canoes had its back broken over the Bridge, and the Marines were in the water, but being roughty, toughty Marines they don’t care do they? Or you’d sometimes you’d try if you had the rigid inflatable boats, as you surfaced, they would try and run themselves up onto the casing, so you could do that. Yeah, they often tipped over and that didn’t all go well either. And then being part of that Upper Deck Casing Party, I was involved in a lot of that recovery and re-stowing and mashing of fingers and getting bits of your body trapped in all sorts of things. So, hard work but a lot of fun, and we had … there’s another guy, a Dutch student. If I think back a bit now, it was almost like a cross between Boris Johnson I guess and Donald Trump. He had this massive blonde hair, and why wouldn’t he, he was a Dutchman for goodness sake, but when he was calling out bearings from the periscope, he was absolutely ingrained in the groove, it would be, “Bearing is thaaat” sort of thing like that. “Oh, ok” (laughs), which all became quite amusing to the rest of us.
112 minutes 16 seconds
Simon: That’s part of the course … I watched the Perisher series of programmes on TV and that seemed to be part of it was, remember you’re dealing with other humans, for some of the people going through the training.
Colin: Absolutely. And they definitely some of them … of course it’s their career. This is what they’ve worked through for all of their life, this is a make-or-break thing that Perisher Course. If you fail it, that’s it. Your submarine career is gone, you’re out of here, so there were times when they could be I suppose just blunt and rude in the moment. Didn’t mean anything by it but they were just so caught up in it all, especially if things weren’t going right. Lots of screaming and shouting.
Simon: I mean it seemed, as you say, the increase of 1 ship, 2,3,4, the pressure must be enormous on them.
Colin: Well, if you think of something … they’re coming at you at 30 knots, and you’ve got to stay up at periscope depth looking at them for as long as you can, and then you need to go deep, rapidly, so that was often sometimes when you’d get the Teacher take over and send the submarine deep ‘cos they were fixated on the target, but they’ve got an Escort Ship now, that’s closer and more dangerous and they weren’t keeping the whole picture.
Simon: How did the Teacher know of what was going on on the surface?
Colin: ‘Cos on a diesel submarine, of course you’ve got two periscopes, so the after periscope the Teacher would take over, and the forward periscope, the attack periscope was what the student was using.
Simon: So, given that, if someone said that they fancied going to become a Captain, what advice would you pass on to them, having seen people go through it?
Colin: The main thing is trust your people ‘cos we’re all trying … I go back to the team thing. We’re all trying to achieve the same aim, we’ve all got a different part in the machine to play, but you have to just trust them. No one’s deliberately trying to upset your day. You know, they might make a mistake but they didn’t do it on purpose, so just trust them and as you said, they’re humans as well so they’re going to make mistakes. Towards the latter part of my time at sea, I definitely saw less of the grumpy shouty type of Captains of the older generation as it were, but being a Submariner, you have to have a certain level of robustness anyway, as you do in many walks of life. If you’re going to crumple the first time somebody shouts at you, it’s clearly not the job for you ‘cos guess what, you’re going to get shouted at again, and it tends to be that you might be the focus of someone’s attention in that moment, but in 2 hours’ time, it’s going to be somebody else and it’s all just get on with the job. I’ve never seen or experienced where grudges see to be held by seniors or anything. It’s, “Right, you’ve had your bollocking, don’t do it again, right can we move on now please.” It tends to be that approach, you know, and you learn very quickly not to do that same mistake again.
115 minutes 52 seconds
Simon: So, when you came to the point of leaving, what was your thinking behind it, or leaving the Service?
Colin: Leaving the Navy?
Simon: Leaving the Service, yeah.
Colin: Well it was just time done. So, the Navy was telling me I had to go. So, I was a little bit disappointed and frustrated with the Navy in equal measures. At that time, I was the most experienced Submarine Sonar Operator I think the Navy had. I was still fit ‘cos I’d just done all the top jobs, that’s basically it. In my Branch, I’d just done all the top jobs, and I’d just finished. Finishing is a Senior Acoustic Analyst for the Navy as well, and I was still healthy enough, fit enough. I wasn’t going to go back to sea, but I said, “Look, if you want to do an extended service of me, tell me now, otherwise I’m due to go outside in so and so.” And the message I got back was, “No, no, we won’t be extending anybody in your Branch Colin in the foreseeable. We’re actually reducing numbers.” I basically leave, and 2 months later they extend 3 people at my level who have not got the experience and up to date that I had, and I just thought, “ok, it is what it is.” I was frustrated and a bit disappointed to say the least at the time ‘cos I had loads to offer but that’s the way it turns out. I mean things change. You know these manning plots change all the time so whatever, but we all know in whatever walk of life, we all know our peers and I could look around and went, “Well I’ve never done that, never done that, never done that” so …
Simon: And when you were the Acoustic Analyst, that’s an onshore job and that’s receiving stuff from …
Colin: That’s basically taking all the recorded acoustic information, ships, submarines, any Naval Unit that is collecting acoustic data on it’s sonars, that goes to the shoreside capability where the data is scrutinised, reanalysed, and there are a number of reasons for that. That’s checking that the Sonar Teams had optimised their sensors, their sonars, and they were operating correctly in accordance with the drills and procedures, so that they shouldn’t be missing anything, but actually had they missed something that they should have seen ‘cos they hadn’t put the lines up (Sonar Search Plan) on right, or they just had missed it for whatever reason. What it also allows us to do is identify are there any defects going on that they’re not aware of and then that also gets turned into, as I mentioned earlier, reference material for the future, training material to keep the guys and girls who are the Sonar Operators in the Fleet up to date. We also generate the Advanced Acoustic Analysis Course information, from that organisation as well, so that’s what that role is all about, plus overseeing and leading the Navy Acoustic Analysis Team that are embedded in Dstl.
Simon: Right, and that’s … so when you left the Navy, did they approach you and said, “Do you want to come and work for us” or was there an automatic hand-over or ..
Colin: No, not at all. So, I did all my resettlement in Waste Management actually. That’s a massive industry today and I could see it going that way, but I didn’t want to do anything particularly … I didn’t want to be some Captain of Industry or anything like that, so I got 5 Waste Management qualifications of various sorts of bits and pieces, and to be fair, I just wanted to be the bloke in the Local Council with the clipboard going, “You can’t put that in there mate.” But it coincided with Mr Cameron’s time in power, and reducing the Civil Service, and actually no local Council were actually taking anybody on. I don’t think any Civil Service ever shrank, but they weren’t taking anybody on. I got offered a couple of roles with a local private waste firms, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. In the months preceding my actual time finishing in the Navy, Dstl were recruiting for a bunch of Line Managers so I thought, well, I’ll put my hat in here and anyway see what goes on, and a long story short was I got offered 3 roles, different parts of Dstl. One basically doing the same job I was doing as a Senior Acoustic Analyst but in a civilian capacity, but an old Captain of mine many years ago said, “Colin, never go back and do the same job twice” which was a brilliant piece of advice, and I give that to anybody I speak to. I was due to go back to the Submarine School, and he said, “Don’t go back there, go and do something else” so I went and found myself another job and that was a much better thing to do, to be fair. And I thought, I’ve just done that job in uniform, and I went and took charge of a Team that were bringing F35 into service, so the new jet fighter.
121 minutes 32 seconds
Simon: That’s the plane is it?
Colin: So, and they were involved in the stealth and survivability of the platform, so it goes back to the signatures thing. I understood what they were trying to do, because of all my signature work in submarines and ships. Yes, the signature was different, because it’s an aircraft up there, so it’s mainly about the RCS and the IR, the infra-red signatures and the optical signatures, as opposed to the acoustics from Warships and Submarines, bit I’d got what they were trying to achieve and like I’ve said a number of times to people, I may not be a Scientist or an Engineer, but I’ve get what you’re trying to do, just don’t ask me to do the maths. And it was good, so I went off and led that Team for about 2 years and then I’d got to the point I thought, I understand DSTL as a business, I need to go and do something a bit more hands on, and I went to the Institute of Naval Medicine where Dstl has it’s Radiation Sciences Group as a LOGI Unit down at Alverstoke there, and I took over as a Facility Manager of the Nucleonic Instrumentation Services Team. Basically, all the detectors and monitors that the MOD use for detecting radiation, be that at sea, in the air. The Army used it as hand-held monitors sweeping the land. So, that was a much more hands-on job, running the Facility, being a Line Manager of people as well and actually seeing tangible equipment coming in for repair, being serviced, being recalibrated and being sent back out to the front line in effect, whether they were off to somebody in Cyprus, down the Falklands, Diego Garcia, wherever we’ve got those MOD units that require radiation detection monitoring equipment. So that was quite an interesting 3 years. Tough gig, small team, really busy, lots of responsibility, no extra money. Basically, I went, “Do you know what, I’m working 2-3 times harder here for the same money. I’m going back up on the hill” and I got myself another Team Leader job looking after Combat System Engineers and Naval Architects in the main, for above water platforms. Did that for a couple of years. Instantly, this is so much easier, you know. It’s a shame ‘cos it was a good job but you just factor it in. You get to a point, you go, “Do you know what, you’re not rewarding me any more for working so much harder” so I went back up on the hill, eased down, took the foot off the pedal a bit, got myself settled in and then an opportunity came along to move out of Line management in effect, and do pure Research and Project work. And so now I do … I’m looking at Automated Systems for anti-submarine warfare, so doing some research, doing some trials, seeing where Industry are to provide that capability to the RN.
125 minutes 17 seconds
Simon: Very good. So, the transition for you from in Service …
Colin: Seamless. You know I literally … apart from I was clearly going to a bunch of people I didn’t know, ‘cos they were in the air world, but I’d been working at Dstl for 2 ½ years in uniform as a last job, and knew how Dstl works to a certain level as a Military Advisor, is what they call people who work with Dstl as serving members, but I knew all the simple stuff like … it sounds odd but I knew where to park my car, I knew when the gate opened, I knew how to get a new pass, all that stuff that can make life difficult when you join and you’re unfamiliar with, and you just feel a bit woooh, I don’t know who to talk to. I knew all the people with all the right Offices to go to, to get the answers, so that was quite easy. What I needed to do was just get my new team of people who didn’t know me from Adam, and I didn’t know them, to just trust me to be their Line Manager.
Simon: That’s interesting. Is it different dealing with civilians or are they all ex-Services as well?
Colin: So, most of the people I picked up in that first team I think they were all civilians. I don’t think there were any ex-Service people in that team.
Simon: How is it managing them?
Colin: Well, I remember a key question I got asked on my interview for the job … so they don’t do it quite the same anymore, but they used to do an Assessment Centre for Team Leaders and Line Managers, basically over 3 days. You’d do a first sort of round interview, you’d do some presentations stuff, they get some role playing to see how you handle a difficult situation. You’ve got a disgruntled employee type thing and you’ve got 3 objectives that you’ve got to get out at the end of it. You know, turn this person around, make them see the error of their ways or whatever it was, and then there was another final interview, and I remember in the last interview, it was an ex-Wing Commander actually who was leading the Panel, and he wanted to know how I was going to get one of my team onside to do something that they didn’t want to do. And what he was looking for was the fact that I wasn’t going to order them ‘cos I couldn’t order them anymore. I didn’t have that Military Code of Conduct behind me anymore as it were, the Naval Discipline Acts so to speak, and that it was going to be by mutual agreement that we’d get the job done, and that’s what he was looking for. Having come out of the Military himself, and understanding the different way of working, so that was the key thing. It was about … it’s almost like progress by agreement with your staff, to that end game.
Simon: Did you find that was the case anyway on the submarine generally?
Colin: Yeah, all you’ve got to do is just talk to people nicely. It’s not difficult. People are people and there are always going to be things they don’t want to do, but if you just explain, half the time why we’re doing this, make them understand it, then half the time it’s not that difficult, I never found. And then very often of course, make them think it’s their idea as well. That’s always a key one (laughs).
Simon: Top tips (laughs). Well look, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you very much.
Colin: That’s fine.
Simon: Is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven’t do you think? Or more detail about the Perisher Course that you want to go in to?
Colin: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s all been pretty good. I mean I’ve had quite I suppose a varied career in some respects. Certainly in the latter years after I got prompted to Warrant Officer from the Special Fit Rider, and then doing the job at Altec as Support Logistics, so out in the Bahamas there’s a Sea Range out there that the American’s run and we take some of our platforms over there to do Sonar and Weapons Trials, so I spent a fair bit of time out there, reshaping processes for the future, and then the role in Navy Command which had seen reduction, so advising the Seniors on the stealth properties of some of our platforms. Were they fit for the task that they were being selected for, and then finishing up as a Senior Acoustic Analyst in the Navy, so I think I was quite lucky in the breadth of jobs I had, and I was also fortunate in that when they moved the submarines and the Submarine School out of HMS Dolphin, back in ’99 I think it basically stopped being a Submarine base or anywhere that Submariners went, actually they then brought a number of Warrant Officer’s jobs from London and other places back to the Portsmouth area, and I found myself as one of the few people in my Branch as a Warrant Officer, who wanted to be here, so I kind of got to pick the job I wanted next, so I got to stay here all the time just bouncing round the jobs, so that was quite fortunate actually towards the end.
131 minutes 8 seconds
Simon: I mean having been in Gosport for so long, you must have an affinity for the place now.
Colin: To be fair, no, because we were talking about this, my wife and I recently. There’s going to come a time, we don’t need, you know, something quite as big as this, just the two of us as we get older, cutting those hedges does my head in every year I can tell you.
Simon: They look very disciplined.
Colin: Well, yeah, they’re due a haircut when it warms up a bit. But we’ve said, we’ve got no … ‘cos neither of us come from here, we’ve got no family that live here anymore, my kids have moved out, so apart from one distant relative that lives in Lee On Solent, and she was from Nottingham in the first place, friends obviously but no family ties to be here, and actually with the way the housing is going up around here, as you can imagine the last 30 years I’ve seen traffic around here go from what was bad to horrendous. That’s only going to get worse, so we’re certainly thinking next 5 years or so, we need to think about … we’ll be getting towards retirement age as well, so we need to … our plan is to get off the Peninsula anyway and get somewhere north of the M27 and see how that goes. But I don’t have an affinity to any part of the country to be perfectly honest. I have just always lived by the sea whether it was growing up in Kent on the Romney Marsh, near Dungeness and Dymchurch, down that area, living a couple of miles inland, or I then joined the Navy and I either spend my time in Gosport or in Plymouth, so would I miss the sea? Don’t know ‘cos it’s always been there. One of those things that you don’t know if you’re going to miss it. You’ve always had it, and all of a sudden it’s gone and you go, “Ooh, don’t know about that.” But living inland might be quite nice as well.
Simon: Ok. Great. Well, thank you very much again.
Colin: Ok.
Interview ends
133 minutes 20 seconds
Transcribed May 2022
