Duration: 2 hours 58 minutes 47 Seconds
Simon: My name is Simon Perry, it’s the 25th of March 2022 and I’m here in Gosport for the Submariner’s Story project, and we are with …
Ian: Ian Moore.
Simon: Now Ian, can you tell me your date of birth and place of birth?
Ian: I was born on the 1958, and I was born in Paisley, in Renfrewshire in Scotland.
Simon: Ok, thank you. And what were the names of your parents?
Ian: My dad was called James, more commonly known as Jock, him being a Scot. My mother was Catherine. She was English, so I got to what I tend to be called mixed-raced parents (laughs).
Simon: Right. And they were … what were their jobs, what did they do?
Ian: My father, when he originally met my mother, he was actually serving in the Army, and he was based in Cumbria, in the north-west coast, and met my mum while he was actually in the Army. They got together, they then moved up to Scotland where I was born. He then left the Army. Unfortunately, the job situation in Glasgow at the time was pretty horrendous. His father-in-law, my grandfather on my maternal side said there was plenty of work for him in the Vickers Shipbuilding in Barrow-in -Furness, so lock stock and barrel moved the family down. I grew up in the north-west in Barrow-in-Furness watching submarines being built.
Simon: Right. How was the move? What sort of age were you when you moved?
Ian: I was only about four years old. My first recollection is of starting my first day at school at five years old in Barrow, at Greengate Infants School under the dreaded Mrs Slater (laughs).
Simon: And how was … you were accepted by the local community there?
Ian: Absolutely. To be honest I don’t remember too much about the formative years, far too early, but I do remember that some of the little local lads and some of the kids in school, I remember them taking the micky out of me because of my accent at the time because obviously I spoke with a Scottish accent, which they found was quite hilarious. But after that, no, it was complete acceptance. I mean I grew up with the same people all the way through school, all the way through to 16 years old by the time I actually joined the Military.
Simon: And how were school days?
Ian: School days were for me a bit nonsensical in as far as that I wasn’t very bright. Back then I was, sad to say a small fat kid who was always tortured by the local bullies and various other bits and pieces, so it wasn’t exactly brilliant, my schooling years. All the way through until I was actually when I was 16 where I had no intention of carrying on with further education at all because I just couldn’t do it. It just didn’t make any sense to me and decided the only way I was going to try and progress myself and see a bit of the world as it was then, ‘cos that’s what the adverts told us, I joined the Navy to see the world. So, I thought, well, join the Services. I remember at 14, I joined the Army Cadets for a very, very short period of time, because essentially it was … joined the first night, I spent an hour being shouted at. Went the second week, I spent an hour being shouted at, and the third week I spent an hour being shouted at. I thought, ‘sod this for a game of soldiers, this is ridiculous, not doing this anymore,’ so I looked around and saw there was either the RAF or the Navy, and it was the naivety of a young 14-16-year-old where I thought well the Air Force doesn’t actually go anywhere because unless you’re a Pilot, you don’t actually sort of travel, it’s all here. How wrong I was there. So, I thought well the only way that I’m actually going to see anything of the world is to join the Navy, and that’s what I did at 16.
Simon: So, what was the urge to see the world then?
Ian: It was boredom of Barrow I’m afraid. As a sort of 12-16-year-old in Barrow-in-Furness, it was at the time in the late ‘60’s, early ‘70s, it was a very dark, dour place where every morning at 7am, you could watch 50 odd thousand people going across Michaelson Bridge and going into the Dockyard and at half past four in the afternoon, you’d see 50 thousand people come across Michaelson Bridge and go home, and it was of a time when everybody use to ride pushbikes and things because not many people could afford cars. Everybody had pushbikes and at half past 4, when that horn went inside the Dockyard, if you were trying to get across Michaelson Bridge going in the opposite direction, you had no chance whatsoever because they would take up the whole of Michaelson Bridge and the footpath on either side and it would be streaming over the Bridge and coming back in to the Town Centre. So yeah, I was looking at that and I knew I could have worked in the Dockyard, but ultimately it was not for me. I mean my childhood with … my relationship with my father wasn’t exactly brilliant in as far as that he was still Army. Even to the point where when I told my mother that I was joining the Navy, she said to me word for word, “Don’t tell your father” and I thought, right, ok. So, how will I get round this? “Dad, I’m joining the Military.” “Good lad, well done, good choice.” “Ok, thank you very much indeed,” so I went through the whole of the selection process of all the interviews and everything else by myself. I didn’t say anything more to him at all until the day of the Races when I had my joining documents turn up and it was in a big brown buff envelope, and on the front of it was ‘Royal Navy Recruitment Office.’ He literally threw the package across the room to me, left the room and didn’t speak to me for 6 months.
6 minutes 40 seconds
Simon: Wow. And what made him come round eventually? Was it …?
Ian: When I outranked him (laughs). It got to the point where after a few years in the Military and I sort of saw the light and started studying and working hard for various things, and I was … he made it as far as Corporal. Well, I made it to Corporal, or Leading Hand in the Royal Navy. I made it to Leading Hand when I was 19, and then when I was 22 I made it to Petty Officer. I was a Chief by 26, I was a Charge Chief by 30, which is more or less getting up towards what he would consider as being Staff Sergeant and Warrant Officer 2. It was only when I reached Petty Officer and outranked him that he’d made in the Army, that he then turned round to people and was telling them, “My son’s a Petty Officer in the Navy. That’s equivalent to a Sergeant you know” so there was a little bit of pride there, but it wasn’t enough for our relationship to actually kick off properly. My family, my father, my two uncles, his two brothers, my father, two uncles, my grandfather, my great grandfather and my great, great grandfather were all in the Royal Scots Greys, Scottish Regiment. Even as far as that we had a sgian dubh, a family sgian dubh and a family short sword, the fighting sword that they wear on the belt of their kilts.
Simon: A sgian dubh is a dagger is it?
Ian: The small dagger that goes down into the side of the sock. My grandfather, couldn’t decide who was going to get the sgian dubh or the fighting sword, the short sword, so he took the three brothers out into the garden and said, “last man standing gets this” (laughs).
Simon: Sounds a bit like Gladiators.
Ian: It was (laughs). And the youngest son, my uncle Toshe, who was very short, very, very solid, arms like a Brick builder. It was just incredible. He managed to win, but not before the three of them had literally demolished the garden. They’d gone through the greenhouse, through next door’s fencing, battling it out between the three of them and then by the time they’d finished, my uncle Toshe was the one who stood there and was the only one left standing, so he got it. And he passed it onto his son who joined the Regiment. He joined the Royal Scots Greys when he was 16, so my uncle Toshe passed it onto my cousin. Fantastic.
Simon: Literally hard fought for.
Ian: Yes, so I really was the black sheep of the family for a little while.
Simon: Oh right, so the rest of the family then, it wasn’t just your dad who thought it strange to go in the Navy?
Ian: Yeah, they all thought it was very, very odd, because some of the friends that I had in school, some of the friends that I had outside of school, they were all joining the Army. The vast majority … there was only one other guy who I knew joined the Navy, a chap called Jack Thornton and Jack lasted … I think he was only in uniform for a couple of years. I ran into him in Barrow when I was home on leave once and asked him where he was doing and what he was up to and he’d gone back to Barrow and was working in the Ship Yard, and I thought, ‘no, no, what you doing?’ and by then I’d already been halfway round the world and done various bits and pieces. Typical Sailor, already got a couple of tattoos by then as well (laughs). Like you do.
10 minutes 32 seconds
Simon: Talking about family stuff, when did you get married?
Ian: I got married in 1977, first time. Very, very young. I was only 19, 20 years old at the time, 19, and it was one of these childhood sweetheart type things that worked out, but unfortunately over a period of time these things sort of tend to fall by the wayside for a lot of Military families, where the separation takes its toll.
Simon: Because you’re away for a long time.
Ian: We’re away for a long time, yeah, and Military life is … people never understand that when you’re in the Military, it’s Military first, family second. Everything is about what you’re actually doing. You’re in uniform, you have no choice about what’s going to be happening next, where you are going to be going, how things are going to pan out, and you’re family work around you, so the toll that it takes on a lot of families. Not so much in places like the Army and the RAF, because they tend to be based as family units together in one place, whereas the Navy will literally, even when you’re based here in the UK, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be based in your home Port, which maybe Gosport, Portsmouth. You could find that when you return back to the UK, and they give you your next posting, your next draft as it’s called in the Navy, your next draft maybe down to Plymouth or up to Faslane. You either take your family with you, or again you’re in to commuting every weekend, so it takes its toll over a period of time.
Simon: So, that’s not just on the family but also on you having to travel those distances as well?
Ian: Yeah, all the time. It was always one of these things where you try and sort of escape as quickly as possible on the Friday, because if you hang around too long, then no doubt the Chief Stoker will find you something to do, even if it’s grab a damp cloth and start wiping something down, so as soon as you’re actually done and you can escape, you do and then stay away for as long as you possibly can over the weekend, and then leave it to the last minute to actually start travelling back and getting back into your Base Port again and back onboard as quickly as possible.
Simon: So, you think it was the stress of being away, being disconnected from the family, that’s hard for your wife to come to terms with?
Ian: Yeah, I think it was. I think ultimately the downfall more or less was probably my fault in as far as what I’d done, where I’d actually started to excel educationally and doing the various things that I was actually doing, I was selected to go on the Mechanician’s Qualifying Course to become an Artificer which essentially is a skilled man, and it’s a 2-year Course. Basically, it’s a 4-year Apprenticeship crammed into 2 years where the level takes you from basically ‘O’ Level up as far as the first 2 years of an Engineering Degree, and it’s at that level. It is really, really high, so it takes an awful lot of studying, an awful lot of … and essentially for those 2 years, even though I was actually going to school every day, if you want to call it that, going to school every day, coming home every evening. The family didn’t exist because I was sticking my head in the books for 6 hours every time I came home every night. So, it was almost like another 2 years, the family didn’t really exist, it took second place again. And I kept on promising her that when I’d finished this Course, ‘don’t worry, it will all be alright, we’ll be able to take holidays, we’ll be able to do this, we’ll be able to do that’ and then when I did finish the Course, we lived here in Gosport, and after I finished the Course, within 3 months, I found myself on a submarine in Plymouth. And the first 2 Patrols that I did on Opportune, one of them was 6 months down to the Falklands. I came back, I was home for a month and a half and then I was away again for another 3 months.
15 minutes 15 seconds
Simon: Yeah, tough.
Ian: Yeah, that took its toll. So, after that really, it was just the writings on the wall. I mean she just couldn’t put up with it anymore, and I don’t blame her. We’re still good friends today. We still chat to each other, still give each other a hard time when we need to over the children (laughs). Can’t really call them children any more, good grief, that lot.
Simon: Aha, wow, that’s quite a clan.
Ian: Yeah, 3 boys and 1 stepdaughter I’ve got, and 9 grandchildren. It was 8 in there, but we’ve literally just had another one, a little baby girl. She was born last week, absolutely fantastic. Apple of her grandfather’s eye at this moment in time, absolutely glorious.
Simon: So, that’s interesting the … not really engaging with school, not finding something that worked for you at school but then sounding like being completely committed, 6 hours every night, that’s a lot of work to do. What was the change there for you?
Ian: Motivation was family, it really was. At that time, back in the ‘70’s, the salary for the Military, across the Military was dire, which is why we had so many Married Quarters dotted around the area. Thousands of them, in and around the Gosport, Portsmouth areas, purely and simple for the fact, and this is absolutely as it was back then, a Petty Officer who could be in charge of a team of anything up to 30,40,50 people, a Petty Officer married with 2 children qualified for Income Support. He couldn’t afford to actually buy his own house. Now, that’s a Petty Officer. At that time, I was a Marine Engineer and Mechanic, I was the lowest of the low, I was an MEM, and there was no way that I was going to able to either afford my own house or anything like this without having to better myself, and I saw … plus as well as that, I was, as a Stoker, you are basically it’s an old, old word Stoker where you saw them in the old black and white movies, where they would be shovelling coal into the boilers. That’s where the word Stoker actually comes from, so you were stoking the fires, and I was exactly that. All I was actually doing was Machine Minding. I was looking after bits of machinery. I was starting up, stopping, checking oil levels and things like this. I needed more, and the only way to do more was by improving your education, improving your qualifications. With each of those new qualifications, comes a promotion and those promotions aka give you more money, so that was the motivation. And it was also at the time, it was one of those things where suddenly everything started to click into place. The Maths, the Physics, the Chemistry, everything else started to fall in, whereas when I was in school, none of that made any sense to me whatsoever (laughs). I was just a late developer, that’s all it was, purely and simply late development. You get to a point where you suddenly think, ‘right ok, if I need to better myself, what do I need to do?’ I was very fortunate in as far as my ‘Sea Dad’ my very first ‘Sea Dad’ … every young Sailor who joins the Navy has a ‘Sea Dad’ of some description. It’s somebody who’s a bit more mature, a bit more experienced, somebody who is designed to keep you on the right track, give you the education that you actually need, show you how things work, make sure that you understand it, and essentially make sure that you don’t go round and try and kill somebody, because that’s the big thing. Submarines are one of the few areas of the Military where a 16-year-old could actually make a wrong decision and sink that submarine and take everybody with it. Now there’s not many jobs around where that type of responsibility is given to somebody so young. It is always something that is highly frowned upon in any other industry. You wouldn’t trust a 16-year-old who has the capability of sinking a submarine, but we do in submarines because we don’t carry passengers. Everybody has a job to do, everybody gets on with it. You train a 16-year-old to actually do the right thing at the right time. It’s indoctrinated into them and they get to the point where they can do it in their sleep, they can do it in the dark. All of that is all designed to actually keep everybody alive. I was very fortunate, my ‘Sea Dad’ a guy called Robbie Robinson, who was a dour Yorkshireman, no sense of humour whatsoever, and he’d been a Leading Hand for a good 10-12 years, and he saw that he’d wasted an awful lot of his career, and he saw in me, that as a protégée that he wasn’t going to allow me to go the same route that he did, so basically he kicked my arse morning, noon and night, until I actually had all this information inside my brain. That I understood every single aspect of how a submarine works, and then he made me sit down and take all the exams that I needed to take in order to be able to better myself, which is why I ended up being a Leading Hand at 19 years old which ordinarily is probably at least 3 or 4 years earlier than most people would actually deem that they were ready to take the next higher rank. But Robbie just made sure that I was going to keep going, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. A little story about him, was that one of the first times that he was showing me through the submarine, and a submarine itself, is a myriad of valves, switches, pipework, whizzes, bangs, things going on around you.
21 minutes 34 seconds
Simon: On a diesel.
Ian: On a diesel submarine. I joined Orpheus in ’75, and Robbie decided that he was going to take me on just an introductory walk through the submarine as to what was actually going on. We started off at the bow, at the pointy end and near the torpedo compartment he explained all the bits and pieces that were going on there and even by the end of actually getting to the end of this one compartment, my brain was just on overload with everything that was going on, and we still had another 1,2,3,4 compartments to go. And we got down into the Engine Room, and at the time we were in Dry Dock in Plymouth, and the Engine Room hatch had been taken off and he was talking about all the various bits and pieces of the lube oil separator, the fuel oil separator, the compressors, both engines, the after-service pumps. All the different electrical boxes and what they did and we’d reached the end of this compartment, and as he was talking about the lube oil separator which is directly underneath the Engine Room hatch, there was a piece of rope that was hanging down through the Engine Room hatch, and I started playing with the end of this piece of rope and I was starting to lose concentration, and Robbie slapped me a couple of times and said, “Listen to what I’m saying” so I paid attention again and then I’d drift off and I’d start … and he was still talking to me and at the end of it, I was hanging onto the end of this piece of rope and I was wondering what was on the end of it, and I pulled it and there was a bucket if diesel on the end of it with all the nuts and bolts from the Engine Room hatch and the whole lot came down on top of Robbie. I was like a scalded cat, I just disappeared. He never saw me for about a week afterwards. Every time I saw him I would flit down into a hold somewhere and stay out of his way. I crawled out of that hole a week later and gave my apologies to Robbie, and he was looking at me and glaring at me as though he’d just stepped on something. I don’t think he made a cup of tea or coffee for about the next 4 years after that I’m sure he didn’t.
Simon: Payback.
Ian: Payback, absolutely. Robbie, what a player, absolutely brilliant.
Simon: I sort of … the distraction has taken us into the depths there. Can we go back to … you decide that you’re going to join. What did you do? How did you get involved with the Navy then? You went to a Recruiting Office?
Ian: Yeah, it was our Careers Master at school. He put me in contact with the local Careers Office in Barrow, which was actually Army Careers Office and that’s the reason why I didn’t join the Army, but he put me in contact with them, who then put me in contact with the nearest Navy Career Office, which is actually in Liverpool, so I had to jump on a train, go down to Liverpool and go and sit an interview with them there, where I did all the bits and pieces. I wanted to join the Navy as an Electrician, and they gave me all these aptitude tests and made me sit down and do various bits and pieces, which again was probably very, very average. They didn’t tell me what I’d actually achieved at all. They just said, “Yep, you’ve passed. That’s fine.” They said, “There’s just one more thing we need to do” and this old and bold Chief reached down into his drawer down the side of his desk, and he pulled out a metal tube that was about 2 inches in diameter and sticking out the top of this metal tube were all these thousands of different coloured wires. The sort of thing that you see a BT Technician working on, on a street when he’s opened one of those boxes and there’s just 1000 wires inside there. He thrust this thing in front of me and said, “Pick out the red and green one” and I couldn’t. he said, “Ok, how about the yellow and blue one” and I couldn’t, and I thought they were trick questions and he said, “Sorry son, you can’t be an Electrician, you’re colour blind” and …
25 minutes 40 seconds
Simon: And that was the first you knew.
Ian: That was the first I actually knew of it. So, reds and greens basically, plus subtleties of colours. I can see strong reds, strong greens, strong blues, but when you start getting the shades and this sort of business, it just means nothing to me. So, I basically said, “Well, does that mean I can’t join the Navy?” and he said, “No, on the contrary lad, you can join the Navy. You can be an Engineer. How about being a Mechanical Engineer? We want Mechanical Engineers.” I said, “Yeah, ok then, I’ll be one of them.” So, the decision was made for me, a snap decision there and then. I wanted to be an Electrician but I ended up being a Mechanical Engineer, purely and simply because I was colour blind.
Simon: What was the appeal of the electrician’s side then?
Ian: Electrician’s side, I actually even thought ahead on that in as far as within the Military, there are certain jobs that do not have a civilian equivalent, and I thought if I can be an Electrician in the Navy, it also means I can be an Electrician in civvy street as well as and when I finish, and it’s always interested me anyway, getting into some sort of doing electrics, more than anything else. I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being a Mechanical Engineer without any problem at all, and at least with Mechanical Engineering, you can actually see it when it’s going to go wrong. With electrics, I mean this stuff is like black magic. It’s just there and you don’t know it until it bites you.
Simon: So, he pushed … encourages you, pushes, whatever, to Mechanical Engineering, and then what happened after that then in Liverpool? You then went home or …
Ian: Yeah, he basically said, “You’ll hear from us with a start date. It maybe sometime within the next 3 months or so” and as it was … this was in the June, and in the July I got my joining documentation through, which was this big A3 buff envelope I said earlier. It was about 2 inches thick, had reams and reams of paperwork inside it as to what I should be bringing with me and what I shouldn’t be bringing with me, and then it gave me a joining date of Tuesday 19th November 1974.
Simon: That’s quite a significant date for you to remember I guess.
Ian: Yes, and it’s the same with all these things. I mean a lot of people say, “Oh, I can’t remember the date.” Yes they can. Everybody remembers their joining date. Everybody remembers their official number for the rest of their life, and you can reel it off. Sometimes I go into … there’s a café down in town that is a café for veterans and a lot of them, if they want a cheap cup of coffee, they can get their first cup of coffee for £1 if they can reel off their official number just off the top of their head. It’s always these things that people say, “Oh I can’t remember the day I joined.” Yes you can. Everybody remembers the day that they joined, so it was Tuesday 19th November 1974, so on the Monday … the reason why they start on a Tuesday is because Monday they deem it that you should be travelling from wherever you are because obviously if they give you a start date of Monday, Sunday services, half of you aren’t going to arrive, so everybody travels down on the Monday.
Simon: To where?
Ian: To Tor Point, or you go to Plymouth Station and there you’re met by a bus that will ferry you across the Tamar over to Tor Point and to HMS Raleigh. The entry point for a lot of Naval Servicemen.
Simon: So, that’s Surface Fleet?
Ian: Yes, when you first join the Navy, you are generic. You’re nothing. You are joining the Navy. It’s only in later years that you’ll actually find your specialism as to where you’re actually going to go, so it maybe into Surface Ships, it may be into Submarines, it might be into Mine Sweepers, might be onto Aircraft Carriers. It just depends on where your skill set lies. Yeah, that travelling down was an experience because it was … when you actually reach the Train Station, and obviously there are a number of people on this train who are going to be joining the Navy, and you’re met there by a couple of guys, a couple of Instructors from Raleigh itself, who will herd you onto a bus, and they are the typical really, really scary big guys with swagger sticks underneath their arm, their caps pulled right down over their eyes and they’re shouting and bellowing at everybody to get over here, in no uncertain terms.
30 minutes 45 seconds
Simon: Was that a shock, or were you expecting that?
Ian: I was expecting it. I mean you join the Military; you know you’re going to get shouted at, you know you’re going to get prodded and poked and you know you’re going to be sleepless days, nights, and goodness knows what else. For me, it just made me smile, that this is what I expected. It wasn’t just 1 man that was shouting, it was like 6 or 7 people were all shouting all at the same time, and you didn’t know whether you turning left, right, or whatever, and then they would just shove you towards this bus at the side and then they’d ferry you over to Tor Point. And then when you’d got everybody together, and they were in Raleigh, you were in a segregated area with your own set of Barrack Rooms and they were Barrack Rooms. They were Nissen Huts in my day. Nome of these high-rise flats that they’ve got these days with their central heating and things. We had a single central heating pipe that was about 4 inches in diameter, but it was about 12 foot off the ground, and as heat rises, I’m sure the roof was lovely and ward, but where we were, it was absolutely freezing because obviously being November, we were going headlong into winter.
Simon: So, stripped floors and bunks was it?
Ian: It was a wooden floor with linoleum over the top, but however thick the floorboards were, there was no insulation underneath them or anything like this. I mean in the middle of winter, you would get ice form on the inside of the windows from the condensation from 28 guys breathing, because essentially you had a single metal bunk with a kit locker beside it and then there was another kit locker, another bunk, a kit locker, another bunk, kit locker, bunk, so you had 14 down each side of the room and that was you. That’s where you were for the next, I don’t know what it was, 12 weeks.
Simon: And everyone was in the sort of ‘We’re all in this together’ frame of mind are they?
Ian: It is. It’s a little bit disconcerting sometimes though because we were all young lads, we’re all kids, and I always remember the first night being there was that we had age ranges. I mean the oldest chap that we had, I think he was around the 22-23 mark, so he’d already seen a little bit of life. He already had a little bit of maturity and things, but for the rest of us, the majority of us, we were all 16-17 years old and lying there that night, on the very first night, I could hear somebody crying, and I thought … and I was full of sympathy. I thought ‘well, there’s a guy who is instantly homesick and it’s not very nice for something like that’ and in the meantime one of the older ones that was a shout from the other end of the room, “Shut the fuck up” (laughs) and everything went quiet again and that was that until the following morning.
Simon: Right. Pushing crying into the pillow …
Ian: Yeah, but it all hits us at some stage of another, at all times of life. At some point or other you’ll get homesick. Everybody does where you’ve just had enough of being pushed from pillar to post and spending more and more days at sea and being thrown around all over the place like a cork in a bottle. But training itself, training down in Tor Point absolutely fantastic. I loved it, absolutely brilliant. I mean I was fortunate in as far that I said earlier that I was a short fat kid, and by the time I’d actually … the first time I was measured I was 5 foot 6 and I weighed 14 stone and I had a 40-inch waist. That’s what I was when I was about 14-15 years old. By the time I was 16, and joining the Navy, I was 6 foot, and I was 14 ½ stone, so I’d grown those extra inches, I’d filled out an awful lot, which made the physical aspects of training so much easier, because obviously the first thing they did was to weed out the weak ones. So, the first week was ‘beasting week’ which is where they would literally at 5 o’clock in the morning, they would come in, banging dustbin lids together. You’d be out in your gym stuff and literally everybody was exactly the same, it was a T Shirt, a pair of shorts and a pair of plimsoles in the middle of winter basically, in November and we’d go out for a 2-3 mile run just to wake everybody up, get back, showers, a cold shower because the hot water took too long to actually come through the pipes, so everybody took a cold shower because we had to be changed within the next 15 minutes to go to breakfast. And then you’re all marched off to breakfast and start every day the same. Makes a man of you apparently (laughs). Allegedly.
35 minutes 57 seconds
Simon: And that was a couple of months you say the training was?
Ian: The training at the time, it was 12 weeks of training. It was 8 weeks at Raleigh, and 4 weeks at Sultan, but the 8 weeks at Raleigh was basically to teach you Military life. Teach you how to be a Military person, so quite literally, it would take a whole bunch of guys off the street who had never marched a single step in their life, and at the end of it, you’ll see these people who are smart as a Guards Van, they work as one, they march as one, they do everything as one and everything is snap, snap, snap straight into place. It’s not very pleasant for a lot of people. Some people who tried to get out. There was one situation where we were probably 3 weeks into the training, and it was about 2 o’clock in the morning and they came round with the dustbin lids, banging these dustbin lids, and everybody was up. Switched all the lights on, told everybody to get out, get a pair of boots on and fall in outside. Luckily I managed to grab a greatcoat that was hanging up by my bunk, and put it on, but for a lot of people I mean they were just in pyjamas with a pair of boots on. And they made us fall in outside and then marched us up to the top of the rise, and at the top of the road, it bent round to the left and instead they marched us over to the right. And in front of us we could see that there was a set of spotlights had been put up and there was somebody on the top of the barbed wire fencing. What they wanted to do was to show that this is not the correct way to leave the Royal Navy. They’d left him hanging there until the brought everybody out to see what was going on, and they marched us all up across the grass, and they stood us in front of this guy who was squealing like a pig on top of the barbed wire fencing, and one of the Instructors stepped forward, pointed to this guy up on the top of the fence. He said, “That is not the way to leave our Royal Navy. If you wish to leave the Royal Navy, you will do it by filling out a Request Form. That’s not the way to do it.” He then turned us all around and we all marched our way back, and as far as we were concerned, this guy was probably cut down off the top of the barbed wire, he was taken to the Sick Bay, he was patched up. When there was no signs of mistreatment on him, he was promptly kicked back into civilian life again, but even to this day, I can still see that guy trapped on top of the fence, where he’d literally tried to climb over the fence and got stuck. Started shouting, people came, left him hanging there until he’d been made an example of to the rest of us.
Simon: So, after training then, what was your shift into submarines? Do you decided that you wanted to do submarines at that time, or what happened?
Ian: Yeah, submarines had always fascinated me purely and simply because I’d watched them being built. Where as a young lad, I went to all the launchings that happened up in Barrow- in Furness from Vickers, and we would always sit over on Walney Island, because Walney Channel where they launched the submarines into, it was always a good vantage point to be able to see exactly what was going on as opposed to being in the Dock Yard itself where you can’t really see all that much. I’d always been fascinated by these things. Submarines had always stuck in the back of my mind.
Simon: ‘Cos they were dark and mysterious?
Ian: It was yeah, ok when you look at a ship you can see things on a ship. When you look at a submarine, you can’t see anything. We used to call them ‘the sleek black messenger of death’ (laughs).
Simon: That was at that age or later on?
Ian: No, it was right from an early age. We’d heard people talk about submarines and of course there was Sailors in Barrow, because they were stand-by crew for these things, and I’d read clips in newspapers where they’d actually interviewed some of the Sailors asking them what it was like, life on submarines etc, and at the time it was mix of diesel submarines and nuclear submarines and it always appeared to me that the diesel Submariners were having a lot more fun than the nuclear Submariners anyway.
40 minutes 33 seconds
Simon: What gave that impression then?
Ian: It was just that the ones that they always wanted to interview always seemed to be the guys who were on the diesel submarines because they had more to say. They had better stories because diesel submarines, they tended to sort of go to a lot more places than the nuclear submarine would, and a nuclear submarine was restricted in certain areas. I mean some countries even banned and visiting from a nuclear submarine because of their attitude towards nuclear power. Australia for a long time wouldn’t allow nuclear submarines into any of their Ports. It was only in recent years after they’d been assured of the safety of a nuclear power plant that they would actually allow a visiting nuclear submarine to come into any of their Ports.
Simon: I guess also diesel is not down for so long. It’s not like the nuclears are hidden away aren’t they?
Ian: Yeah, big difference. Massive difference. I mean a lot of people say, “Oh, diesel submarines are the only real submarines.” Actually, a submarine is designed to be underwater, and if you look at how long you want to be underwater, a nuclear submarine is the way to go. I mean a nuclear submarine has circumnavigated the world without surfacing back in the ‘50s, so that showed you the power of a nuclear submarine. We’ve had diesel submarines since the late 1800’s, John Holland designing the first one for the IRA of all things, or the IRB as it was, Irish Republican Brotherhood, but they weren’t interested so he sold it to the Americans, long story. Anyway, it was one of those things where I thought well, if I want to join submarines, I want to join submarines that are actually going to go somewhere and visit somewhere and be various places, plus as well as that there was always the thought in the back the mind that nuclear power wasn’t safe. Pure and simply it wasn’t safe because I always remember a chat I had with a guy who was a nuclear Submariner, and he said he couldn’t understand why he wanted to stay in nuclear submarines because every year, year on year, the exposure rate that a nuclear Submariner is allowed to have has come down, and down, and down. And it used to be that … back in the ‘60s, your maximum exposure rate was something like 5 Rads. Well 5 Rads was the equivalent in 1 year was the equivalent of having something like 50,000 X-Rays taken of you. By the ‘70s, that had gone down to 5 milliRads, which is 5 thousandths or a 1000 times less than what it was back in the ‘60s. I mean even to this day, I doubt very much if there are actually any nuclear Submariners left alive who were serving on nuclear submarines back in the early ‘60s. Doubt it very much, purely and simply because of what they were exposed to back then, although obviously the Government wouldn’t ever admit it. And it’s even true to this day apparently, although I’ve only heard this third hand, is that when you leave the Submarine Service as a nuclear Submariner, and you sign on with a Doctor’s Surgery, and the Doctor then writes to the Military to ask for your Medical Records, he will get all your Medical Records up until the day you joined nuclear submarines. After that it’s all nuclear confidential. You won’t get access. It’s always been that way.
Simon: Right, I hadn’t heard that before. I had heard that being onboard was actually safer than being out in the open air because the levels were so low.
Ian: Yeah, it is. I mean it’s very, very highly monitored inside these, and outside of the … because there is a degree of discharge that comes out of a nuclear submarine from the Cooling System. What they call the Secondary Cooling System. You’ve got your Primary Cooling System which goes around the pot itself, goes around the nuclear reactor, which is on a closed circuit all the time, but as that System heats up, you need to be able to cool it down, so you’ve got a Secondary Cooling System, which is sea water, which is pumped round. And it’s a bit like a heat exchanger. It’s pumped round that pipework to cool it all down again, and then that Secondary Coolant is than discharged overboard. But where it’s discharged overboard, it does have an increased background radiation level within it, so …
45 minutes 21 seconds
Simon: Just because of the proximity of it …
Ian: Yeah, purely and simply the proximity of where it is because it is going through an area that … I mean it’s stainless-steel pipework but it will become irradiated, so once that radiation soaks in far enough, it will seep into the surrounding area, and the seawater then picks it up and discharges it overboard into the Ocean.
Simon: Taking you back to your decision to … you’re in the Navy, you think right I want to be in submarines now. What do you do? You stick your hand up and say, “Can I join the submarines” or is there process where they say which Service do you want to be in?
Ian: They had this … it’s almost like a … the Military, the Navy being fly about these things. They give you something called the ‘Drafting Preference Form’ which is two or three sheets of paper where you put down as a 16-year-old, you put down where you think your Naval Service should end up (laughs) and like all these things, it’s just a series of tick boxes. What would you like to do? Tick. What would you like to do? Tick. And it asks you various things. You know, would you like to serve on big ships? Yes I would. Would you like to serve on small ships? Yes I would. So, for the most part, as a 16-year-old you’re going to tick ‘Yes’ to everything. Yeah I’ll do that, yeah I’ll do that and one of those boxes said, “Would you like to serve in Submarines?” Tick. Yes. And the next thing I know is that we’re all in a large hall to hear our first Drafts from leaving training. And the guys either side of me literally sat right next to me, on my left, on my right, they both went to HMS Tiger which was an Assault Ship, and HMS Tiger was deploying on a world exercise for 18 months, so for 18 months, they were going to be travelling the world. And when they called my name, they said, “HMS Neptune to await Submarine Training” and I thought brilliant, ok, no problem at all. What’s HMS Neptune? What type of ship is that? I had no idea (laughs) and it turned out that it’s a concrete ship. It’s otherwise known as Faslane in Scotland, and they were going to send me up there to await a course in HMS Dolphin down here, to start my Submarine Training. So, I spend 4 months up in Faslane while the rest of my compatriots were sailing the high seas and going out to Hong Kong and Singapore and Australia and all these other places. I was in Scotland for 4 months.
Simon: What did you think of that?
Ian: Oh, I was so hacked off it was untrue (laughs). Oh, my God, I had no idea. I mean it was good fun up in Scotland because again as a 16-year-old I was just let loose. I had no restrictions. You know I had just come out of training where it was literally Cinderella leaves so you had to be back onboard before midnight and everything was regimented and in actual fact it was a bit of a culture shock because you’d gone from everything from being, ‘You will be here at this time in this rig doing this, then you will move on to that, then you will move on to that’ and it had gone from that literally to nothing. You had free reign. You’d get up in the morning, you go down to breakfast, there was no onus of responsibility on you so long as you’re at your place of duty, at your workplace by 8 o’clock in the morning.
Simon: What did that feel like then? You get a bit lost with that having been so regimented?
Ian: Yep, totally deflated. It was just ‘Oh, is this it?’. You know this is really, really boring. In fact, if anything I thought it was really, really boring. This is totally boring because I’ve gone from zoom, zoom, zoom, lifetime where everything is regimented from 6 am in the morning to more or less 10 o’clock in the evening . Where from 6 in the evening, when you finish everything, all your daily chores and all the rest of it, and you’ve had your Dog Watch sport and everything else. From 6 until probably 10 o’clock, you’re getting all your kit ready for the following morning, and then you’ll sleep and then at 5 o’clock in the morning, the man comes in with his dustbin lids, bang, bang, bang. Get up, start your day again. 6 o’clock, start prepping for the next day. To go from that to just working an 8 till 4 in a Workshop up in Faslane, where as a 16-year-old you weren’t actually trusted with anything, so you were given menial tasks and menial jobs to do, it was highly deflating, so I just couldn’t wait for my Submarine Training to start, so I could get back into the training regime again and back into something where I’m actually learning something and get on with things.
50 minutes 28 seconds
Simon: So, then you come down to Dolphin.
Ian: Yeah, I left Faslane. They drafted me down to Dolphin and I think it was about the May ’75 that I was drafted to Dolphin for Submarine Training, and that’s your first week of Submarine Training is generic training. It is just, what is a submarine, how does it work, how does it dive, how does it float, how does it motor itself around, what is it designed to do? At the end of that week, arbitrarily just stand up and say, “Right, what Class of submarine would you like?”
Simon: You’d learnt what the Classes are before that.
Ian: No, none whatsoever (laughs). Essentially what it was, was that a chap came into the room, and he said, “I’m looking for …” and there was a Class of probably about 12 of us, and he said, “I’ve got 8 places on nuclear submarines, and I’ve got 4 places in diesel submarines” and I don’t know why to this day, but I stuck my hand in the air and said, “Diesel.” I was the first one with my hand in the air, first one to say, “Diesel.” Hand in the air, “Diesel” and he went “Yep, got you” and then somebody else said, “Nuclear”, “Diesel”, “Nuclear”, “Nuclear” and this sort of stuff and then those that couldn’t decide, they were just given whatever places were left. So, to this day, I’ve no idea why I actually did it. I think there was just something in the back of my mind about nuclear power, and I stuck my hand in the air and said, “Diesel” and he said, “Name?” “Moore” and he went right, ok, fine, tick. “You’re going to diesel submarines.” So, week 2 onwards was then Type Training, which is diesel ‘O’ Class Oberon Class Submarines.
Simon: So, you’re then in the classroom rather than … it’s all sort of theoretical classroom work rather than …
Ian: Yep. Initially it theory, and then occasionally they will take you down to the Submarine Training Boat that we had alongside the wall, which was absolutely useless, because it’s the Alliance, which is now a Submarine Memorial in the Museum. Well, she was the Submarine Training Boat so I’ve actually ran the engines on that thing when she was alongside the wall in Dolphin, and she was the Training Boat, and they would take us down there and they would talk about something in the classroom, which was Oberon Class related, and then they would take us down the Alliance which is an ‘A’ Class related, and the two do not bear any resemblance whatsoever. For an Engineer, the ‘A’ Class Submarine had straight eight engines. An Oberon Class Submarine has V16’s. An ‘A’ Class Submarine has permanently engaged superchargers. An ‘O’ Class Submarine has superchargers that you engage separately. An ‘A’ Class Submarine can actually drive its own propellors direct from the engines. An Oberon Class Submarine drives its propellors from the batteries, so although they were taking us down this submarine, it bore no relation to the submarines we were actually going to. It just gave us a flavour of what to expect, more or less. It gave us a flavour of what it was like to work in a submarine, and the biggest thing about working on a submarine, is restricted space. Everything is restricted. Whatever you try and do, it’s all in a restricted space. If you’re not banging you head off something, you’re getting your fingers trapped under something or you’re pushing somebody out of the way in order to be able to do what you need to do.
Simon: What about the size of the ‘A’ Class and the Oberon then? Are they similar inside, the dimensions inside?
Ian: Yes, they’re similar in dimensions. In actual fact, there is actually less room on an Oberon Class, on a modern Class that I was going to, then there was on an ‘A’ Class, because the Oberon Class, where they developed new ideas, new pieces of equipment, new machinery, they could pack it all into the submarine and try it out, whereas the ‘A’ Class submarine … I mean Alliance, I believe she was built in, laid down in 1944, so the Second World War was still on and she was built on the design of a German ‘U’ Boat, including the snorkel system that they had was all designed around captured German ‘U’ Boats. But she was basic engineering and it would be the difference between climbing in to a 1970’s Ford Cortina and climbing into a Lincoln Bentley Continental GT of today. You lift up the bonnet on a Continental GT and you cannot see any space around that engine whatsoever for the things that they pack into it. You open up the bonnet of a Ford Cortina from the 1970’s and you and your mate can climb in either side of the engine and actually lift it out yourselves without any problem. That was the difference in engineering, so there was a lot … a lot more was packed into an ‘O’ Boat, but sizewise, an ‘O’ Boat and an ‘A’ Boat, they were both around about sort of 300 feet longish, and the ‘A’ Boat weighed somewhere in the region of about 1800 tonnes, and an ‘O’ Boat weighed just over 2000 tonnes, and that extra 3-4000 tonnes was the additional equipment that they would actually put inside these things. The additional torpedoes that we could actually carry on an ‘O’ Boat in comparison to an ‘A’ Boat. I think a full complement of torpedoes on an ‘A’ Boat was something like about 12, whereas a full complement of torpedoes on an Oberon, we could carry anything up to 23-24 torpedoes.
56 minutes 29 seconds
Simon: That’s quite a difference.
Ian: It’s a big, big difference.
Simon: I guess with the training as well, they’re getting you slightly used to the restricted space, so you don’t have a sort of a shock of the first time you go onboard.
Ian: Yeah, again I can understand it from the point of view of somebody who is more mature, somebody who has been drafted to submarines having spent time in Surface Ships, where in Surface Ships, they’ve got lots and lots of space around them to do all sorts of things, whatever they want to do, and if they were suddenly thrust in to the world of a diesel submarine, oh what a culture shock that must be for them. Not least of which is a dirty filthy atmosphere that you’re working in constantly all the time. Water is an absolute premium on a submarine, so therefore we would go weeks without shaving, without washing, without changing any of your clothes because everybody’s going to smell the same, everybody’s going to look the same, whereas on a Surface Ship it’s still that very much regimented routine, where you’re expected to change out of your overalls when you came out of the Engine Room and you would change into a working rig, which is smartly pressed, No.8 shirt, No. 8 trousers and this sort of stuff, completely unheard of in a diesel submarine. We were Pirates. We were literally Pirates. I mean back in the early 1900s, an Admiral once said that submarine warfare was ‘damned un-English’ and that any Submariner who was actually caught by the enemy, deserves to be ‘damn well hung.’ As Pirates, and that’s where the ‘Pirate Rig’ come in. That’s where the Pirate flags for submarines comes in, and the Jolly Rogers that we used to fly at the end of our War Patrols and this sort of business. It dates back to this Admiral remarking that we should have been hung as Pirates back in the early 1900s (laughs).
Simon: So, you’re getting used to the submarine, you’re learning about it, you are doing the Engineering for the engine, so that was … did you say you had 2 months of that, the specialist knowledge?
Ian: Yeah, and you’re given basic knowledge. You’re given a basic understanding until you actually join the submarine itself, so you learn how the submarine actually works and what it’s supposed to do. You learn how all the different compartments, what is in each of those different compartments, and how they interact with each other. The big learning curve is when you actually join your first submarine.
Simon: And that’s what happened next for you was it?
Ian: And that’s what happened next. I joined Orpheus as my first submarine in 1975, and at the time, my cap tally said HMS Dolphin. The reason why it said HMS Dolphin, is because only qualified Submariners are allowed to wear the HM Submarine’s cap tally. So, mine said HMS Dolphin, and the first thing that any decent Submariner wants to get rid of is he wants to get rid of the Dolphin cap tally. He wants the HM Submarine’s cap tally.
Simon: So then comes your Part 3.
Ian: And that comes to your Part 3 and when you do your Part 3, you’re given leeway. You’re given around about 3 months from joining in order to be able to pass your Part 3 and your Part 3 is not all about your own Department. It’s about every Department onboard that submarine. How it all works, how all the machinery works in each of those Departments. How a torpedo works, what to do if you have a hot runner on a torpedo. I’m a Stoker, I’m a Marine Engineer, what the hell do I know about Weapon Systems and this sort of stuff? By the time I’d actually done my Part 3, I knew everything there was about Weapon Systems onboard. I knew everything there was about Sonar Systems onboard. I knew everything about all the Auxiliary Machinery Spaces, the main Engine Room, the Batteries, the Propulsion Systems. How everything worked, even Electrics that I hate. I knew where all the electrical boxes were. I knew where all the isolators were. I knew what to do if something actually kicked off in various areas.
60 minutes 41 seconds
Simon: How do you learn that stuff? By asking people or there’s a book to read or …?
Ian: Yes. You get a Part 3 Book and in that it tells you and it might just … the Part 3 Book is about half an inch, three quarters of an inch thick of A4 sheets and each of those sheets just has a single line on it, and there might be 20-30 lines on it on every single page on both sides, but that one line might be to explain the 189 Sonar System, the 186, the 183, the 2009 Sonar Systems. It just gives you 1 line that you need to tick off and get a signature next to, and that signature comes from the Head of Department, and you have to prove to him that you know and understand each of those pieces of equipment and what they do.
Simon: So it’s testing before you get to the Part 3 test is it?
Ian: No, this is part of your Part 3. Your Part 3 is the whole of these tests, all the way through, so you will learn what happens in every single Department, how it all works. It’s an in-depth understanding that you actually need. It’s way over and above what you would actually have to learn on a Surface Ship if you were joining. If you were joining the Ark Royal, I know people who have joined the Ark Royal and they know how to get from their place of work to the Dining Hall, to their bunk and back again, and they don’t know anything about any other part of that ship at all. If you were to plonk them into somewhere that’s unknown to them on an Aircraft Carrier, they wouldn’t know their way around it, how to get from A to B.
Simon: Whereas Part 3 teaches the intimate understanding …
Ian: Part 3 on a diesel submarine, you need to understand all of that, not least of which is because in a war situation, if somebody gets injured, killed and various other bits and pieces, we’re so short staffed on one of those, where skills are so finite, that we need to be able to cross-skill so if something happens in one Department where they need additional bodies, you can actually be chosen to go up there and give them a hand and be expected to know what to do, and that was the difference between a Submariner and our Surface Fleet, the Skimmers. It was always a big, massive difference between us. At the end of your Part 3, you then have, for us as Engineers, you then had the dreaded Chief Tiff’s walkthrough. The Chief Tiff’s walkthrough is he will take you through that submarine and he will ask you any question he likes on any aspect of any system on that submarine, and he will expect you to know it intimately, know it backwards.
Simon: That’s after the Part 3?
Ian: This is the end of your Part 3. This is your final …
Simon: Final Part 3.
Ian: … it’s part of your Part 3. It’s like your final exam. So, you do all these mini exams all the way through, and you prove to each of the Departments Heads that you’ve got the skills and the knowledge to be able to pass as far as they’re concerned. That you understand what goes on inside their Departments. You then get to the Chief Tiff’s walkthrough, and the Chief Tiff, he is the Senior Engineer onboard. He will not take prisoners at all, and he will take you on a walkthrough of that submarine, and that walkthrough can last anything, as a minimum, from a couple of days to a week or more.
Simon: That’s one on one. That’s you and them.
Ian: It’s one on one. Just you and him. And it maybe … I’ve known people who have spent a week on a Chief Tiff’s walkthrough and their nerves have been absolutely shattered at the end of it all, because the Chief Tiff has got to a point where he’s just looked at them and said, “No” and walked away.
Simon: And then it’s back to study and how long before you can do the Part 3 again?
Ian: As and when … whatever Department where he said, “No”, you go back to that Head of Department and you say, “I need to go through this again” and then once he’s happy, he will then revert you back to the Chief Tiff and the Chief Tiff will start all over again. One of the biggest things with the Part 3, it was always known that you started your Part 3 at the for’ard end, the sharp end, and you worked you way through to the blunt end, back through to the stern, and every Part 3 walkthrough that I’d ever know up until that point, had always been from for’ard to aft, and you get into … it’s almost like doing a song, where you literally walk through and you’re literally bouncing from one side of the Compartment to the other. Go through into the next Compartment, one side to the other, and you’re pointing at these things and you’re talking to yourself as you’re walking through, how everything works, what everything does, how it interacts with other systems, how to cross-connect various things, how to isolate systems, what to do in the event of an emergency, what to do in the event of a fire, a flood and all this sort of business, and it was always for’ard to aft. I was in the Stoker’s Mess, which is right back aft on the submarine, and the Chief Tiff knocked the door, came through the bulkhead door and he said, “Right then Pony, so you’re doing your Part 3 today yep?” And I said, “Yes please Chief Tiff.” He said, “Let’s make a start back here then” and we went from aft to for’ard and my brain just exploded (laughs). I said, “Hang on a minute, hold on, we always start at the for’ard.” He said, “No, we’ll start back here and see how we get on shall we?” Oh my God, so I had to do everything in reverse (laughs).
66 minutes 20 seconds
Simon: It’s like the alphabet backwards was it?
Ian: It was, it was just frightening and you must have seen the blood drain from my face when he knew what he’d done, he knew what he’d done, but it was a chap called Dusty Roads.
Simon: Dusty Roads. What a great name.
Ian: Yeah, Dusty Roads. Everybody’s got a nickname. To this day I’ve got guys that I know by their nicknames, I’ve known them for 20-30-40 years and I have no idea what their Christian name is. Absolutely no idea what their Christian name is.
Simon: Why were you ‘Pony’?
Ian It dates back to apparently there was a Pony Moore who fought with Nelson at Trafalgar. It’s annotated in the book somewhere.
Simon: Is that the link between surnames and nicknames?
Ian: It’s the link between your surname and what it actually pertains to be. With me, Ponies you’ll find on a Moor, Pony, Moor. So, it works out that way, and it’s the same as where anybody who is called Walker will be called ‘Whisky.’ Anybody who’s called Cross will be called ‘Jumper’, so Dusty Roads, anybody called Roads, he’ll be called ‘Dusty.’
Simon: What happens when there’s two people with the same surname?
Ian: Usually get, as we was on Opportune. I joined Opportune and I was a Pony Moore. We also had another Petty Officer onboard who was Moore. He was called ‘Pony’, I was called Pony Mut, which was Pony Mechanician under training. And even on the voice pipes when they want me for something, it would be ‘Pony Mut required in the Control Room’, so I was Pony Mechanician under training, Pony Mut and he was Pony. In fact, he was Pony Spo, Stoker Petty Officer, so we had Pony Spo and Pony Mut (laughs).
Simon: When you went onboard for the first time, and went inside, how did it feel? Was it … you’d been inside the Training one a few times, so you kind of knew what it was going to be like, but as soon as the hatch was shut, was there any thoughts or you’re just so busy you don’t have a chance to think about it?
Ian: Busy, busy. You really don’t have chance to think about these things because one of the things that the Navy never ever tests you for is claustrophobia. Which always appealed to me as being a little bit strange, but in all that time that I was actually in submarines, there was only ever two occasions when claustrophobia came to the fore. One of them was a young guy who joined the boat, he was absolutely fine and dandy, and as soon as we shut those hatches, he went to pieces.
Simon: Just literally …
Ian: Just literally, boom. He just shot himself and that was it. He’d literally just gone and there was nothing we could do. He couldn’t function, and we’re not going to stop and let him off, so literally it was a matter of right, ok, let’s put him the biggest space we can actually find initially, give him a job to do, so for the next week and a half, he was peeling spuds in the Torpedo Storage Compartment, in the fore ends, because that is the biggest Compartment that we’ve actually got. The widest open space if you want to call it that, and we also put a bunk up there for him as well. A week and a half later, was the first time that we actually liaised with a ship and we literally just evacuated him off onto there and that was him finished with submarines. And the second time, it happened to me. I’d been onboard for a number of years and I’d been in small, tiny spaces and crawling between pipes and various other things and we were on the surface and I had to go down into one of the air spaces which is on the outboard side of one of the engines. It’s a tiny little hatch cover where literally you’ve got to squeeze yourself down into this tiny little space, and I dropped down into it, and suddenly everything just sort of closed in on me. I felt really, really odd and really weird, but it was only for 10 or 15 seconds or so, but I really felt as though everything was closing in. Things were starting to push in on top of me. Once it was over it just … it was a shake of the head and just get on with it, what’s the matter with you? And I did what I needed to do, get down there and then out.
71 minutes 9 seconds
Simon: Is that the sort of thing you talk to people about afterwards or you just keep quiet because …
Ian: Yeah, you wouldn’t talk about it. No.
Simon: Right. Otherwise, you’d be evacuated off or the potential.
Ian: Not so much that. In my case it would have been that I’d have had my leg pulled and my ribs poked for at least a day. They would have made your life a misery if they had found out if you’d had admitted to anything like that. You never admit to any weaknesses in the Military at all. That’s all three Services. Never admit to any weaknesses because the first thing they do they’ll exploit it and they’ll rib you for it remorselessly, so you don’t want to do that. You always have this persona of being hard as nails and that you can take anything that anybody will throw at you. You never show any form of weakness, not a chance.
Simon: And that’s sort of linked to the dark humour onboard.
Ian: Yeah, it is. And it is very dark humour. It is Military banter, and sometimes it can be quite base, but at the end of the day, it’s very much a male orientated society. I mean the testosterone levels are massively high within the Military in general, but especially so where it’s an all-male environment, which is what you’ve got on a diesel submarine, at that time.
Simon: Everyone need to get on, everyone needs to function together as a unit, so how does that sort of macho side … there has to be some … it can’t be people being overtly macho can it?
Ian: It can be.
Simon: How does that work with keeping a balance onboard?
Ian: Sometimes you can … today we would see it sometimes as being a form of bullying, where some people can be just really horrible to other people, especially subordinates, but it’s not something that’s acted upon back in the early days. A lot of the bullies managed to get away with it, purely and simply because they had the rank, you didn’t, so therefore you just put up and shut up, get on with things. You’d never get away with it these days, not a chance, not a hope in hell, but it was all part of discipline, is that you 100% knew exactly where you stood. You were at that level there and that’s where you’ll stay until such time as you are actually deemed good enough to elevate yourself to the next level up. But it really was one of those things where for an awful lot of people, found it hard to contend with. There were a number of people who left submarines purely and simply because they couldn’t put up with the type of atmosphere. A lot of people said that it must be very similar to the hierarchical system that you have inside a gaol, amongst all the inmates, where you have certain people who are elevated above certain others because of what they’ve actually done in life. You know, the murderers being at the top type of thing and the people whose accrued a few parking fines at the bottom. And you had this sort of hierarchical system where you kowtowed and bowed to the people above you purely and simply on the basis that they’d done it all, they’d been it all, they’d fed it, read it, got the tattoos, had the T shirts, eat the pies. You don’t sort of mix your words with them and whatever they say, goes. Again, it comes back to the fact that more often than not, what they’re actually saying to you is something that at some point or other is going to save your life, because they need you to react without thinking. That’s an awful lot of the things about submarines, is that you react without thinking. If you have to think about something, it’s already too late. So, if something goes wrong, it goes wrong big style, and it will go wrong instantaneously, and it can be catastrophic. You haven’t got time to think about what you’re going to do next. That’s where the training comes in. That’s where the arse kicking comes in for everything that you’re actually doing because you get it wrong, somebody will kick your arse for you. Get it wrong again, they’ll kick your arse again until you get it right, and when you’ve got it right, it’s ingrained. You won’t even have to think about it, you can do it in your sleep, you can do it in pitch blackness, all the rest of it, and that’s the whole point of this society. But in the same instance, there were a number of people within that who I would say today, I would recognise as being just overtly bullying all the time, but at the time it was part of the persona of these people as they were, and it was part of what we actually did. Nobody argued with it. You had your Lower Deck Lawyers …
76 minutes
Simon: Had your what?
Ian Lower Deck Lawyers.
Simon: What does that mean?
Ian: Lower Deck Lawyers were people who will always put the world to rights because they had an opinion about everything, and they would express …
Simon: Ok. Why is it Lower Deck?
Ian: Lower Deck and the Upper Deck, again dates back to the early days of Victorian times and before Henry VIII and everything else, in so far as all the Sailors onboard a ship, a Galleon like the Victory, their accommodation was always low down inside the ship itself, and the Officers were always high up. They were up towards the Poop Deck and all this sort of stuff, so they had their own quarters, so this was ‘the Lower Deck’ and it transferred through right all the way through the 100s of years, so we still have the Lower Deck.
Simon: And the Lower Deck Lawyers were the ones …
Ian: Yeah, these were Lower Deck Lawyers who in actual fact didn’t know jack, they didn’t know anything, but they would always extol their knowledge on various subjects and what it was like and everything else, so you find these people everywhere you go. Somebody’s whose always got an opinion and are always wrong (laughs).
Simon: So, you mentioned there the sort of hostile environment as in you’re in a tube under the sea.
Ian: Yep.
Simon: How much of that comes into your mind when you’re onboard, or if it does, then you’ve just got to dismiss it?
Ian: It is one of those things where you … I was fortunate in as far as that I suppose at the end of the day, people realised that I could look after myself. I mean I used to fight, all the time. There would be battles going on all the time.
Simon: Onboard?
Ian: Onboard, yeah.
Simon: Is there space to fight onboard? (laughs).
Ian Not really. I mean these fights usually lasted milliseconds. Somebody would say something, they’d catch you at the wrong time, as opposed to arguing with them, you just hit them. It’s far easier. Just get it over and done with, and then the next time you’re ashore, you’re the best of buddies and you go and have a couple of pints together. Then he might turn round and say, “Oh, sorry about the remark I made.” “Yeah that’s alright mate, no worries. You know not to do it again.” But people realised that … again this comes down to your own personal persona of how you hold yourself, how you purport yourself. If you give as good as you get, they will leave you alone type of thing. If you’re weak, then these guys who want to actually prey on the weak, they will do it, and you get them in all walks of life. It’s a sad fact of life but you get them in all walks of life where people do this sort of thing.
Simon: Is that increased because of them feeling concerned about being in the submarine?
Ian: Um, not too sure. I mean I’ve never looked at it from the aspect of somebody who is a weakling, and somebody who is a bully. I’ve just watched it from a distance, and it’s not something that you actually get involved in, because they might turn on you and make your life a misery for the next 6 months, or more, so you just sort of look at it from a distance and just think right ok, remind me to stay away from that guy, remind me not to talk about that or remind myself not to get in his way and this sort of business. But again, I was fortunate in the sense that I only really had 3 years of being put upon, from 16 to 19, and then I was the one that was in that position of being a put-on others, because I was …
Simon: ‘Cos you’d raised up in …
Ian: I’d become a Killick of the Engine Room, which is in charge of my Watch in the Engine Room, and everything that goes on around that Engine Room under the direction of one of the Chiefs. He’s the Chief of the Watch but it’s me that then was dishing out the orders, it was me that was teaching people how to do things. And I’d always said to myself …
80 minutes 7 seconds
Simon: You were a ‘Sea Dad’ at that point were you?
Ian: I’d become a ‘Sea Dad’ at 19 years old, so these guys … for the most part I was 19 years old and I think every single one of the Marine Engineers that I was in charge of were all older than me, every one of them.
Simon: How did that go down?
Ian: It doesn’t go down too well with a lot of them, because a lot of them are real old and bold. They’ve never been interested in bettering themselves, they’d never been interested in going through for their hook, their Leading Hands Rate or anything like this, and they would always have a go at me for being the so called ‘sprog’ as it were. A ‘sprog’ is a derogatory term for somebody who doesn’t know anything, who hasn’t been around long enough. A lot of them used to say, “I’ve spent more time under one wave that you’ve been at sea.” “Yeah, alright, whatever.” And it used to be like that but again, that is overcome by your expertise and your knowledge. If you are regarded as being highly knowledgeable, if you’re regarded as being a bit of an expert of what you actually do, then they tend to start to respect it, and that’s the only way that you can get on in submarines, is that you need respect from those around you. If you haven’t got that, it will not work. You will never become a Submariner. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you are, it doesn’t matter what rank you are. I’ve had Chiefs come on to a submarine, and they’ve literally tried to dismiss those below them who are trying to help them to understand what a submarine actually is, and I’ve hauled that Chief over to one side, given him a severe bollocking and told him that he’s to listen to what these people are telling him, because at this moment in time, they know more about it than you do. You’re Rank on this submarine means absolutely nothing until such time as you gain the respect of the guys that you’re in charge of. One thing they can do, they can either make you shine, or they can bury you, whichever way you want to go. Your choice, crack on, away you go.
Simon: And how do they react to that?
Ian: They don’t react too well to it, because they’ve spent too long being in charge where everybody below them has said, “Yes Chief, no Chief, yes Chief, no Chief.” You join a submarine and all of that goes out the window. We don’t use … the only Chief on a submarine is the Chief Tiff, the Head of the Engineering Department. He’s the Chief, and even the rest of the Chiefs call him Chief Tiff. All the rest of us, everybody below that is all on first name basis, unless you want to give somebody a hard time, and then you can change to the more formal stuff, but as soon as you go into the more formal stuff, then they know they’ve done something wrong (laughs). As soon as you use their proper title, you can see the hairs on the back of their neck stand on end. Oop, what have I done?
Simon: Somethings on the way.
Ian: Yeah, somethings coming my way (laughs). I’m not going to enjoy this am I? No, you’re not (laughs). So, it is this high testosterone environment that given what it was at that time, given the fact that we were in the middle of a Cold War and all these other things that were going on, given at the time that we also had the IRA who were bombing various parts of Britain and various other things, it was a … it made for interesting reading.
Simon: So, with the engines … I’ve interviewed some other people who were on old diesels, they didn’t initially have ear protection or they had it and then didn’t use it and now their hearing has gone.
Ian: Yeah, completely shot away.
Simon: What was it in your time?
Ian: In my time it was exactly the same. The only ear protection we actually had … we had ear muffs or commonly called a ‘clamp’. You could have a clamp that you could put on your head, but in this day and age, it would be no different to putting cotton wool in your ears. I mean they were just useless, absolutely useless. The sound hearing protection that they use these days is far superior to what we had back then, but essentially two 16-cylinder diesel engines, banging away in a compartment that is sort of 40 feet long by 18 feet across and maybe 10 feet high, it was similar to sort of sticking your head without ear defenders, sticking you head between 2 people using jack hammers either side of your brain.
Simon: And you’re in that all day.
Ian: And you’re in that all day, every day. All day whenever those engines are actually running. If we’re on the surface, and we’re going transit in between A to B, then we’ll do it on the surface running the engines and those engines can be running for days and days on end, and every time you went out there for your shift, you would wear this clamp on your head that was no better than cotton wool. But what it also did give you, is that it did give you perception of what’s going on, so the slightest change in tone, the slightest noise that is unusual, you will pick it up immediately inside your headset, whereas these modern things, they shut out so much, that you wouldn’t hear that change in tone. It was always the same that you could always tell when something would actually happen. There’d be a slight change in tone of the engine or there’d be a slight change in the air that’s coming into the Engine Room, or there would be something, and there might be 3 of us, 4 of us in the Engine Room at the time and all 4 of us would suddenly get up and we’d all look at each other. “You heard it?” “Yes, I did.” “You heard it as well?” “You’ve heard it? “Yes.” And then we’d start searching round the Engine Room to find out and see if we could see where that noise actually came from, until we got to the root cause of it. That was the biggest thing was that the slightest changes of anything that goes wrong and you’re immediately on high alert.
86 minutes 29 seconds
Simon: So, even though it’s loud, I mean I had heard up to 120 decibels, so you kind of ignoring it until there’s a change and then it’s laser focussed on …
Ian: Absolutely.
Simon: How do you communicate with people in that noise?
Ian: Sign language.
Simon: Oh really? You invent your own or there’s a …
Ian: We’ve got our own sigh language.
Simon: That’s passed down from other Submariners is it?
Ian: Yeah, it’s passed down through all the years and it would … a simple little thing like banging both your fists on top of your head like this, means that the Compressors are working.
Simon: Are working?
Ian: Yeah. You’ve got 2 Compressors in, so you’ve got two, like that, and that means 2 Compressors are actually working, and they’re producing compressed air and topping up the air bottles which we use for surfacing the submarine. We blow air into the tanks, but once you’ve blown air into the tanks, those tanks need topping up again. So, the first thing that happens when you actually surface, is that you’ll start the engines and you’ll start both Compressors and you’ll start replacing that air that you’ve just used to actually get yourself back onto the roof again. So yeah, simple things like that.
Simon: What other sign languages are there apart from fists on your head?
Ian: It’s two fists on the head would be Compressors, the other thing would be that if you have two arms side by side, that means both Generators, they’re not Engines. Everybody calls them Engines but …
Simon: Because the Oberon Class weren’t driving propellors
Ian: Correct. They’re Generators. So, they generate electricity and they charge the batteries. Swinging both arms out shows that both Generators are on full load …
Simon: That’s sort of fists and … I don’t know how to describe that (laughs).
Ian: It would be difficult … is that both arms out in front of you and one arm slapped on top of the other one to say that both are on load. And then when you’re talking about things like the … normally you would have the fuel separator and the lube oil separator would be working all the time that the Engines are actually running, but sometimes they need shutting down in order to be able to … for cleaning and various other bits and pieces. Normally the only one that would be shut down while the Engines are actually running would be the lube oil separator, so you can say by putting your finger in the air and swishing it round, is that you can denote that the lube oil separator has been shut down by crossing your arms …
Simon: That’s a sort of international thing.
Ian: … for cleaning (laughs). So, lube oil separator stopped for cleaning.
Simon: Right. It’s like … that first bit is a little bit like those 1950’s dances where they all got little movements …
Ian: Yeah, it is. It’s a language all of its own. And sometimes even just mouthing what you’re actually talking about as well, is that we can lip read. Half the time you can look at somebody and you know what they’re saying, so you can actually lip read as to how they’re actually saying it to you, because the headsets were dummy headsets so they had no electronics inside them at all, so everything had to be done by either sign language, lip reading or if it was something unusual, you’d actually grab him by the scruff of the neck, you’d haul him away and you’d point to something and then shout in his ear as to what’s going on. And usually, you go behind the ear. If you go here, and shout just there, it’s almost like you’re having a normal conversation.
90 minutes
Simon: Because you’re speaking to the bone.
Ian: You’re talking directly into the all the cochlea area at the back of the ear, so shouting to somebody on this side of your headset, you can hardly hear them. If you go behind the headset, behind the ear and shout there, it’s almost like having this conversation, same as we are here. It’s weird.
Simon: Right. So, this thing about the diesel and it being in your clothes and almost built into your skin. When you got off the submarine, that was a thing was it?
Ian: Oh yeah, you open up one of those hatches and there’s like this blue haze will come out of it and the smell of diesel is impregnated into your skin. You can’t get rid of it. It takes years for it to disappear.
Simon: Literally?
Ian: Literally years. I mean to this day, I’ve still got a kit bag in the loft that if I open it, I can still smell diesel.
Simon: And what does that trigger for you, smelling that?
Ian: It takes me right back, right back to those days, it really does. I’ve got a diesel car and every time I go to fill it up and I get the smell of diesel as I’m filling up the car, it evokes all those memories straight back in again. As for the diesel side of things, I mean in a previous house, in the garage, I had my own wardrobe, I had my own washing machine, my own tumble dryer and I built in a shower into the garage .
Simon: For coming home.
Ian: For coming home and I went straight into the garage, everything came off, everything was put through the washing machine at least two or three times because it absolutely hummed. I would shower probably at least twice, get everything off and then shower again, get everything off, and then my other half would bring out some clean clothes from the house and that’s when I would actually go into the house. Everything stayed outside because otherwise it will just impregnate the whole house. You’ll get the smell of diesel all the way through the house. And you can see people when they come in, ‘oh, what is that?’ ‘Ah, that’s diesel.’ Either that or they walk in and they go, “Oh, he’s home” (laughs). “Yes he is, how can you tell?” “You stink of diesel.” “Oh alright, fair enough.”
Simon: I had heard that there were Pubs in Gosport that if you went in there and you didn’t smell of diesel, then people looked at you suspiciously. These were Submariner’s Pubs because this was true in the Cold War time, because they’d be like, ‘Well, what are you doing in here listening to us effectively and concerns about that.’
Ian: It was. I mean the Submariner’s Pub in Gosport was the Royal Arms, the ‘RA’, the infamous …
Simon: Oh, it was called the ‘RA’ was it? I didn’t know that.
Ian: Yeah, the ‘RA’, the Royal Arms Pub, which literally is just down the end of the road here, in Stoke Road. It’s been shut down for many, many years now but it was run by the matriarch of the Gosport Submariners.
Simon: What was her name?
Ian: A lady called Sonia. Sonia, she owned the place. She was the one who actually … it was Sonia and Darcy, her other half. Darcy, he always wore a bow tie, he always wore a waistcoat, and he was always put upon by Sonia, and he used to hate Submariners with a vengeance.
Simon: Really? Running a Submariner’s Pub?
Ian: We were the bane of his life because we would constantly rip into him all the time. We’d constantly be taking the mickey out of him, constantly trying to get Sonia to come out from around the other side of the Bar and all this sort of stuff, and she was loud, she was proud, she was crude with the best of us and all this sort of stuff. But the ‘RA’ was fantastic, absolutely brilliant, especially for single guys because it was the sort of place where you could go in at any time of day that it was actually open. Going back to the ‘70s, it used to shut at 3 o’clock in the afternoon or whatever it was, we didn’t have this 12-hour bar, 24-hour bar type of thing, apart from onboard the submarine itself. But quite literally if you were at a loose end and the ‘RA’ was open, you could go in there and you would know somebody, and if you didn’t know anybody, the mere fact that you were a Submariner, you would make a whole new bunch of friends while you were actually in there, because there was always guys there and they were always Submariners, all the time. It was a Submariner’s Pub. Everything about it was submarines. All the plaques and the photographs around the walls and things, was all about submarines. This was another Pub that they used to do a Raffle and during the …
Simon: Which was that one? What was the name of it?
Ian: The ‘RA’. In the ‘RA’ this was a Pub that again did a Raffle during the 2nd World War and one of the guys that actually won a bottle of whiskey, was lost on Patrol, never came back, but that bottle of whisky stayed behind the Bar forever. And it was one of the bottles of whisky that was then handed over to the Submarine Museum. They’ve got one in there as well, another one in there that … I don’t know whether it’s the same one from the ‘RA’ or whether it’s from another Pub, where somebody had actually won it in a Raffle but didn’t come back off their next Patrol. So, there’s a lot of stuff like that, that goes on, a lot of history.
95 minutes 33 seconds
Simon: What were the other Pubs … in Gosport, what did you do when you were around Gosport?
Ian: Gosport in the ‘70s was … you had a fair number of Pubs, a lot of Pubs. The usual one for us would be that we’d go from the Bar in Dolphin, we’d come out of Dolphin, we’d come over Pneumonia Bridge, which at the time was just a walkway, a walkway Bridge, it wasn’t a road, so we’d come over Pneumonia Bridge and the first watering hole was the George and Dragon, which was right on the edge of Town. So, we’d go into the George and Dragon, then we’d go into the central High Street and we’d go into Nelsons or the Star, and then at the end of the evening we’d go up into Emma’s Night Club above the Star as it was, but it can’t be called the Star anymore because it’s now called Nelsons, but it used to be called the Star. Another Pub took that name back from apparently the Pub that they opened, that was the original name of it all, and Weatherspoon’s came in with a big law suit saying, “We want to call ourselves the Star so you’re going to have to change your name” apparently so. They changed it to Nelsons.
Simon: So, what about Emma’s? What’s your recollections of Emma’s?
Ian: Oh God, Emma’s Night Club. Oh my God. Sticky carpets.
Simon: That’s what everyone says.
Ian: Yeah, sticky carpets, absolutely horrendous place.
Simon: Someone said that was because, apart from all the beer that was spilt, that there was food that was put out and people would just sort of leave and the food would get spread all over the floor.
Ian: Yeah, it would be. They’d bring out all these nibbles and things and various other bits. Nobody was interested in that sort of stuff. For the most part everybody was just interested in the beer and the women that went in there and that was it. So yeah, the carpets were just dire, but I knew Pete Wall, the guy that owned the place, really well, and the only time you ever really see it is in the evening when its dark and it’s a good job its dark, because I’ve seen the place in daylight. It is not pretty. Oh, my good God, it is not pretty. It is horrendous, absolutely horrendous and the carpets in there were just vile. They did have a pattern; they did have some colour to them but they were just black. Absolutely horrific. But he was making a fortune out of the place out of all the Submariners and the Sailors that were actually going in there, so he wasn’t bothered.
Simon: So, good memories of Emma’s then?
Ian: Oh fantastic, some great nights in there. Absolutely brilliant nights, oh my God. Yeah, we went in there and decided that we’d all go in there dressed in black tights except what we’d done was, we went round some of the Charity Shops and collected a whole load of suits and makeshift things that we could do, get a bow tie so we all had bow ties, and there was probably about a dozen of us, but we’d cut the trousers off at the knees and we had 18-hole Doc Martin boots on when we went in the place. It was just a bit of a riot, just for something to do. It’s the sort of thing you did. Back in those days when the Pubs used to shut at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, there was actually a 4 o’clock sailing from Portsmouth Harbour going over to Le Havre, and it was overnight and then it would come back again, and it would get back here at 6 o’clock the following morning, so we’d jump out of the Pub here, go straight across the other side and we’d jump on the Ferry, all take our passports with us, because the Bar opened as soon as you got onboard. So, we carried on drinking in there and we’d drink all the way through the night and all the back until 6 o’clock in the morning ‘till it came back again. We’d never leave the boat. And then everybody would go back to Dolphin, we’d all have a shower …
Simon: Did you ever get off at the other end and then get back on again?
Ian: No, we stayed onboard (laughs). They realised what we were doing because usually what they would do is obviously they would shut the Bar for the time that they were offloading and onloading, but we convinced them to leave the Bar open and leave us with a Bartender, which they did and the said, “Right, ok then lads, crack on.” It’s all extra revenue for them, so we just used to do that and just crack on with things and come back the following morning …
100 minutes
Simon: What’s that like at 6 in the morning? Is it a walk of shame?
Ian: Yeah, not pretty. It’s not pretty. Some of them have fallen asleep and got into a drunken stupor onboard. Fallen asleep wherever they were and this sort of stuff so they’re all dishevelled, all of us were dishevelled and drunk and all the rest of it and then we’d come back at 6 o’clock. We’d get back over to Dolphin, go and have a shower, go for breakfast and then do your days’ work. Probably still half-cut but hey ho, whatever (laughs).
Simon: When you’re young you can do that kind of thing can’t you?
Ian: Absolutely. You’re bullet …
Simon: You think you can anyway (laughs).
Ian: Yeah, you’re bulletproof. You get up in the morning, you think, right, I was brilliant, and then you could literally go out and do it all again the same night, and still be fine the following day. I mean these days, oh my good God no. It takes me 3 days just to recover from having a couple of pints of beer.
Simon: So, your time at … when you were going back and doing stuff at Dolphin, you were living in the area were you?
Ian: Yes, I was living in … at the time I was married, I was living in Rowner, the married patch here in Gosport, so I used to cycle to work every day all the time that the submarine was in alongside the wall. Just get a bike, and bike into work and just be a normal person. Try and be as normal as you possibly can, at whatever time you’ve actually got alongside before you set sail again and …
Simon: That’s sort of doing repairs and the like was it then?
Ian: Yeah, you’d be doing repairs, you’d be storing for the next trip, however long that might be, plus bringing onboard whatever specialist equipment that we might need for the next lot, or we might have Special Forces coming onboard and bringing all their equipment for the next round robin of whatever it is that we might be doing. We could be alongside anything from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to a month. You just don’t know. Usually, more often than not, the average was a few days to a week or so before you’re actually out due to go off and keep the sea lanes open again.
Simon: And that was in the diesel days?
Ian: Yeah. I don’t know anything else other than diesel submarines.
Simon: Oh, you’ve always been on diesels?
Ian: Always been on diesel submarines, right from Day 1. I was one of the … it used to be in the ‘60s going into the ‘70s, was that anybody who joined diesel submarines had to have spent at least a couple of years in Surface Ships, but they got to the point in the early ‘70s where there was a distinct lack of volunteers for diesel submarines, so they literally said, “Right, ok, we’re going to start drafting people to submarines” and at that age I was one of the first ones. When I joined Orpheus, at 16 ½ -17 years old, I was the youngest person they’d ever had onboard. They’d never had anybody onboard under 20. They kept on looking at me wondering what the hell I was. Who is this young kid who looks like …?
Simon: Is he supposed to be here?
Ian: Yeah, does your mum know you’re out? (laughs). Usually, you would be what they called a ‘Badgeman’. That you’d spent at least 4 years in the Navy, you’d have 1 stripe on your arm to denote that you’d done 4 years in the Service, and here’s me with nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever, a bright-eyed bushytailed kid. ‘Ok, teach me.’ And quite literally they were just looking at me and sort of said, “Gee wow, what the hell, who are you? More to the point, what are you doing here?”
Simon: That idea of being away in close company with people, and then coming back and sort of re-joining a different world, because you’ve had your own world inside the submarine when you’ve been away. How do you adjust to that, or do you …?
Ian: Very difficult, and this is one of the reasons why relationships break down, is that the worst thing you can actually do is you can bring the attitudes and what you actually do, off the submarine and bring it into your private life. When the two of those encroach all the time, then you’re on a loser, you’re on a sticky wicket, all the way through. It’s never going to work. You have to learn to be able to cut off what you actually do within the Military, away from what you actually do in your so-called civilian life, and your family life, and how those two need to be kept separate. The best relationships there are the ones that are the distance relationship. I knew a guy who was very, very happily married all the way through his Naval career. He had children, he had a home, and he had this home in Hull. His wife only ever saw him 2 weeks every 3 months, because for those 3 months, he was Navy. For those 2 weeks when he went home, he was the family man, and that was it. The family and the Navy didn’t exist basically, and tey worked like that for years, and he got really, really worried when he was coming to the end of his time, because he said, “How’s this going to work, how am I going to be able to …?” and he was really afraid of what was going to happen to his family life and his relationship now that he was going to be at home all the time. And so was his wife (laughs).
105 minutes 40 seconds
Simon: I bet.
Ian: The two of them would just say, “Well we’ve had this for so long, this routine, and we’re perfectly happy with it, what is going to happen if we’re in each other’s pocket 24 hours a day?” And then he ended up getting job with P&O, and he became a Security Officer for P&O, both of them ‘happy as Larry.’ Even better is the fact that if he’s going anywhere nice on one the ships, she can actually join him, because by this time all the kids were all grown up and left home, so she could actually join him on some of those trips to go to the places where he’s been before, so he can actually show her around and this sort of business, and it worked brilliantly.
Simon: What was your approach to that time at home then? Did you sort of get guidance from other people onboard, of this is the way you’ve got to think about it, or …?
Ian: No, it’s not something that you would talk about amongst various people, purely and simply because …
Simon: Even with your best friends onboard?
Ian: Even with some of your best buddies, you wouldn’t sort of go down the route of showing some sort of weakness, in as far as that you’re worried about your family relationships and this sort of stuff. No, it’s something more along the lines of, ‘the Navy is hacking me off because I can’t do this and I can’t do that and I can’t do the other’ so it’s done in a roundabout way, but it’s done in a very masculine macho way type of thing, as opposed to being able to turn round and say, “Well, I’m really, really worried about my relationship with my wife.” You’ll see people start to walk away from you (laughs). “Yeah, ok mate, whatever” and they’ll walk off in the opposite direction.
Simon: Because they’ve got the same thoughts. They don’t want to acknowledge it.
Ian: They’ve got exactly the same thing going on themselves and they don’t want to be able to drawn into that type of discussion, as to how these things actually work out.
Simon: You have to make your own … you have to recognise that your behaviour changes when you come back or you’ve got to change it and have that disconnection you’re talking about.
Ian: You try to, but that’s where most people fail, and that’s where mine failed as well. I took my regimental side of things, I took my Military side of things and I allowed it to actually interfere with my personal life, and that type of thing just gets too much. It takes a special kind of person to be able to put up with that sort of thing, and for the most part, no. And I would not want anybody to actually put up with that sort of thing either, because it can be quite overbearing.
Simon: ‘Cos you’re away for so long. You come back and I guess you’re then, particularly if you’re a senior person, you’re shouting the odds or whatever. It just like, well hang on a sec, we’ve been working perfectly fine …
Ian: That’s exactly what it is, and you’ve probably heard it before, is that when you come back, you’re so used to taking charge of everything that’s been going on, that you walk in the front door and you immediately start taking charge of everything, and the biggest thing is that on a submarine, everything is just so, everything is more or less perfect, if you want to call it that. You know where everything is, you know how people are, you know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, how it needs to be done. Nobody leaves a mess anywhere, so coming home to a house full of children, who are just creating absolute chaos everywhere ‘cos they’re so excited to see you, which is fine but it immediately seems to wear off where there are children’s toys everywhere and this sort of stuff. “Why haven’t these been put away, come on, get them out the way” and things like this. And then you start taking charge of the house itself, where quite rightly, as you say, the wife has been doing it all the time that you’ve actually been away. She’s been handling everything, so yeah, that aspect of it creates this sort of animosity in your relationship. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes it doesn’t. In my case, it didn’t. After 10 years, we ended up divorcing, but as I say, for some people it’s just how you actually conduct yourself. Looking back on it, you can’t actually say that you did anything wrong, ‘cos you can’t live to regret anything. You know, it’s just one of those things, but it dies affect a lot of people in different ways. And in later life, as a Senior Rate, I’ve had lads coming to me, my Department, “Chief, can I have a quiet word with you?” “How quiet?” “Can I shut the door?” “Yes you can” and I know then that if they’re shutting the door, it’s because there’s a damn good reason behind it, and it’s something that is literally between me and him and will never go outside that room, as to what he’s actually needs to tell me, various things. And I’ve heard all sorts of things, but it’s something that they needed to get off their chest. They needed to get some form of understanding, they needed a second opinion, knowing full well that they couldn’t discuss it with any of their peers for fear of retribution or ribbing. All sorts of things that could happen for something that potentially for them is quite serious.
111 minutes 21 seconds
Simon: It is good that they’ve got an outlet.
Ian: It is, and I’ve always maintained an open door.
Simon: So is that the difference between someone who is well respected as a Senior Officer?
Ian: Yes, it is. And I always looked upon it that way. One of my biggest things that I’ve always said that I’m extremely proud of, is that I never ever issued an Order ever, in the whole of my Naval career. I never had to issue an Order. I would ask somebody to do something and they would do it, and I knew full well that they would actually go away and they would do it and get on with it, and I don’t need to check on what they’ve actually been doing. That’s the level of training, the level of commitment that you actually get from people if you run your Department correctly. Because, as I said before, a Manager is only as good as the people he manages. They can either make you shine or they can bury you. It’s your choice as to which way it actually goes, and I’ve seen both of them. I’ve seen careers go down the pan (laughs). Because people have made the wrong choices and been the way they were to the Department that they run, and I’ve seen other people absolutely shine brilliantly because they got a real Department that will support them. Absolutely 100% no matter what happens, and that’s what you need in the Military. You need people who have got your back. You need people who you know you can rely on.
Simon: When you’re talking about the seniority, what were the … it sounds lie you were very young when you went through the higher stages. What did you reach eventually?
Ian: Eventually I became a Charge Chief Petty Officer, which these days is equivalent to a Warrant Officer. It wasn’t a Substantive Rank in my days, what they called Substantive Rank. In the Army, you have Corporals, Sergeants, Staff Sergeant, Warrant Officer 2, Warrant Officer 1. In the Navy, you had Able Seaman, you had Leading Hand, you had Petty Officer, Chief Petty Officer and then there was this change off between if you were a Technical Rank, you became a Chief Tiff, but it was like a segregated rank type of thing, as a Charge Chief. You were paid extra money but it’s not reflected in something like your pension, because I get the same pension as a Chief, but I was actually in charge of that Chief when I was in the Navy, so it’s always been a big bone of contention this one, that we had this additional pay and additional knowledge and additional responsibility, but it wasn’t reflected because it wasn’t called a Substantive Rank. Today, the Navy has a Substantive Rank. They call it Warrant Officer 2. They’ve brought them in line with the Army and the RAF, so that on retirement, you would get a Warrant Officer’s pension as opposed to a Chief’s pension, but back then, I reached ultimately I reached Charge Chief. The only reason my career stopped really is because of redundancy. They did away with the last of the diesel submarines, and from that point on, my skill set had gone out the window, even though I’d actually been selected for Officer and when I asked about what sort of jobs I was going to be doing as an Officer, seeing as how you’ve just got rid of all my Trade Training and all my skill set where it lies, I was told, “Well, we always need General List Officers to be able to do various tasks” and it sounded to me too much like general dogsbody, so I thought no. I’ve always been front line, I’ve always been either on a submarine, supporting a submarine, going out into various war zones, supporting submarines out there and doing various things. No, I think I’ll sort of pass on that one and I’ll accept the redundancy and move on.
115 minutes 40 seconds
Simon: And which year was that?
Ian: That was 1994 I came out from there.
Simon: And how was that shift?
Ian: Um, it was fine in as far as that I didn’t really understand what I wanted to do, because the level that I was actually at within Engineering … essentially what I didn’t want to do was I didn’t want to join another company where somebody would be giving me orders again. It was almost like taking a step back. Plus, as well as that, I’d had just about enough of Engineering so if I’m not going to do Engineering, then I’m looking for a new role. So, I started researching various different new avenues and various other things and after a bit of Consultancy work in Engineering and doing various other bits and pieces … when I first left the Navy, you have to sign up with a Doctor and a Dentist, and when I was in the Dentist’s, while I was waiting, I picked up a copy of the BMJ, the British Medical Journal, and in the back of that they were asking for submissions to the School of Podiatric Medicine in London, and to this day I have no idea why I did it but I tore that page out and stuck it in my pocket. I found it again a couple of months, rang the School up, chatted to a couple of guys on the end the phone, went up there for an interview. Funniest part of that was that they said, “Tell us about yourself” so I told them how I was diesel Submariner for 20 years and knew everything there was to know about diesel submarines, and he looked at me square in the face and said, “So, what the hell makes you think you can do this Course?” and I said, “Well you think of a human body, it’s no different to an Engine really. It’s got air bits running through it, it’s got fuel bits running through it, it’s got blood bits running through it, it’s got pumps, it’s got turning motions, it’s got this , it’s got that, it’s got the other.” “Yeah, I suppose we could sort of … I can see where you’re coming from.” Anyway, the upshot was I was accepted on the Course and I’ve been a Podiatrist now for the past 27, 28 years as a second career.
Simon: That is quite a shift isn’t it? But I can see the link you’re talking about. And what about having to re-train? Sort of forget all of the skills and experience you had? I guess it was just for you … how did you approach the relearning?
Ian: Just another Course. Your lifelong learning within the Military is that you are constantly learning something. There’s always another set of books that you need to read, another set of books that you need to complete. Another task that you need to do, so it’s not like within civilian industry, is that you would do an Apprenticeship. You may leave that Apprenticeship and you’ll be doing that one job, and you’ll do that job until you retire. Within the Military, especially within the Navy, you can find yourself doing different jobs, all related to Engineering, but all in different aspects. One can be with internal combustion engines, next minute you could find yourself working on ‘fridges, air conditioning, and after that you can find yourself working on pumps, oil pumps, air pumps, compressors, things like this. So, there was always this learning cycle that was constantly ongoing, all the time, and even to the time that I actually left the Military, I was studying to become an Officer anyway, so the learning curve was always vertical, all the time. So, going back to this school again was nothing new. It didn’t hold any qualms for me at all, apart from having to relearn Biology, Anatomy and Physiology and this sort of business I hadn’t done since I was at school, but once it all fell in place, you’re fine, you just carry on, you just keep going.
Simon: One thing that we haven’t spoken about is the SETT. Everyone goes through training there. How many times did you go through?
Ian: Yes they do. Four.
Simon: And what was your first experience of SETT like?
120 minutes
Ian: They were trying to turn me into a fish. Quite literally, they want me be a fish. They want me to breathe under water. The SETT itself is 100-foot tower with various locks that you can actually access the tower through the side of the tower, at 30 feet, 60 feet and 100 feet. Essentially what they’re trying to do is that during s submarine escape, they want you to be able to understand what it actually means to escape from a dived submarine, and I was one of the last ones where you actually did the so-called free ascent from the bottom of the Tank. The free ascent is where you are breathing out all the way to the surface, so you’re breathing out all the way to the surface from 100 feet down. The air that you’re breathing at 100 feet has been highly compressed, so that the air that you’re taking into your lungs is probably about ten times normal atmospheric pressure, so us breathing now, if you can imagine ten times that volume of air going down into your lungs, that’s what you’ve got at 100 feet if you’re breathing compressed air. When they open out the access into the Tank itself, and you’ve got 100 feet of water above you and you’ve got a couple of safety numbers either side of you, and you need to prove to them that you can actually breathe out properly, which literally is just blowing out. Pursing your lips to about the size of a pencil, and then just breathing out and then they’ll release you. And then you breathe out all the way to the surface, so you’re breathing out for essentially about 12 seconds, 13 seconds, 14 seconds or however long it might take you, depending on what your personal buoyancy is. But you’re breathing out all the way to the surface. At some point or other, once or twice, you can actually run out of air and you think you’re going to die, because you’re out of air and you’re still only halfway to the surface. And by the time you’ve actually thought of that, you’ve actually gone up another 2,3,4 feet, and the air inside your lungs has now expanded out again to take into account that lessening of the pressure on you. Suddenly your lungs start to feel so full of air that you’ve really got to blow out really hard, so effectively you’re the same as a fish. You’ve run out of air, and now you’ve got more air. How does that work? (laughs). So now you’re breathing out again but having to breathe out really hard because you’re trying to get rid of this … because your lungs are now starting to hurt because they’re expanding so much …
Simon: You feel the hurt in your lungs?
Ian: You can feel it.
Simon: You’re filling your chest.
Ian: You can feel it filling your chest up. You’ve got to blow really hard to get rid of this air as fast as you possibly can. And then you break the surface and you lie there on the surface and one of the Swim Boys will actually drag you over to the side, and then they’ll make you stand on the side of the Tank to make sure that you’re actually ok. When you’re actually at the bottom of that Tank and you’re about to do it, the panic that runs through you is like nothing on earth, and when you hit the top of the Tank, all you want to do is do it again. Absolutely fantastic. Brilliant. It was just fantastic stuff but really, really odd, and it’s a strange, strange feeling. You’re supposed to qualify every 4 years, so every 4 years you’re expected to get your backside up to the Tank again. They go through it, it’s a 2-day Course. The first day they teach you all about submarine escape and go through it all again and you practice a few bits and pieces, and then the second day, you’re actually in the Tank itself and they will first of all teach you how to breathe out so you’ll gey into the top of the Tank and just sit on the top of the water and the Swim Boys will actually teach you to blow out properly, as to what they’re expecting. And then you’ll be taken down into the 30-foot lock. So that’s 30 feet down and you’ll go into this capsule, probably 4 or 5 at a time, and then they will flood it up, they will introduce high pressure air and equalise it with the pressure of the water out the other side, and then they will open the door and then you get that time honoured thing that every single Submariner will hear. “Take a good, deep breath.” The Instructor will have his hand on the top of your head, he will push you backwards and down and backwards out into the Tank itself. You’re wearing a belt with a couple of straps hanging off it. The Swim Boys will grab hold of each of those straps, they will look at you and you’ll prove to them that you can actually breath out properly as you’ve been taught, and then they’ll release you, and on the side of the Tank, you’ll hear them tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, so you get this tap, tap, I can even hear it to this day. Like a hollow sound like tapping inside a metal tube. Tap, tap, tap, tap, and then they’ll release you and let you float up to the surface, breathing out all the way to the surface. You’ll do that a couple of times from 30 foot and then you’ll do a 60 foot and then you’ll do the 100 foot.
125 minutes 30 seconds
Simon: All in the same over the period of a day.
Ian: The same day. Day 2 was the wet water, the wet tank, so wet work was Day 2 of the Training and that’s when you would spend all day just in the Tank and just doing these various runs. It takes that long purely and simply because you’re only going through the chamber 4 or 5 at a time, and there might be 20 of you in the class who are having to qualify that day, so there’s a fair amount of sitting around on Day 2, waiting for your turn. This is when the anxiety level starts to go up.
Simon: That’s interesting. ‘Cos you have a chance to think about the repercussions of what’s going to happen.
Ian: Yep, and you get that banter between the guys that are sat around, and everybody’s got this bravado about them and everything else, but when it comes to your turn, everything suddenly goes very quiet (laughs). Everybody shuts up, nobody says a word and it’s almost like, right, ok, this is the march of death, here we go, until they’ve done it. And once they’ve done the first run …
Simon: So, once you’ve done the first 30, you’re ok.
Ian: Yeah, then you’re back into the routine again. Right, ok, let’s get on with another 30, let’s get on with the 60.
Simon: And each time you redo the training, you do the 30, 60, …
Ian: 30, 60, 100 yeah. 30,60,100, 30, 60, 100, you do that all the time because I mean what they don’t want is to take you straight down to 100 and for you to have problems. Because you know some people can have medical issues they’re not even aware of, especially with their ears. Not being able to clear their ears …
Simon: So did you do the bit with the clip on the nose did you?
Ian: Yeah, you get a clip that you put on your nose which is really, really tight, but needs to be, and then as the pressure is coming on, so you grab hold of the clip and you actually keep on blowing … as though you’re trying to blow your nose, and every time you try and blow your nose, it pops your ears. And you keep on doing that and then if you do have a problem, you just raise your hand and they’ll stop what they’re doing and either clear your ears of if you can’t, then off you go to the Sick Bay, see if you can clear your ears out there and do whatever you need to do, and you might have to come back later and requalify, for whatever reason. Either that or you get a burst eardrum, one of them. I’ve known people, one or two, they knew that if they didn’t qualify, that they could be taken off the submarine until they do qualify. That’s what it used to be like. You had to qualify, you had to go through the Tank, and if you couldn’t, then you were removed until such time as you could. I knew a couple of guys, they actually allowed themselves to get a burst eardrum rather than be sent away to come back another day. Tried to clear their ears couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, keep on trying, keep on trying. It got to a point where their ear just popped.
Simon: So, they were very keen to get the thing completed. They wanted to complete, but they couldn’t clear so they just thought, well, I’ll chance it.
Ian: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just keep going , my ears will clear in a minute, they’ll clear in a minute, and then bang, it cleared alright, it just burst an eardrum. But outside of that, I mean that’s a rare, rare occasions that something like that would happen. But otherwise, everybody else, 99.9% of the time nobody has any problems whatsoever. We just do it and get on with things.
Simon: You were describing that idea of thinking, oh my goodness, I’ve got no more breath left. That happened to you did it?
Ian: Yeah.
Simon: Does it happen to everyone?
Ian: Probably does.
Simon: ‘Cos they blow out too hard, that the rate isn’t quite right to do it.
Ian: Yeah, you blow out too hard. Yeah, it’s a fine line between blowing out just enough, not blowing out enough, blowing out too hard, and in my case it was a case of blowing out too hard and suddenly I had no air left. Ordinarily there’d be this fight or flight syndrome that kicks into the brain and things, but that’s where the training comes in, is that they actually tell you.
Simon: That’s going to happen to you, so …
Ian: This could happen to you. If you find that your chest is starting to hurt, you’re not blowing out hard enough. If you find that you lose air, then you’ve blown out too hard.
Simon: So, next time you then blow out in a more regulated way.
Ian: Yeah, you try and regulate it and try and think about things. It’s trying to think that way in an environment that you’re not supposed to be in. You’re not supposed to be able to do this. This is not natural; it goes against the laws of nature. Is that you actually sort of … you do these things and it’s the overcoming, the fight or flight syndrome for all of us, every one of us has experienced it, where you’ve got to overcome that fear of, if I do run out of air, then what? Or if not blowing out hard enough, then what? You’ve got to get on with it, you got to do these things, because you can get injured.
130 minutes 28 seconds
Simon: The Instructors were saying that when they were going down, there’s a part of their brain that saying to them, you need to breathe, you need to breathe, you need to breathe, and they learn to override that and realise that they’re ok, which seems extraordinary.
Ian: It is massively strange when you sort of think that way as to how a human brain, can actually think, ‘well, hang on a minute, I’ve now run out of air, why aren’t I panicking? What should I be doing?’ And then by the time you’ve thought of that, you know you’ve come up that extra few feet and suddenly your lungs are full of air again, expanded air inside your lungs that you suddenly think, ‘Jesus, now I’ve got to blow out really hard to actually get rid of this excess air inside my lungs.’ So, it happened to me a couple of times, but you just deal with it. I mean that’s the way things work.
Simon: Is it shocking to have the … when you’re at the 100-foot level, the rate at which the water comes in?
Ian: Yes, at 100 feet, the water does come in at a great rate of knots. Your breathing just the normal air in the compartment itself, so that’s becoming pressurised. But at the same time, in the 30- and 60-foot locks, the water only really comes up to more or less about sort of midriff, chest height. Down at 100 feet, the water kept on creeping up, and it does sort of get a little bit disconcerting where you can see people looking at each other thinking, when’s this water going to stop coming in? When is it going to sort of start to equalize? We know the Dynamics behind it, we know the Physics, we know that at some point or other, this water will stop coming in because it will equalize with the pressure of air that’s already in there, but it’s getting your brain to understand that because this water just seems to keep coming up and keep coming up, and keep coming up until it’s up around your neck area which is where it is when in the 100 foot so yeah, it’s a strange, strange thing, it really is. But a hell of an experience, and one of the one’s that is just … if somebody said to me tomorrow, “Do you fancy doing the SETT again?” “Yeah, give me a date in the diary.” Without any problem at all, I’d do that.
Simon: It’s funny when you were talking about it before and it was almost like you could hear the sound of the hammer on the Tank.
Ian: Yeah, I can still hear it. As soon as anybody mentions it, I can hear it, I can hear it. They’ve got a brass hammer because obviously what they don’t want to do is they don’t want to chip the paint, so they won’t use a steel one. It’s always a brass hammer they they’ve actually got and two things that are synonymous with any Submariner whose gone through the Tank that they’ll talk about is they always talk about the last thing they hear before they’re dunked into the water, is the Instructor saying, “Take a good deep breath” and then you’re pushed out and into the Tank itself, and then you prove that you’re actually breathing out properly, and when you prove that you’re breathing out properly, you’ll hear this tap, tap, tap, tap on the side of the Tank, and that informs those up top that they’ve released you. You’re released and then you’re free buoyant up to the surface, and the guys on the surface, they know when to expect you because they’ve heard through the water, the tap, tap, tap, tap from the side of the Tank.
Simon: Did you do it with the outfit on as well?
Ian: Yeah, with the full suit on.
Simon: How was that changing from doing it free to …
Ian: It was very, very odd, in as far as that you no longer needed to breathe out all the way to the surface. You could just breathe normally inside the suit. The SEIE.
Simon: Because the excess just spilled out the side.
Ian: Yeah, it was like a hood that you more or less … you were in a suit, but the hood itself had an escape valve on it, a pressure valve. So, as the pressure built up inside your suit, so this valve would actually release that pressure and there’d be just bubbles coming out of your suit, but inside the suit itself you just breathed normally all the way to the surface, and as the air inside your lungs and as the air inside your suit is expanding out all the time, it’s just escaping out of the suit, so it’s a bit of a weird one, that one, just breathing out normally.
135 minutes 6 seconds
Simon: Going from one from being at free to the other.
Ian: Yeah, to going from a free ascent to a suited ascent. But yeah, it was an experience that every Submariner has to go through, and every Submariner would want to do it again. Or the vast majority would anyway. They’d all say, “You want to be a fish?” “Yeah, I’ll be a fish.” “Come on then, let’s go do it again.” So, it was really sad to actually pay a visit to Dolphin a couple of years back and went to the Tank top and the Tank has all been switched off and all the heating is off and it’s full of growth and mould and goodness knows what else and it’s all looking in a very sorry state for itself and things, but at the end of the day. The Tank itself features really prominently in a movie, ‘Above Us the Waves’ and there’s a section in there where it shows guys going through the Tank, and that’s John Mills and the attack on the Tirpitz up in one of the fjords in Norway, and it was all about their training on the ‘X’ Craft. Good movie, ‘Above Us the Waves’. You want to see how the Tank actually works properly, watch that movie. It’s got a good section in there about … and they actually go through the Tank itself, and they show the Swim Boys all the way through it. And those guys that were actually shown in that, they were serving Submariners.
Simon: Have you ever had any incidents when you’ve been onboard the submarine that have brought fear or unexpected experiences?
Ian: Two occasions that spring to mind immediately. One is an experience in the … both experiences in the 1970s, on the Orpheus. One was the depth charging that we took in the Mediterranean, and the second one was losing 2 Royal Marines on an exercise in Lock Long. The first one, long hot summer of 1976, when everybody was basking in their sunshine in this country, just as the sun came out here in the March, we left for a 6-month sneaky Patrol. Sneaky Patrol is something where we’re going spying basically. That’s what it essentially was, but we were going to be away …
Simon: Taking photographs or listening to things or …
Ian: Yeah, we were going to be away for 6-months and it was going to be 6-months dived, so everything was topped up to the absolute maximum. The food that came onboard was just absolutely ridiculous. We ended up with what we call a ‘false deck’ running through the submarine which is where we packed in as many tins as we could, so we literally created another deck all the way through the submarine. We quite literally ate our way through the submarine with all the food that we had onboard.
Simon: Getting more ceiling height as you …
Ian: Yeah, so because of the additional height that we put onto the decking, everybody kept on banging their head everywhere because we were so used to just dodging things around that was above us. We got to a point where that didn’t work, right, ok, fine, no problem, so yeah, we would eat our way through the submarine. But the idea of that was that we were to dive just south of the Isle of Wight in March, and the plan was that we were going to surface just south of the Isle of Wight 6 months later in the September. From diving just south of the Isle of Wight, we would go down out into the Atlantic, through the Bay of Biscay, down into … and then we’d do a dived transit of the Gibraltar Straits. We would traverse the whole of the Mediterranean, down into the Aegean, to the entrance to the Black Sea at the eastern end of the Med, because we were told that the brand-new Russian Aircraft Carrier, the Kiev, was coming out on sea trials into the Mediterranean, and we were there to meet her and greet and we were going to spy on everything that she was actually doing. And spying for our side of things was that we would see if we could get underneath her and photograph all her underwater fittings so that we knew what sort of equipment she was actually fitted with. We would listen to all the ship’s noises so that we’d learn to recognise it from a distance. We’d also watch all the routines that they were actually doing [telephone rings] … sorry about that …
Simon: So, you were saying, listening.
Ian: We would listen to all the noises that the ship actually makes and what that would enable us to is all those recordings would then be sent out to all other submarines, so that at any time in the future, if the Kiev was operating in their area, they would be able to pick it up and they would be able to analyse it and recognise that it was actually the Kiev without even ever seeing it. But as with all these things, for a new 1st of the Class, she was escorted out by a whole troop of Destroyers, Frigates, aircraft and submarines.
140 minutes 45 seconds
Simon: ‘Cos they know that you’re going to be there.
Ian: They know that we’re going to be there, they know that we’re going to try and spy on them, so it was just a matter of we went down there and we stayed dived and waited for her to come out and obviously the intelligence that we had was good enough, because she appeared when she was supposed to have appeared, and we then spent the next few weeks following her around and watching what she was doing and how she was doing things, and making recordings of … because she was there to exercise, so we were watching the Russian Exercises and we were making notes of everything that they did and how they did it. Obviously part and parcel of what they do is Anti-Submarine Exercises, and that’s when it got a little bit scary (laughs) because when they went in to the Anti-Submarine Exercise mode, we got caught, and they started chasing us all round the area, and they were dropping …
Simon: How do you know that they’re chasing you?
Ian: ‘Cos they suddenly went active.
Simon: What does active mean?
Ian: As opposed to the surface ships and the submarines, we knew there was a couple of submarines there, for the most part, a submarine relies on stealth. It relies on being silent, completely silent, so therefore it just listens. It doesn’t make any noise, it just listens. When you actually pick up a positive contact on something, you call it ‘active’ which is where you’re actively making noises yourself to pick up those other submarines. It’s almost like using radar, where they will send a ping out into the water, and if it hits the hull of your submarine and bounces back, they know they’ve got a target. They know we’re there. And they suddenly went active to tell us basically, ‘we know you’re there and now’s your chance to actually leave the area’.
Simon: Right, it’s a warning sign.
Ian: Yeah, it is a warning, and we weren’t going anywhere. The Captain at the time, JBT, James Bradley Taylor, he was a little bit gung-ho and he said, “No, we’ll stay around, we’ll evade this and we’ll stay out of the way and things’ but we never did. They kept on chasing us down and every so often they were dropping depth charges over the side.
Simon: Of a ship.
Ian: Of a ship, yeah, they were dropping depth charges which is a usual thing. I mean when the Russians are spying on us, we will actually drop scare charges basically over the side a ship to let them know that we know you’re there, so therefore your cover’s been blown, go away. This lot decided … the Russians decided that they took great umbrage at the fact that we were actually there, and they were dropping what we believe was to be 50 kilo, 200-pound charges over the side that were so close to us, that we actually lost 2 sections of the casing off the submarine itself. The casing section.
Simon: Blown off?
Ian A casing section essentially is a fibreglass section of the submarine that you look at when you’re actually looking at the external part of a submarine, so it free floods inside but it’s basically it’s made of fibreglass and it comes in sections. Each of those sections probably weighs about half a tonne, is held on by over 100 stainless steel nuts and bolts, and they hit us with enough power to actually dislodge two of those and we lost those completely. We also lost one of the Indicator Buoys, which caused absolute chaos back here, ‘cos an Indicator Buoy is used in an Escape, that when you actually are on Escape, you release the Indicator Buoy to tell the world and especially the Admiralty here, that you’re in trouble, and we lost the Indicator Buoy and we didn’t know it.
Simon: That went off and basically is saying, “Hey, we’re in trouble.”
Ian: Yes, that went up to the surface, we were deep, we didn’t know that we’d actually lost this thing. The cable had been severed ‘cos normally there’s a couple of thousand yards of cable attached to this thing, so that if you’re on the bottom, and the Buoy is on the surface, you don’t tie up to it or anything like this, but there’s a cable and you can contact the submarine below you, if you’re lucky. It depends on what depth of water you’re actually in. But that cable had been severed, so we had no idea that we’d lost the Indicator Buoy. The Indicator Buoy hit the roof, it did what it was supposed to do, it sent out a Distress Call to the Admiralty in London and all the rest of it, the whole of NATO was put on high alert for a sub sunk, which is one of your worst-case scenarios, a bit like the Kursk. When the Russian’s lost the Kursk and things, this is the same scenario for what they would do for us. The Indicator Buoy went up, it flashed off a signal saying that the submarine was in distress, and we had no idea what was going on. The Russian’s kept on chasing us, all around,
145 minutes 44 seconds
Simon: So, they didn’t react to the Indicator Buoy?
Ian: No, the Russian’s didn’t. No, they’ll take no notice of that whatsoever. They want us gone, out the area, and if they can do it in the worst way possible, so much the better. Because all this stuff that the Kiev was doing, it was all as far as they were concerned it was Top Secret, so we had Top Secret documentation that we were taking back to NATO. The last thing they want is that, so if they can do as much damage … if they could have sunk us they would have done, because nobody’s going to argue over the toss over it. Who’s going to say who’s fault it was, and things like this you know? Happens all the time. So, they chased us around and it got to the point literally where they kept on forcing us deep, where when they were forcing us deep all the time, the air inside the submarine got so bad that everybody was becoming cyanosed. Everybody had blue lips. There was not enough oxygen in the atmosphere. People were starting to sort of wobble from side to side through the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere. The barometer, which gives you the air pressure inside the submarine was basically round in the red, which is somewhere we should never be, because we kept on releasing air from the air bottles, the blowing bottles. Kept on releasing a bit of air from the blowing bottles into the atmosphere to try and boost up the oxygen content which failed miserably really. We had the CO2 generators, which is absorbing soda lime canisters, which absorbs carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They were on full flow, we had oxygen generators, they were on full flow, trying to generate oxygen but we were still in a bad, bad way. I mean we’d sustained a lot of damage. It was just like watching a War Two movie where every time one of these things went off, you’d have paint flakes and water and the lights would go out and all this sort of stuff. Paint flakes would come down off the deck heads and things.
Simon: Can you feel the air pressure …?
Ian: Oh yeah. There’s a massive ‘woomph’ when it hits you, and then whichever side it comes from, the whole submarine will move, and especially the ones that landed on top of us and did the most damage. I mean how we didn’t sustain more damage I don’t know. But they chased us around for probably about a week or so we were undergoing this, until eventually the Captain said, “Right, ok, we’ve got to get away out of this.” By this time, we’d traversed a lot of the Med south, and he decided that he was going to go into Libyan territorial waters, so literally we went into Libyan territorial waters. The Russian’s wouldn’t go over the line because obviously they can be seen to actually transgress that line, but they sent a submarine after us, which is an Alpha Class nuclear submarine. And an Alpha Class is capable of 40 plus knots. We believed at the time that the hull of the submarine was made of titanium. High grade carbon steel, and this thing, if they found you they would just drive straight at you at 40 knots and if they hit you, they’d just slice straight through you like butter without any problem at all. Probably wouldn’t even dent them going at that sort of speed. So, we had the Alpha, we knew was somewhere around us. We were more afraid of the Alpha than we were of anything else that was going on, because we knew that the Alpha driver, the Captain would just drive straight at us without any problem. So, we managed to get into Libyan waters, the depth charging side of things stopped, and that’s when we managed to get up to the surface and we flashed off a signal to the UK to say, “Hi, we’re still here, we’re still alive, blah blah blah blah.”
Simon: That’s a week later.
Ian: “How’s things going?” And all hell broke loose with the incoming traffic, because they said, “Where the hell have you been? We’ve got NATO Forces heading in your direction, we’ve got them all over the place, we’re watching the Russians, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, we’re doing the other. We found your Indicator Buoy which has washed up on a beach in Egypt, and where are you?” So, we said, “Well actually we’re in Libyan territorial waters.” They said, “Give us your exact position” and this sort of stuff, and then they sent some of the surface ships, and they had a whole mish mash. They had Spanish, French and Italian and British Warships come out into the area and then they literally formed a huge circle and we sat underneath in the middle of that circle and they basically escorted us away from the Russians and the Russians wouldn’t come inside that circle that they’d formed. So, literally we were there. It was only when we’d actually, a couple of days sailing, a couple of days of steaming, that we managed to say, “Right, ok, we’re now going to hit the roof, we’re going to hit the surface and see what’s going on” and that’s when we discovered all the damage that had been caused to us and we had blast marks all over the paintwork. One of the Ballast Tanks, there’s a picture of me somewhere sat in it, where the blast had bent the metal to the extent that … it was a huge area, probably half the size of this room of a dent in one of the Ballast Tanks. So, they escorted us out and where we were supposed to have remained dived, and made our way back to the UK, they said, “No, you’re coming back to Gibraltar first. You’re going to off-load all the sound, all the intelligence that you’ve gathered there, and then under cover of darkness you’re going to leave, you’re going to dive if you’re safe to do so, you’re going to make your way back round to the Isle of Wight again. You’re going to surface there but only at night, and you’ll enter Portsmouth Harbour and you’ll go straight round into the Dockyard and straight into Dry Dock” (laughs).
152 minutes 4 seconds
Simon: ‘Cos they don’t want to expose the damage.
Ian: They don’t want people photographing all this damage and everything else that we’d sustained and things, so literally we said, “Right, ok, we’re going to go round and up into the top end of the Dockyard and that was a 6-month trip that we actually did for that. And one if the things that we had on that one which was quite interesting was that we had a bunch of guys come down from some medical University, who wanted to take samples. They knew what we were going to undergo, so they wanted to take hair samples, skin samples, urine, blood samples …
Simon: Because of the lack of oxygen?
Ian: To see what sort of effect it would have on the human body for that sort of deprivation of no sunlight for 6-months, this type of thing. So, we did that and then when we came back, we had those same people come down the submarine. They met us just south of the Isle of Wight, and they were told in no uncertain terms, whatever you do when you go, don’t wash for a couple of days, don’t wear any perfume, don’t wear any aftershave, because these guys haven’t had smells like that for 6-months and you’ll send their brain into overload. And one of the women that came down, one of the Scientists, she didn’t listen. She passed her bag down to one of the young lads that was at the bottom of the ladder waiting for her. She came down the bottom of the ladder, she turned round and faced him, and as she turned round and faced him, he got this sudden waft of her perfume al over him. He threw up all over her. His brain just went in to overload and he immediately just ‘whoop, sorry’ (laughs).
Simon: Wow, welcome aboard!
Ian: Yeah it was. “Hi” (laughs). “How you doing?”
Simon: Goodness.
Ian: Yeah, and we never ever did find out about the results of those tests. We asked the Captain to see if … “Those tests that were done to us, can you find out what went on?” He said, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.” He said, “I want to find out myself.” He came back a few days later and said, “Nope, even I was told to wind my neck in and go away.”
Simon: Right (laughs).
Ian: “Go away, you don’t need to know” so obviously it was not something that the Navy wanted to know about.
Simon: So, you being chased down for a week. What’s that experience?
Ian: It’s sort of … 17, 18 years old …
Simon: You were that young at that time?
Ian: Yeah, you took it in your stride. You almost thought that this was normal, this was what you joined the Navy for. This is what happens when you go hunting down the dreaded Russians and things like this, and the fact that we do the same to them. It was one of those things where I didn’t think about it. It didn’t even occur to me to be worried at all. In fact, I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried about anything. I was 17, 18 years old, I was bullet proof, I was going to live forever as far as I was concerned. You don’t think of these things. If you did think of them, you wouldn’t do the job, so you don’t think of this sort of stuff.
Simon: What about the older people onboard who weren’t feeling so?
Ian: The older guys. That was the one that I noticed. There was a couple of the older more experienced, a couple of the Chiefs and things you could see the worried look on their faces and you could see that every time there was another explosion, another bang, their eyes would go like saucers, whereas for us it was like ‘ok, then, whatever’ but for these guys it was just like ‘Oh my God’ you know and you could see that there was something different about the whole thing. Yeah, there was a look of being worried on their faces without any doubt whatsoever, and it was just a matter of really of well, if they’re worried about, should I be worried about it? And you think, no, I’m not worried about it, this is fine.
Simon: And did it have an impact on them longer term? Did they stay with the Service or …?
Ian: Yeah, I mean that sort of thing you just work through it. If it was worrying, then it was worrying for that moment in time. You just get out the other side.
Simon: Next time it won’t be spotted.
Ian: Yeah, next time we’ll just do better, we won’t get caught. And that’s the way you do things. In the Gulf War, first time round, I was out in Diego Garcia and I had 2 submarines there that we were supporting to go into the Gulf and on separate occasions I have had senior guys coming to me, giving me a letter for their family and another letter with their Last Will and Testament inside it, and they would see me privately. They’d catch up with me in a corner somewhere, in a Bar. “Pony, can I have a quick word with you?” “Yeah sure, no problem at all.” “Can we step outside a bit?” “Yeah, fine.” I knew what it was about, and they would say, “Lok, this next Patrol I’m going on, if something happens can you make just make sure that this gets to the right people and deliver it by hand.” Yeah, and I made that undertaking. I said, “Yeah, fine, no problem at all,” and I had a few people do that. None of them knew that either of them had actually approached me in any way shape or form and when they came back, I would approach them individually, privately and I would hand it back over to them again and give it them back until the next Patrol, until they went out again. And then they may or may not come and see me again and hand over some sheets of paper and things. So yeah, you do get people who are worried about the situation, but it’s not something that you would talk about in open company at all. You don’t talk about your fears at all because you don’t want it rubbing off on anybody else. Even to this day, Sailors are superstitious buggers and it’s always the same. Any amount of superstition, black cats and ladders against things and walking under them and this sort of stuff, don’t do that sort of thing. They’ve always got these superstitions about whistling at sea, various things.
Simon: What’s the whistling at sea one then?
Ian: Whistling at sea dates back again to the time of sail. Anybody caught whistling at sea is immediately frowned upon because you’re whistling up a bad wind. The only person who was allowed to whistle at sea was the Chef, because if he was whistling, he wasn’t eating the victuals. That’s the way they looked at it. The only person allowed to whistle onboard was the Chef, because if he was whistling, it meant he wasn’t eating your food (laughs).
Simon: So, when you were describing the people coming to you and … that’s something we haven’t spoken about yet, is that the camaraderie between Submariners. What’s your view on that, what’s your …?
Ian: I’ve got people even to this day, I’ve got people who I served with who are closer to me than my own family. When I was actually serving, there was certain people who I served with, I knew more about them than I did about my own family, and they knew more about me than they did of their own family, and that was the way it was. I mean we were a family. In fact, even today, they’re talking about changing the Submariner’s Association, changing the name to the Submarine Family. Talking about coming under one umbrella within the Museums within the Naval Associations and things, and they’re talking about it being the Submarine Family. It may be one of those things that is … it is one of those things that always comes to the fore is that your relationship with the guys onboard is second to none, and it’s always comes back to that original thing is that ‘has he got my back, I’ve got his.’ ‘Anything goes wrong, I know he will get me out of it.’ ‘He know that I will get him out of it.’ Worst case scenario, it’s almost like these people who get medals and various other things, they haven’t done it because they’re brave, they’ve done it because their mates are in trouble. You look at Johnson Beharry who is a VC from Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever it was, he wasn’t going out there to get a medal, he drove that Armoured Personnel Carrier because the guys in his Platoon were coming under heavy fire from the enemy, and he had to go in there and get them out, and that’s what he did that for. He wasn’t thinking about a medal or anything else, and that’s the same with all the rest us. Nobody thinks about medals at all. Medals come along because it just happens that you’re trying to save somebody else’s life. I mean some of the VCs that were awarded in submarines. One of them was to a chap called Tommy Gould, who during the 2nd World War, a bomb hit the submarine and got jammed underneath the casing but didn’t go off. There are two things with that. If it goes off, everybody dies. Whoever we send under the casing to try and get it out and push it over the side. If the enemy come back, the submarine will have to dive and whoever is under the casing will die. Tommy Gould and one of the Officers onboard, they volunteered to actually go under the casing and release it, knowing full well that if the enemy came back, they were going to die. If the bomb went off, they were going to die. The reason why they went under the casing, is because the rest of their mates meant more to them than the job itself and what they were actually doing. Forget about gongs, nobody was thinking about medals or anything else. They were thinking about how do I save my mates? If I can get rid of that bomb, my mates are safe.
162 minutes 20 seconds
Simon: So, is it a different sort of love in a way that you’ve got for these people that you don’t have other people?
Ian: It is, I mean these are family members. I mean some of the guys that I’ve served with, they’re almost like blood brothers to me. I’ve lived through so much with them. I’ve seen them sort of get married, had kids, I’ve heard the sob stories of getting divorces, I’ve heard about their tragedy of some of their kids dying, close family members, all sorts of things. It’s far ranging, and it’s true what I say. I knew more about some of the guys that I served with than I did do about my own family, because I had spent more time with them. And through course of conversation, all of these things come out all the time. In the Submarine Society side of things, when you’re actually at sea, you’re being exposed to the extreme of everything. You’ve got the extreme depths of being morose and being hacked off with the Navy, and you’ve got the extreme highs of having all your mates around you going for a run ashore and going for a few beers and things, and all the camaraderie that comes with it. Absolutely brilliant, but it’s extreme ends of the spectrum, that you watch people go through, and that’s what we all did, all the time.
Simon: You mentioned … you’ve covered the first instance with the depth charges. You mentioned another incident.
Ian: Yeah, very sad. 1977, January, Loch Long. I was on the Orpheus, we were doing four-man chamber trials, which is exit re-entry. HMS Orpheus was the first boat fitted with a 4-man chamber which allowed us to be able to remain dived while we could have Special Forces, SAS, SBS, enter into that chamber, we could flood it up, equalize it and they can swim out through another hatch which allowed them to be able to hit the surface and go ashore without us having to surface the submarine to let them off. We were doing trials in Loch Long, and a submarine, when it’s dived, has an equal trim with the salinity of the water around it. So, in sea water, the submarine will actually have a certain buoyancy that will hold it in position. In Loch Long, there’s an awful lot of rivers that run into Loch Long, and those rivers are fresh water. We ran into one of those fresh water layers while we had 4 men inside the chamber. I was on the Chamber Team, and I had an indication that the upper lid of the Chamber was open, which meant that the 4 guys were about to exit. Just at that moment in time, we hit this fresh water layer and literally the submarine dropped like a stone. We went from 60 feet to 120-130 feet …
Simon: Because of the weight of the submarine, no salt in the water.
Ian: Because of the weight of the submarine, no salt in the water so that made the submarine very, very heavy, and it just literally dropped like a stone and we went from 60 foot to 120 foot in the space of 10 seconds. At 90 feet, the Engineer in charge of the routine, he would normally contact the Control Room, call the Chamber Emergency and the submarine would surface. By the time he’d actually got hold of the microphone, called up the Control Room, called the Chamber Emergency, the submarine surfaced. By that time, we’d already hit 120 feet. We came up to the … did an Emergency Surface, came up onto the roof, so we were sat on the surface. Two of the Marines had managed to escape. The other two Marines, we didn’t know where they were. We’ve got a Safety Number, who immediately exited the submarine, went down to the Chamber itself and jumped into the Chamber to check if anybody was in there and it was clear there was nobody around. Two of the Royal Marines had already been picked up by the Safety Boat, but those two others that weren’t around, we didn’t know where they were. We then spent the next 12, 16 hours or so, just literally skirting around the Loch Long itself and searching along with various other boats that were part of the exercise as well. More boats arrived from Faslane. They helped join in with the search. That went well into the evening where we were using searchlights and various other things to look for … but we never actually saw them again. These were Special Forces guys who were trained to survive in any given situation and when they left us, it was a live exercise, they were fully booted and spurred, they were fully armed. They were Special Boat Squadron, they were Specialists, they were Special Forces and we lost them.
Simon: It clearly still affects you.
Ian: Yeah, it does. After so many hours of searching around, we were sent back to Faslane to await a Board of Enquiry which we knew was going to be coming up, and in the meantime, the following morning, one of the Marines was …
Simon: If it’s easier, we can stop.
Ian: No it’s fine. I’m ok. One of the Marines, he was found by a civilian out walking his dog about 6 o’clock in the morning. He’d washed up on a beach on the side of Loch Long. He’d called it in to the local Police. The Police came out. They called in reinforcements who also contacted the Military and probably the funniest part of this is that when the Military turned up, not only did they take the civilian into custody, but they also took all the Police Officers as well, and they made them all …
Simon: They’d seen things that they shouldn’t have seen.
Ian: They’d seen things that they shouldn’t have seen and they made them all sign the Official Secrets Act which didn’t go down too well obviously. The second Marine, he was found 3 days later at about 80 feet down. He was dragged up by a fishing net. They brought out a fishing net and they were going round dragging everything because he was found, because of his buoyancy, he was found at neutral buoyancy, where he wouldn’t go up and he wouldn’t go down. He was just stuck in a layer, and they literally just fished him out just using a fishing net. But we’d been working with these guys at least a good 6 months. We got on really well with all of them. And that sort of thing is when you do lose people on … especially for an Exercise. You can understand it in a War scenario, where people are … they’ve got a job to do, they know the risks etc etc. To lose a couple of guys on Exercise seems what a waste, what a waste. It really does, and especially the fact that one of them we knew … ‘cos we got to know them and we got to understand about their families and things, we knew that one of them, his wife had just given birth to twin daughters about 3 months previously. So all of that … that laid heavily on the mind and even now today, just talking about it, it invokes some real emotional memories about all of this sort of thing. Because one thing that you don’t expect, is you don’t expect people to die. You know there’s always a chance that’s it’s going to happen. There’s always a risk, because that’s what we do. That’s the point of being in the Military. You go out to do these things not with the expectation that you’re going to die, but wholly understanding that there is an expectation that if push came to shove, you will end up in a situation where you could possibly get yourself killed in one way, shape, form, or another. But it was a very sad time for everybody that one but …
172 minutes 3 seconds
Simon: How is that coped with onboard then? Even so many years later it …
Ian: For months and months afterwards, everybody was … first of all we wouldn’t talk about it for the simple reason that nobody wants to show any sign of weakness or anything like this. It was more a case of nobody wanted to remind ourselves of what happened because we’ve still got lots and lots of other of these exercises to do, with various other Special Forces from around the world, and one of the things that we don’t want to do, we don’t want to put a hex on anything by talking about it and bringing it up. I mean at the time we were working with all sorts of Special Forces. We were working with the Navy Seals, even the GSG9, which is the German Paramilitary Police. They wanted to have a go as well. We had the Australian SAS and SBS, we had the Norwegian SAS, we had the South African SAS, so all these people were all coming onboard because they all wanted to try this new idea of exit, re-entry and we spent a good 2-3 years, just constantly doing this type of training all the time, and up until that point, every single one of those runs had gone without a hiccup. It was literally … it was just a …
Simon: You just had to carry on doing that pretty much straightaway afterwards did you?
Ian: Yeah, we went straight back out, we went straight back round to Loch Long.
Simon: No cancelling or things that might be around these days?
Ian: No, we had the Inquiry in Faslane which was held almost immediately, where everybody made a statement and then we were alongside the wall for 2 or 3 days, they recovered the second Marine, and then the day after that we went back round to Loch Long with another team of SBS and carried on what we were doing. Carried on where we left off. It’s just that the areas where we actually were, they shifted our area into an area where we weren’t going to be subjected to outflow from rivers, so they moved us further along the Loch, so that we wouldn’t … basically wouldn’t happen again. So, we stayed in the sea Loch part as opposed to the brackish where you’ve got a lot of fresh water coming down into the Loch itself. So, we just carried on like that and carried on with the rest of the Exercise because we had other people who were relying on us who still needed training. We carried on with the rest of it and completed the Mission, came back, sent out on another one somewhere else. Do something else.
175 minutes
Simon: Goodness. Do you think it’s done differently these days?
Ian: Very much so. I believe that these days the risk element … they would literally do a Health and Safety Risk element to all of this. They’d do an Assessment and see exactly what they’re getting in to and things, and I don’t believe that they would actually take any form of risk the way that we used to at all. It would literally be … everything would have been forethought out. Everything would have been computer generated, tried out for various things. With a computer you can try all these things and various other scenarios and you can look at your worst-case scenario and what you can actually do about it, so safety wise, these days it’s probably second to none. However, it doesn’t take away from the fact that at the end of the day, they’re humans, and humans are liable for anything that could go wrong, and if it is going to go wrong, within the Military it will go wrong very, very quickly and it can be catastrophic, and it’s one of those things that we all live with on a day-to-day basis.
Simon: Ok, so you’ve been incredibly generous with your time today. It’s nearly a quarter to one, blimey! Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you think that we should cover?
Ian: There’s probably lots. What I have done is that many, many moons ago, my boys turned round to me and said, “Dad, what is it that you actually did in the Navy?” and I thought well, I’m often saying to people that everybody’s got a good story in them, so I started writing it, and I’ve written my autobiography of my 20 years in the Navy, and it runs to about 400 pages, it’s got dozens of photographs in it and various other bits and pieces. And every time I look at it, and I start proof-reading, I always think of something else that need to be added in. It’s ridiculous, but at least it’s given them an insight into what it was that I actually did. And things like this that I’ve bee talking about, about the depth charging and the loss of the Marines in Loch Long and various other things plus a myriad of other stories is all inside that. Photographs wise, you did mention that you wanted some photographs. I can sort out a load of photographs and mail them over to you. Then you just sort out and use whatever you like for whatever you want. One of the nice things about that is that |I knew that the demise of the ‘O’ Boats, so it’s not just photographs of guys on a run ashore and doing various bits and pieces and all smiling for the camera and things. It’s actual action shots from when they were loading a torpedo, so I’d go into the fore ends and I’d actually photograph the guys putting a torpedo into the tubes and this sort of business. The middle of a Fire Exercise, where you’ve got guys in breathing apparatus running round everywhere and this sort of stuff. Unfortunately, they’re all stills, I’ve got no video, which is a bit of a shame. I can send you over a package of photographs and you can choose whatever you want. Just ditch the rest.
Simon: That would be great. Fantastic. Ok. Well, like I say, thank you very much, one for your time but also your hospitality here as well.
Ian: Pleasure.
Simon: Much appreciated.
Ian No problem at all. Thank you.
Interview ends
178 minutes 47 seconds
Transcribed May 2022
