Duration: 2 hours 48 minutes
Simon: My name is Simon Perry. I’m here for the Submariner Story Oral History Project and we’re in Gosport today, and today is the 23rd of March 2022 and I’m with …
Midge: Alexander Ure, more commonly known as Midge.
Simon: And Midge, can you tell me your place and date of birth?
Midge: Place of birth was Glasgow in Scotland and date of birth was 1974.
Simon: What was the name of your mum and dad?
Midge: My dad, Robert Ferguson Ure, my mum Jeanette McKeen Ure.
Simon: And what were … do you remember their dates of birth?
Midge: I should do (laughs). My father 29th of August 1948, and my mother 30th of March 1949.
Simon: And what did they do?
Midge: My dad, at the time of my birth was working in a Pub, and taxi driving, and he also has a trade, he was an Electrician. My mother, she was a Nurse.
Simon: Right. And what was life growing up like? Was that …
Midge: In the initial, we grew up in Glasgow. It was probably normal for the time. My mother and father who were out working a lot. Mother sort of part-time initially whilst looking after me the rest of the time. My dad would take on additional roles within the Pub and Taxi driving at night to earn money. I was an only child for two and a half, three years before my two kid brothers were born at which point we were probably living in an average sort of semi-detached house in Glasgow. I do remember at one point moving to a three bedroomed detached house and that was as we had sort of made it at the time, so we must have been doing ok. They must have been, with the various jobs they were doing, we were doing ok.
Simon: And what about school years? How were they?
Midge: So school years, there’s a slightly strange one for me in the start of my school years. I started school at age four and a half in Scotland. Of age four in Glasgow and had been at school for about five or six months before my mother and father decided to up sticks and move from the west coast of Scotland to the east coast, and upon arriving in Fife, to be told that I wasn’t old enough to join the education system in Fife. My mother and father fought tooth and nail to get me into school, otherwise it would set me back having already been at school in Glasgow, so I had to go through a whole series of educational tests, interviews, at the age of four and a half I would have been, but my mother and father fought like mad to get me in and ultimately I got in but what it did do, it meant that I was easily the youngest person in my year. There was people in the year below me actually older, so I wouldn’t say it disadvantaged me but it certainly put me as the youngest person in my year at all times. I do remember that people in the year below me at school, who were older than me, so it was almost … I wouldn’t say I had to fight the system from the very first, but I definitely had challenges through my early years. Being from Glasgow, talking as a ‘west coaster’, living in an east coast environment where they didn’t accept ‘incomers’ they used to call them. They probably still call them that. And I think even to this day, my brothers still live up there so we all moved through. My brothers still live there now, so 40 odd years later, than they’re probably only just being accepted. So, the very early school memories were … but I was quite good at school, so I passed all the tests and got in and I was performing reasonably well.
Simon: And what about … so the same throughout the rest of the school time?
Midge: Yes, school time I performed reasonably well through, Primary School and then went on to Secondary education and yeah, I did ok. I had my eyes set on joining the Military or certainly the Navy at some point so I sort of steered that towards my academic and the qualifications I was going to get. I went for things like Craft and Design, Technical Drawing. I got rid of French because I wasn’t joining the French Navy. I did a bit of English, Maths and some of the Sciences, Physics and Chemistry. To be fair I passed I think I had about eight or nine ‘O’ Levels or equivalents, so we had three of four ‘O’ Levels and they brought the Standard Grades in at the time, so I managed to get about eight or nine of them at pass or above. I wasn’t particularly an ‘A’ star student, but I managed to pass everything, and I would openly admit now, with very little in the way of studying. I can’t say that too loud ‘cos my kids are up the stairs (laughs), but yeah, I could have pushed myself further, but I reached the point at school where I had achieved what I needed to pursue my career, so I was fairly … I did what I did and I did what I needed to do at school.
5 minutes 25 seconds
Simon: And when did you set your mind on the Navy then?
Midge: It probably wasn’t me that set my mind on it. When we moved to Fife, my dad scrambles about a bit for a job, made himself available for Electrician, Taxi driving but it wasn’t really the environment, so he ultimately became a Deep-Sea Fisherman, so touring the local villages looking for jobs, the only real offer at the time was Deep Sea Fishing, so he signed up to that and he spent many years … he spent a good 10, 12 years being a Deep-Sea Fisherman. Firstly, fishing out from Fife, the coastal villages in Fife, and then transferring up to Aberdeen for the Deep-Sea Trawlers and I had a fascination with the sea the minute I moved to Fife. Down the beach, crabbing, swimming, canoeing, whatever. I was down the beach every day so I was sort of drawn towards the sea. My dad bought me a boat, a little lobster pot boat shall we call it? It was an 18-foot clinker-built boat that had many issues with but I was probably one of two children in the village that had a boat, so we sort of teamed up. We would go out, we would catch lobsters, crabs and sell them and do a bit of fishing, so that sort of ingrained me into getting up every morning before school, going out. It wasn’t the safest thing in the world to do. I now realise I had no lifejacket, no flares, no oars, in case my engine packed in, but every morning I would get up at 4 o’clock, go out, do my lobster pots, come back in, get my breakfast, then go to school. I wanted to be at sea, I wanted to do that, and it was ingrained from about four or five all the way through. I wanted, I think quite naturally as a young boy, I wanted to follow my dad to the Deep-Sea Fishing, which he was against ‘cos he knew how hard it was. Ultimately I think I knew how hard it was. We’d gone from living in probably a reasonably affluent area in Glasgow, to a fishing village. We did have a large house but your income was based on what you could pull out of the sea, and that wasn’t always, certainly in the winter months, that wasn’t always good. It didn’t deter me, I still wanted to be a Deep-Sea Fisherman, I still wanted to do what my dad did, but he did his best to deter me and he did. He wouldn’t let me go with him on trips. A lot of my friends would go out with their fathers on the boats for days and weeks at a time during the summer holidays to get a flavour for it. He wouldn’t allow me to do it. He said, “If you’re going to go to sea, you really need to do it properly” and what he meant by that was, you join either the Navy, you do it properly or the cruise ships or something like that. So, it boiled down to two options really. The Royal Navy, which I knew how to get in to. Remember, we’re talking of the days pre-internet, so I had to go to my sort of guidance teacher and they offered me options on how to join the Navy and it was a local Recruitment Area, or the Royal Fleet Auxiliary effectively or the Marine Navy, and I didn’t really have anyone guiding me towards that so I think the Royal Navy became the option, so I enquired, I found out what I needed to get in and I reached those academic qualifications no problem so it was mainly my dad. He deterred me in every single way he could from trying to get me not to become a Deep-Sea Fisherman. I’m eternally grateful for him for doing that.
Simon: The Deep-Sea stuff, it’s a hard life, it’s a really …
Midge: It’s hard. He was a victim of accidents at least two or three times and he actually … it was an 80-foot sea net Trawler he was on, and they would do Watch Routines through the night, so there would be one person awake, everybody else would get a couple of sleeps whilst the nets were down and one of his stories, the one that he did tell us , was that he had given up one night when he did his set of rounds to wake up the person who was relieving him. He got caught in something, he fell over the side of the Trawler, and the Trawler was seen leaving him. He could see it going off in the distance, and for some reason, it had been stormy weather, and part of the net just happened to bobble up in front of him as the boat was going away and he managed to cling onto it. This was in the North Sea, 3 o’clock in the morning. He waved goodbye, he thought that was it. Fortunately, the person who he had shaken, got up, realised my dad wasn’t there, and initiated a search. So, that was just one of his stories, and he said, “You’ll never do that.” So, joining the Navy where there was a structure, there was reasonable safety other than going to war. He made sure I did it properly.
10 minutes 29 seconds
Simon: So, what age was that, that you joined the Navy then?
Midge: I joined the Navy straight from school. I did my ‘O’ Levels, I then entered into my fifth and six years at school so I’ll be 16 ½. I think I did the interview when I was just turned 16, when I was old enough to do the interview, got accepted but they wouldn’t allow me to join, so what I did, I went up with most people. It turned out it was a boy in the same street as me and unbeknown to each other that we were both going for the same interview on the same day, we met each other up there.
Simon: Where was the interview?
Midge: It was in Dundee, so 20 odd miles away, 25 miles away, and back then it was busses, trains and planes and automobiles to get places. So, we got there and to turn up in a Recruitment Office to find a friend of mine and someone who lives in the same street as me, back then it just seemed a bit weird. So, we all did the tests and two of us got invited back for the afternoon, which was a sign that had we managed to successfully pass the first part of the test, we would be invited back. So, we got invited back and then we got offered different career paths. Fortunately for me, I got offered a Marine Engineering on an Apprenticeship, which is exactly what I wanted to go for. That’s what I set myself up to go in as an Engineer. I don’t really know why, I didn’t think of myself as particularly engineering minded but I think now in hindsight, I probably was. So, I carried out the test, I got selected but the Apprenticeship had only taken three intakes per year, so it then meant that I had to wait for not the next one but the next one. It took me right through to September of that year, making me almost 17 by the time I joined. I was 16 ¾ but it also gave me seven or eight months in the knowledge I was joining the Navy, I had it in the bag and I could enjoy myself. My education took a bit of a dent and did sit my exams. I didn’t do particularly well on my Highers. I could have done a lot better, but I had enough to get in and do what I needed to do, so that was it and I definitely enjoyed that summer. Beach parties, ‘cos it was a coastal village with lots of beaches and night life going on and it was good.
Simon: So it was a bit of a release before joining the Navy.
Midge: It was yeah. I mean I had a girlfriend at the time, a local girlfriend I had been with for a few years and a lot of good friends and this was almost my … there was quite a few of us at that point all deciding to go off and do different things, some joining the Army, some the Navy, some other industries.
Simon: I guess it’s goodbyes as well.
Midge: It almost was yeah, because the fishing industry had taken a massive downturn probably round about then anyway with the fishing quota capped and all sorts of stuff, and the fishing industry which my dad was no longer part of at that time, he’d moved out of that, just through struggling to get work and stuff like that. He’d gone back to his trade of Electrician, so it was a real struggle to get work up there. There was a lot of unemployed fishermen. I did have a couple of friends however, who were earning big, big money at the Deep-Sea Fishing and I’m talking … he was 16 and he was earning back then about £500 a week. When I joined the Navy, and I got my first pay packet in the October of that year, I earned £256 for the month, and that was me living away from home and having to pay for food and accommodation, all sorts of stuff. So, it wasn’t for the money that I joined Military initially, put it that way.
Simon: And that was Surface Fleet was it?
Midge: So, I joined as a new recruit at HMS Raleigh as you all do. The intention was for me to join the Navy as an Apprentice, and you didn’t get the selection option to go submarines as an Artificer Apprentice until probably half way through your Apprenticeship. I take it the idea was that there was no submarine specific training early on in the Apprenticeship …
Simon: They’ve got to get you up to a level of engineering skill, general engineering.
Midge: So, it was a three and a half year Engineering Apprenticeship that ticked all the boxes for the academic side of stuff, and the City and Guilds, so I managed to do all that. The submarine element as opposed to the … so if you imagine the Submarine Fleet being nuclear and steam, and the General Service being gas turbines, that was the only real difference, so they interviewed you in a process at a point in time in your career. It wasn’t only an interview. Occasionally it was … “There’s 20 of you joined this Course, we need three Submariners. Who wants to go? If there’s 20 of you join this Course and we need 23 Submariners, you’re all going.” So, sometimes it was an option, sometimes it wasn’t. I almost that through my Naval career, I fell in to the default bracket that I wanted to, so I got my Artificer and became a Marine Engineer, which thankfully was the biggest pot of people pooled in there, and then when it came to the submarines, I thought yeah, definitely want that because what the Submarine Service would have given me the option of at the time was moving to Scotland and basing myself in Scotland. Alright, it was on the west coast, but it was still far closer to home than either Plymouth or Portsmouth. So, I fell in to that. I didn’t even get interviewed, I got selected, I got asked if I wanted to do it, put my hand up and off we went. I did have a few other friends who probably peer pressure put their hands up as well and said they wanted to do it and I remember one young lad, same age as me, he volunteered to do it ‘cos he was in our group. We played football, we went out drinking, we enjoyed ourselves together. He put his hand up and said, “Yes, if you are all going, I’m coming with you.” He then went home and told his mum and dad that he was going to submarines, and his dad was actually a Coxswain, or a Master of Arms in the Navy, in the Royal Naval Police, and he put his foot down and he said, “You are definitely not going submarines, you will definitely go back to work and tell them you’re not going” and I think before this young lad came back he was off the Submarine Course ‘cos I think his dad had some influence there. That should have told me something (laughs). That someone who had served in the Navy didn’t want their own son to do it. I think it was geographical.
16 minutes 55 seconds
Simon: I was going to say, did you ever learn why?
Midge: I don’t know. I think the reason this young lad’s dad gave us because he wanted to serve with his son prior to leaving, so the two of them wanted to serve in the same ship. That was the reason given. I think it was just a dark murky world, underhand world that he didn’t want his son, and obviously he would have ended up in Scotland. But that young lad actually, he didn’t do that long in the Navy. He left, and he is now … I won’t give his name or anything like that, but he is now one of the Chief Police Officers in a northern area in England and I see him on telly quite a lot when there’s major investigations going on, so he’s done alright. He’s almost followed his dad as a Policeman but he’s done it through being an actual Policeman, not just a Naval Policemen, and he’s done very well for himself. So, him and his wife are actually two of the top Detectives in their area, so yeah, he’s done really well.
Simon: So, when you got the option of do you want to be in a submarine, what was it that made you put your hand up and say …?
Midge: The idea that it was in Scotland, so I always sort of knew that …
Simon: It wasn’t the attraction of the Service, it was the geographic thing?
Midge: Initially it was geographical, and secondly the money was better because you had submarine pay on top of everything else. And as a Nuclear Engineer, or a Nuclear Marine Engineer, there’s additional benefits to that. Yeah, there was a bit of money, there was a bit of being back in Scotland. It all turned back on its head when actually I’ve spent most of my career down here now, so you know I spent a long time up there, but ultimately I’ve spent a lot of time down here as well. So yeah, geographically, and probably the lure of the money.
Simon: So, what happened then? So, you then shifted up …
Midge: So, then what we did, on the Apprenticeship, we almost … you go to two areas. You go Submarines or General Service, and at the end of your Apprenticeship, you almost pass out of that phase and then you’re selected or you go on an additional Course which was called the Systems Course, and that’s when you start your Nuclear Training. So, you go into Rutherford Building, where I now work, and you start on a process of learning the fundamental systems for the reactor and the propulsion and everything to do with submarines and I started that probably in the middle of ’94. So, I joined the Navy in 1990. The middle of 1994, I embarked on that nuclear phase and I passed that, I managed to … remember I was quite young. I was still only 19, 20 coming through to the end of that, and always been at school all the way through. I joined the College, I’d joined the Navy but it was effectively a College for me, HMS Sultan, and I did three and a half years there almost just continuing to learn. So, I was able to do that quite easily. There was a few of the older ones struggled a little bit having been out in industry and then come back in and trying to … so yeah, I got through that no problem. I got my Nuclear Ticket effectively, and then went out into the Submarine Fleet from there.
Simon: So, that’s you understanding how the reactor works and then how that drives the submarine forwards?
20 minutes 2 seconds
Midge: Yes, so that’s from the engineering perspective, and that was the first encounter I had with submarine learning effectively. When I left there, the next part of it was … so what used to be a lot of Submariners would recognise the term of Part 3. So, to be a Submariner, it’s widely recognised that you need to be … we always claimed that we were specially selected for the Service, educationally, because what you needed to know to be a Submariner was far in excess of anything you needed to be known to be a Surface Fleet Sailor, and the reason behind that is every single person in a submarine certainly was, to a lesser extent but certainly still is, required to be able to operate and understand all of the systems onboard the submarine, for the reason that if you’re the only one left that can do anything about it, you need to be able to make those isolations, or you need to be able to interrogate something and pass that information on, so understanding all those. So, the engineering was my day job, or my career, but being a Submariner everybody onboard that submarine or any submarine would have to have passed something called a Part 3 or what we now refer to as SMQs, Submarine Qualification. And what that was for me was a 10-week process of back shifts in Faslane. So, this was my first venture into Faslane, which it doesn’t get called ‘Faslamabad’ for nothing. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s horrible, and my first introduction was … I think I was up there in the October of ’94. It was dark, it was cold, it was rainy, it’s quite an unforgiving outlook. Big buildings, it’s a bit like prehistoric Russia. It certainly wasn’t a nice place for a … I must have been about 19, 20 then. Maybe early 20-year-old and going there, not knowing a lot of people, embarking on a new Course. So, this Submarine Qualification is basically you learning the submarine from almost the keel upwards, so you learn about the shape of the submarine, why does it look like that? How does it control itself? What are the components that allow it to do that? The openings on the outside of a submarine. What compartments are inside it? Who works in a submarine? So, you basically learn everything from scratch, all the way through.
Simon: This is in a classroom or this is onboard?
Midge: The new way of doing it when I joined then was this Submarine Qualification Course. It was 10 weeks of almost … when I say a back shift, we’d go in at 4 o’clock, and we’d work through ‘til maybe about 11 o’clock at night, so during those six or seven hours, we would do a couple of hours in the classroom, we’d break for something to eat, and then we’d spend three of four hours in a submarine that was parked alongside the wall in Faslane. So, it was mixed. It was a blended learning solution.
Simon: So, you’re doing stuff in the classroom that you’d then go and practice?
Midge: You’d go down into the submarine and actually look at. Ok, so you’d then go down and right, this is the bit of kit we were talking about, this is how we operate it, this is the switch, and this is the spanner to use on that. So, whatever it was, whatever system you were … so you had to do an element of … to get through the entire suite of systems onboard a submarine, it would take those 10 weeks. So, you would build up knowledge all the way through and then …
Simon: This was on nuclear?
Midge: This has always happened on submarines, but I happened to come in at a time when the SMQ was brought in as a way of doing it. What you used to get given, you used to join a submarine, get given a big book with all those systems in it, go and find them, and that was your Part 3. So, your Part 3 …
Simon: So you had it easy is that what you’re saying? (laughs).
Midge: We were the beginning of the new culture where we look after people a bit more. Back in the day, you got given your Part 3 task book, and you went off and you did it. You weren’t allowed to eat in the Mess, you weren’t allowed to enter the Mess, you weren’t allowed to involve yourself in any Ship’s Company events or do’s or anything onboard. You were a Trainee up to the point where you were signed off. And that signing off is ultimately, whether it was SMQ or Part 3, you get a series of tick lists you have to tick and assure people that you know the system, that you can trace it. So, on submarines, you generally have a chat about something, a system and how it works, you show someone how it works and then you bring all the systems together and you do what was called a Part 3 Board, or an SMQ Board. You will sit down in front of a delegated Panel of experience, so it might be an Officer, a Sailor and an Engineer, and you sit there and you have to satisfy them, that you are a Navy Submariner and that they can trust you to go off and do stuff on your own. And at that point, if they say you’ve met the qualification, you the get given the famous Submariner Dolphin shoulder … you know the Dolphins that we wear, I don’t know if you’ve seen them, they’re little gold dolphins we wear on our back. So, you get presented then on successful completion of either your Part 3 or the new version SMQ.
25 minutes 4 seconds
Simon: And what’s the testing process like? How did you find it?
Midge: Again I’d gone from academia all the way through and it wasn’t particularly challenging but remembering that’s every Submariner that joins and every potential Submariner that joins that submarine, so that’s a Chef, or a Steward who might not be as academically able. It’s the Engineers, it’s the Sailors, it’s everybody that joins that submarine at no matter what academic level you join, have to complete the same Course, so I would say it’s sort of middle bar. I was quite able academically, that’s saying I was super clever but I was able to do that sort of stuff, so I tended … I had a good friend, Frank, who was a Steward, who’d been out in industry for a bit doing some Cheffing work, came into the Navy, didn’t have a good background behind him, and he really struggled, so I tended to help Frank. It wasn’t a challenge to me to pass the SMQ. My challenge was to get him through it, so he got through, we served on a submarine together so yeah, it was good. Although it was challenging, because remember a lot of what you learn on a submarine is engineering and if you’re not an Engineer, I can imagine … if you’re going on there to be a Chef, and then to be suddenly told that you need to know how the hydraulics systems work, why we turn the lights off at night, or why we do onto a certain river routine or why we man these Stations and how a nuclear reactor works, I’d imagine that might be quite challenging, for a Steward or a Chef or a Sailor who has … they’re only interested in tying ropes and navigation and things like that. So, I managed, got through and the culmination of all that work is the presentation of the Dolphins. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you, the Dolphins are served to you in a little shot glass …
Simon: I hadn’t heard that, no.
Midge: … in a glass of rum, so they carry rum on board, they carry the Dolphins on board, and then the Captain of the vessel will call you all in, you’ll stand and then you’ll …
Simon: An official ceremony.
Midge: An official ceremony. He’ll welcome you to the Fleet, in whatever way he does that, and then he presents you … whoever it is the Steward will come up with a big silver platter, and on there is the requisite number of rums, and in those glasses will be your Dolphins. What they also have in attendance is one of the Medics, because the idea is that you will slam the glass, you will sink the rum in one, and you have to try and catch the Dolphins in your teeth. Most people, and I say most people, catch the Dolphins in their teeth, or sip it, catch it and end it. Some people literally throw it back, the Dolphins go down their throat and … you know they either swallow the Dolphins or well …
Simon: Nature takes place.
Midge: So, we always have a Medic on hand for that …
Simon: And with yours, did people caught in in their teeth ok?
Midge: Yeah, absolutely, but that first shot of rum, because it’s a real Navy strength rum, it’s quite a strong rum, and it’s not just a measure of rum, it’s the bottom of a glass of rum so there’s probably three or four measures in there. I don’t know what age I was, a 20-year-old, that’s quite a shock. It’s a lot of rum, you’re trying to concentrate on getting it and it’s an official presentation. You feel, you’re under pressure to get it right and not mess it up …
Simon: It is very formal as well I guess.
Midge: Yeah, it’s as formal as it can be on a submarine, but it is yes, you definitely turn up in whatever rig you have … well, we’ll come to rigs maybe on submarines but you don’t take an awful lot of kit to sea with you as a Submariner, so you turn up in whatever you’ve got. You’ll iron your shirt, and you’ll present yourself well and you’re stood in front of the Captain. Now at that stage in your career, the Captain is God. He is up there on his throne, and to mess up in front of the Captain probably wouldn’t be the best thing to do.
Simon: So you’re then accepted as a …
Midge: Yeah, you’ve done it. You’ve ticked all the boxes, you are now a Submariner, you are now allowed to enter the Mess, you are now allowed to share in any … you would obviously be fed and watered before but you can now involve yourself in the Games Nights, or Mess Nights or runs ashore or whatever it was … and even something they still say to this day, as a Trainee, if you’re not seen to be doing something … what they say is, “If you’ve got time for a movie, you’ve got time for a system” which really means you have no time as a Trainee to yourself. And they still say that now, “What, time for a movie? Time for a system.” So, the implication is get off that X-Box or get off that running machine, get … ‘cos what they’re waiting for is for you to qualify with those Dolphins ‘cos ultimately we have this thing in the Service in General but specifically submarines, you’re almost waiting on the people coming through behind you to relieve you, so for me to move on, I need to … we call it ‘growing your own relief’ so you mentor someone to come through and take over.
30 minutes 12 seconds
Simon: Do you sort of spot talent or you’re just assigned somebody?
Midge: Quite often when people join submarines, they will be given, in old parlance, it used to be called a ‘Sea Dad’. I don’t think you’d be allowed to call it that anymore, but that Sea Dad was someone who was a mentor. You would be assigned three or four of the new Trainees and you would be their point of contact, you would be the ‘old and bold’ Engineer or Sailor or Chief or whatever it was, that would then tell these guys how to manage yourselves. Look after them, be the first point of contact for any problems they had, but you’d be fully involved in their training as well. So yeah, you get people that come through that you are assigned to be their mentor effectively, or their Sea Dad, and that was just to initiate them into the ways of the boat and the Department and all sorts of stuff, but you’re definitely waiting on them getting that SMQ, their Dolphins, so that they can become … one it’s a trigger for your submarine money to start, which is a big incentive, so you go onto that elevated rate of pay from the minute you get told you’re now a Submariner, not the actual ceremony but the minute you pass that Board. That goes down as your time in Log and you’re now on the higher rate of pay, so it’s a massive thing for a young …
Simon: Is it considerably more, the submarine pay?
Midge: It can be yeah, and it gets more and more as you go up through, but we’re a talking £1,000 a year. It’s a big old jump and it’s all relative to where you are in your career, but yeah, it’s a big old jump. Sometimes quite often for me, the big pay jumps are from AB to Leading Hand and at that sort of time you’re getting that submarine pay as well so it can be a massive jump. I don’t know what it is right now. It’s maybe changed slightly given that the way we come in now but there was a massive incentive to get that submarine pay as soon as you can.
Simon: So, for the people coming in then and the experience you had probably that the Captain is God and then your Sea Dad is …
Midge: Well he’s one down from God. I mean your Sea Dad was everything because …
Simon: Because he’s the God you can talk to …
Midge: If you got a good Sea Dad, I mean not all Sea Dads were great Sea Dads ‘cos not everyone can be a great teacher or mentor, but generally it was the Chief Stoker or the Wrecker. They were given those roles primarily because they were the ones who knew the submarine intimately. Your Chief Stoker or your Outside Wrecker were the people that dealt with all the systems onboard ship, front and aft. Your hydraulics, your HP air, your water systems, domestics, and that was the bulk of your SMQ. That was the bulk of the content in there, so they were highly sought after for, “Chief, can you take me round and show me this? Chief, can you do that?” So, they were always being pestered by people, so I think they went away specifically from maybe a Chief Stoker and your Wrecker because they were so overcome with people asking them to do this and do that, so he would then sort of disperse them out to other people. “Go and find someone else to help you do that.” You’ve got to remember, when you’re on a submarine, you’re there to do a role and you’re on a Watch system, and you have systems or operations to carry out on a daily basis, so when you’re awake, you don’t always have … you don’t have free time. It’s when you’re off Watch, that’s when you get your free time. But that off Watch has to mean that you’re maybe doing stuff that you need to do. You maybe want to watch a movie, you maybe want to get some food, whatever it is you need to do. So, that off Watch, you certainly don’t want to be spent eight hours a day teaching young people how to do it, but inevitably …
Simon: So, that teaching side was in the off time?
Midge: Oh yeah, it generally is. Onboard a submarine we work slightly different. The front end of the submarine, and again I don’t know if you’ve been made aware of this, the front end of the submarine works a two Watch system, for six hours on, six hours off, six hours on, six hours off from the minute they go to sea. The back end of the submarine they work a completely different system.
Simon: The back being the propulsion?
Midge: The Engineering. So, a nuclear submarine as it is now, you’ve got the front end which is your Weapons Engineers, your Sailors, your Chefs, Stewards and the living accommodation for everyone. The middle section is primarily the reactor itself and everything beyond that, behind that to the back end is your Engine Room. It’s not all Engine Room but it’s effectively the Marine Engineering Department. So, that Marine Engineering Department back there, we work a slightly different routine. We work a shift system and a Watch system which is four hours overnight, so three four hour shifts overnight, and then …
Simon: Three four hour, yeah.
Midge: If you were to go onto what we would call the First, you would have your evening meal at half 6, you would go on Watch at 7 o’clock, and you would finish at 11 o’clock. Come off Watch when relieved by the next Watch. So, somebody is getting up at 11, to then come on and work through ‘till 3 in the morning. It’s a 24-hour shift. At no point does a nuclear reactor not get watched over, ever. From the minute it commissions, to the minute it’s laid off, it’s always got someone there, so you work 11 to 3, and then somebody gets up at 3 in the morning to work through ‘till 7 in the morning until breakfast time. You go off and have your breakfast and then somebody comes on 7 ‘till 10, 10 to 1, 1 ‘till 4, 4 to 7 and then you start the night. So, there’s three overnight longer shifts, four 3 hour shifts during the day. Still makes up the 24-hour cycle and it fits in around that the Watches at the front. It just means there’s as a ‘back afties’ which we’re labelled as, they’re ‘fore endies’, we’re ‘back afties’ you probably do two Watches a day, so you might only do 7 hours a day. They do 12 hours a day, so they’re actually on Watch longer than we are. So, the ‘back afties’, if you’re only on Watch seven hours a day, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’ve got a lot of time off. So, if you’re away at sea for 10 weeks, 20 weeks or whatever, you spend a lot of time trying to find things to do, whether it’s watching a movie, listening to music, going on the Gym equipment or whatever, so what …
36 minutes 29 seconds
Simon: What about hobbies? Do you have any hobbies onboard?
Midge: It’s quite difficult to … so the nature of submarines, it’s quite difficult to have hobbies so I’ve always wanted to build models. When I grew up, it was the old … there would be a Magazine where there would be an introduction offer for £1 and you get a little bit and then you had to buy the subsequent Magazines. I always thought, I want to build and I got in to that and I started building stuff and I used to make little boats and I always wanted to do it, but I was never able to do it onboard a nuclear submarine because you’re not allowed to do that sort of thing. You can’t take on your own sort of adhesives or glues or paints or …
Simon: Because of the atmosphere.
Midge: … because of the atmosphere, so that was always out for me, so I sought refuge in sort of box sets, movies, and games in the Mess at night, just sit and talking, socialising. Because back in the day, it’s slightly different now, but you could come off Watch and have a couple of beers. You’re entitled to come off and have a few beers. As a Senior Rating, you’re entitled to three cans per day, so we used to carry cans. You’re entitled to three cans a day. What you weren’t supposed to do was bank … so on a Sunday, you’d say, “Oh I don’t really fancy my beers today, Monday no, Tuesday I’m going to have 12 and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I’m not going to have any, I’m going to have 15 on a …” That wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but that’s not the way. So, the accounting of it was three cans per day. So, you could socialise in the Mess, that was always a free space to … but generally every night there would be a movie going on about 8 o’clock.
Simon: So, that’s everyone sharing the same … watching the same screen.
Midge: Everyone watching the same movie. So, when I first joined them, we didn’t have the media that we’ve got now. What we had was reel to reel, like the old cinema, the box set …
Simon: What literally film?
Midge: Literally on a tape.
Simon: What VHS or literally a film?
Midge: The reels, we used to draw the projector, and Submariners are allowed to smoke, so you had a Mess no bigger than this area, filled with smoke, with the clickety-clack going and the movie sort of projecting through the mist. It wasn’t a great environment. It looked good, but it wasn’t a healthy environment, so slowly but surely, the smoking went away and then the media updated so we now have, you know you’ve got a 65-inch telly with Blu-ray and all sorts of stuff on there now. Hard drives and discs that people bring. You basically download a load of movies, you bring them onboard and it’s not like a formal announcement, it’s just accepted that every night somebody … I think what we generally accept is that maybe the 8 o’clock shift at night, the ‘back-afties’ might put a movie on, or the ‘fore-endies’ or the Wes or the Sailors …
Simon: And people go between the front and the back?
Midge: Yeah. So, you maybe finish your evening meal, you tidy up the Mess, all hands in, you hoover, you clean, you polish, all that sort of stuff and then it’s movie time, so somebody then picks a movie and you get a feeling that withing five or ten minutes whether it was a good choice or not. The unspoken word is that if you put a movie on and it’s not popular, you have to stay to the end of it. You’re not allowed to put a crap movie on and leave, because that’s what you would do. If you had decided, I’m going to bed, you put a real rubbish movie on ‘cos very rarely does a movie get stopped. You watch it right through because the decisions been made, you’re watching that movie and it’s … especially a Saturday night. What you try and do is the Saturday night one’s a bit special and you try and keep the big movies for the Saturday night. So, you have your evening meal, if that’s the Watch system you’re in, you have your evening meal, Saturday evening was always ‘surf and turf’ so it’s your steak and your prawns or whatever it was, steak and salmon, onion rings, gravy. They make an effort on Saturday night, followed up by ‘duff’ or pudding, whatever that might be.
40 minutes 36 seconds
Simon: Why is it called duff?
Midge: I’ve no idea.
Simon: It just is.
Midge: Well, there’s probably a load of acronyms and a load of phrases that I’ll say in the course of my career and you really have to go back and look at something like the ‘Jack Speak’ book to understand. Have you seen the Jack Speak book?
Simon: I’ve heard about it.
Midge: You’ll have to interrogate that to find out where all these names come from, all these various things. So, duff is just something I’ve grown up with. “What are we having for duff?” It just means pudding. So, then you would have your pudding, and then you would clear up and then round about a quarter to eight, ten to eight, the freezer would get opened up and the Magnums would come out. So, every Saturday night, there was ice creams and they’d come round and distribute 30 ice creams per Mess and everybody in there can have one. You put one away. That would cause a lot of fights if it wasn’t the right ice cream. You could throw something like a ‘Twister Popper’ or something or some rubbish and you’d like … A Magnum was the top of the shop. Everybody liked the Magnum.
Simon: So, food is … there’s high importance on food.
Midge: Massively important. So, you set your daily routine by the food and even to this day, my wife gets annoyed. Every single morning, I get up, I say, “What are we having for dinner?” She’ll go, “We haven’t even had breakfast.” I say, “I need to know what I’m having through the day” and I think it’s through the Military. It wasn’t because when I was young I was really poor and didn’t know where my food was coming from, ‘cos we always had food, but it’s a thing that’s ingrained. I need to know … when you’re in a submarine …
Simon: To look forward to it.
Midge: … they print out the menu for the week. Alright, it doesn’t always go exactly how it goes, but they print out the menu and you can see what you’re having on Wednesday lunch and you think well I’m … if I’ve got 17 hours in a day when I don’t need to be up, I’ll sleep for 7 or 8 hours of that, and I’ll be up for 7 or 8 hours and I’ll be on Watch for 7 or 8 hours. The time I’m up, you almost plan it around the menu. So, for instance, if you like fish and chips on a Friday lunchtime, that’s the one I want to be up for. I’m not on Watch, I’m going to get a shave, I’m going to get up because like my fish and chips, and when I come off Watch later on, I don’t necessarily want the say the pizza or the chicken curry, so … and they almost run on a 2-week rolling cycle, so you know what you’re getting. Once you’ve been at sea for 3 or 4 weeks, you know what’s coming up, so things like your Sunday roast. There’s always a Sunday roast, without pudding. You get the pudding at night when it’s pizza night, and the pizza night then becomes …
Simon: Always on Sundays.
Midge: Always. So, Sunday roast followed by pizza. The reason they do that, the pizzas are easier to make and it’s all the meat from the Sunday roast and anything else that was left over. If you got on with the Chefs, they’d make you your own bespoke pizza. They’ll put a bit of lamb or gammon or whatever it is you want on there and they’ll do it for you. Through the week you’ll have Wednesday night is usually curry, Tuesday night is maybe American or Italian night or … when I say Italian, it’s pasta with some meat in it or something, but it’s just that thing and you’re definitely set your days around your food. So, you have your standard breakfast, lunch and evening meal. Something called ’10 o’clockers’ and ‘4 o’clockers’.
Simon: Not heard about that.
Midge: So, on alternate days, 10am and 4pm, the Chef will make something. He might throw a packet of biscuits out, or he might make like a tray bake, caramel shortbread or a brownie or a scone or whatever it is it’s easy to make. Hot cross buns or something, so they’ll make them in the Galley and they’ll throw them out, so on one day it will be 10 o’clock and then the next day it’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So, you get into a cycle then. What if it’s 10 o’clockers today, it’s 4 o’clockers tomorrow. So, every day they do something whether it’s 10 or 4 o’clock, and again it can be Club Biscuits, it could be chocolate Clubs, and if you’ve been at sea for 10 weeks, a chocolate Club Biscuit is a prized asset, and …
Simon: It that the one with the raisins in as well?
Midge: It can be all. It can be the mint, it can be the chocolate, it can be the … we get all sorts, so the Club Biscuits are famous. NAAFI 3’s, I don’t know if you know the NAAFI 3’s. The sort of biscuit you go into a café and you’ll see them in the front. It’s a little packet with three Bourbons, three custard creams, three shortbread biscuits. We’ve got boxes of them onboard and if they manage to keep them locked away long enough, hidden in a Store somewhere that nobody finds them, they come out after weeks onboard and you get the standard pack of NAAFI 3s. They’re ok, they’re tradeable. You can trade with them onboard if you like. The good stuff generally comes out early and then late. The good or bad things, so a submarine crews up for 90 days food ok, so there’s a bit in there that’s alluding to how long you’re away for. You never know you’re going to be away for, but a standard sort of victual for a submarine used to be 90 days, so the Caterer and the Supply Officer would victual up for 90 days so he needed 90 days’ worth of eggs, flour, milk, steak, so you had that 12, 14 weeks or something like that, so you had that … so if you were out for 10 weeks, you had spare capacity. If you go beyond that, and that’s the problem, when you start to go beyond the time or you’re getting … there’s something we call ‘getting bounced’ on a submarine. You’re out for a prescribed period of time, some other submarine has come out to relieve you, you come off Station, make your way back. If a signal comes in and says actually the submarine that’s coming out to relieve you is having issues, it’s got a defect, it’s got personnel problems or there’s a world event that’s caused something to change, that almost instantly tells you that you’re not getting relieved on time and almost from that moment, it’s no longer two sausages and two bits of bacon, it’s a sausage or a bit of bacon for breakfast.
46 minutes 38 seconds
Simon: ‘Cos it’s unknown.
Midge: Well you don’t know. Straight away you don’t know so the rations kick in pretty quick.
Simon: So is that sort of a double psychological thing of being out longer than we want and we’re not getting the great food we had?
Midge: Oh it’s horrible. So, if you go away expecting, particularly if it’s Christmas time or birthday time or holiday time or whatever you’ve had booked, you’ve got no control. I mean a submarine is out there, and you have no control whatsoever of when that submarine’s coming back. It’s nice when you come back on time, sometimes come home a day early, sometimes you come home a day late. You can handle that. If you get told you’re going to be 4 weeks late, and there’s a family birthday, Christmas and New Year, that can have a massive psychological effect on people.
Simon: So, what can they do to balance that then? How does the crew pick itself up after that?
Midge: You have to do it individually and you have to do it collectively. I’ve always felt myself to be a reasonably strong person in terms of psychologically in working out things. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. If you’re going to be late, you’re going to be late. My biggest concern was always the family back home, have they been told? Do they know? ‘Cos my wife and family would accept that dad’s out there doing something and he’s not getting home on time. It’s not because he’s in danger, he’s just not getting home. Is everybody safe? Some people take it really bad and you really have to … because they were expecting to be doing something or does my wife know? Obviously you try and get information off and back on the ship or the boat to iron out those problems, but …
Simon: You could send stuff out? ‘Cos some of the subs I’ve spoken to …
Midge: Well, you can on occasions, depending on what … there’s two types of different submarine in terms of operations. You’ve got your Vanguard Class, the big ballistic nuclear submarines, I’ve served on them, the bombers. So, my early days were spent on bombers, and the communication you would have on there, and again I don’t know if you’ve been told, it was a 40-word Family Gram. It was a ‘bluey’ they used to call them. 40 words Family Gram and if you imagine sending someone 40 words, I don’t know how many words were in that paragraph there, but it’s probably about 40 words, that’s what you’d receive. We tended to receive them on a Saturday, maybe a Friday night, Saturday. I don’t know if that was just when the wire came in, so our submarine would sit somewhere, it would pick up the information, download it. It would be read by three or four people, they’d then issue you with a little envelope …
Simon: You’d physical get it?
Midge: Yeah, you physically get it. You get the envelope, you then usually retreat somewhere and you read it because it’s your own personal little message, and it was fairly vague a lot of the time. The first couple come through, so maybe the first time you’ve ever been to sea, I don’t know if your mum did it if you were a young boy or girl at sea, your mum would write it and she’s probably write 40 words of nothing and send it and you think oh, there’s nothing in that. It used to have to be like ‘family good, holiday booked’ or whatever it was, or ‘can’t wait to see you’ type of thing. You had to get as much information in there but I’d imagine, it definitely happened that people would have coded words in there, so it went through a series of scrutinization before it came to you. So, it went into the Radio Shack, the Petty Officer in there, the RS, he would see it. The RO, the Radio Operator would see it, and it would probably, I don’t know if it was up to them, to guess whether there was information on there. Certainly, if someone had died and it was on that bit of paper, that wouldn’t be passed to you. You know, that isn’t psychological, that isn’t going to be good. That is a call for the Captain and it was always your worst fear. So, if you were away for, again a standard Patrol back then, 10 weeks. If you were away for 10 weeks, you didn’t want to hear on week 3 that your dog had passed away, or granny or mother was in Hospital. You didn’t want to hear that because that would really screw you up and the nature of the SSBN, the ballistic submarines, the big Vanguard Class, was that they wouldn’t surface for anything. They just don’t break that cover, so you knew you were on there. So, you mentally had to steel yourself for that. So, not knowing was the best thing and it wouldn’t have been the first time that somebody had come home to realise that somebody had passed away and been buried and the grief process was ongoing whilst your returned. But you did know before you hit the wall ‘cos what you heard, on approaching the river, or coming in on the night before, if there was a chance to get you off, there would be a pipe or you would get a message, “You need to go and see the Captain” or “You need to go and see the MEO” so only on one occasion did I have the MEO call me in.
51 minutes 26 seconds
Simon: What does that stand for?
Midge: Marine Engineering Officer, so my Head of Department, but the Captain, who heads the boat, and then you’ve got the Executive underneath him. The Marine Engineering Officer, the Weapons Engineering Officer, the First Lieutenant, which is his second in command, and then you’ve got … so your XO, your WOR and your MEO. So, the three Heads of Department effectively and we would work under the MEO, so it was up to him to come and say. So, he pulled me in, he just said, “Look,” I’ll always remember it, he said, “I just need to have a chat. You’re no going in there; you’re going in there to be told news.”
Simon: You know somethings up.
Midge: All you want to be told is it’s not my immediate family, it’s not my kids, my wife, and I say thankfully, it was aunty who was … you know it wasn’t a massive shock to me that it had happened. Had it been , it would have been like oh … but they told me at the right time. As it was, “Do you want to get off?” I think we were a day away from getting off. They could have got me off that night, so “No, I’m ok. As long as everybody’s ok at home and it’s just that” but it wouldn’t be the first time somebody’s come out of there crying and wanting to come off. “I need to go now.” So, you couldn’t really be told that news any earlier.
Simon: Yeah, because you can’t disrupt the way the ship’s function.
Midge: Exactly. So, we have this Continuous at Sea Deterrent on the Vanguard. It’s been there for, you know, 50 odd years we’ve had that, we’ve celebrated it. At no point has a Vanguard Class submarine broken that, so it would be a shame to do it for one person and I get the grief and everything else and the entitlement you should have if someone dies in your family, but you almost know that going in and being a Submariner. You know you are going to be away from it, and it’s something … you don’t know how you’re going to react to it until it happens. If you come back and you find out that your entire family have been killed in a car crash, you’re not going to want to go back to sea again. You know, psychologically that will change you, so there’s elements … you almost know going in being a Submariner that at some time during your career, if you’re unlucky enough it’s going to happen to you. You just need to hope it’s not a big one. Given when things happen, things to me have happened but I’ve been at home, like the birth of my son or the death of my father. All that sort of things happened but I’ve been at home ‘cos you’re not always at sea, so there’s brief periods in your life in a year if you do two or three Patrols, there’s maybe 20 or 30 weeks in that year you’re not available, the rest of the time you are available.
Simon: What happens, I’m just thinking about the practicalities of the Radio Operators. What happens if a message comes through from their family, ‘cos they’re going to be the first to read it aren’t they? Or maybe they steer it to you never receive your own communication?
Midge: There might be. I would imagine that’s probably a protocol that’s set up onboard. It’s not something I’ve ever considered to be honest with you, because they would, yeah, they would have first access to that detail.
Simon: Yeah, ok. As you say, it’s something you accept, that’s the way that things are and you understand that it’s for the good of the boat.
Midge: It is, absolutely. It’s one of these, you know, these real powerful ‘it’s for the bigger cause’ type thing. That’s what it is, you know why you’re there. I don’t know how it happens now; I don’t really know if it’s still the same ethos. The CASD, the Continuous At Sea Deterrent definitely still a thing. I think generationally we’ve changed a little bit in the psyche of people, but I’m not aware of any problems onboard submarines at the moment that have broken that and caused major problems. I think we generally nowadays have more people that cry off and don’t want to go to sea, not Fleet wide, but there’s certainly some people that you can … because remember we’re not psychologically analysed before you become a Submariner. You volunteered to become a Submariner. You then go through a period of training, you do all the tests, you do all the bells and whistles, you get the Dolphins, you then go to sea, because nowadays, they’ve made it so that you can actually earn your Dolphins without having been on a submarine.
55 minutes 33 seconds
Simon: Oh wow. Is that controversial?
Midge: Very controversial. And then, you’re a Submariner having never been to sea. The minute you step on a submarine, and they shut the hatch, that’s when you find out whether you’re suited to be Submariner, ‘cos then the submarine sinks and then it goes under and it’s that whole …
Simon: How was that first time for you then?
Midge: Well, as an Engineer, you might as well be sat in here, because you’re not aware of it. Your very first time you’re not really aware of it. You’re getting told you’re doing it. As you go through your career, you’re actually responsible for the shutting of the hatch, or the shutting of that valve or doing the planes that take you down, or putting on the revs or whatever, so … and some of them have cameras on them so some of my early submarines we were lucky enough to have cameras fitted, because we were like a test. It was a test and evaluation thing but the missiles on HMS Vigilant, and you can stand in the compartment and actually watch the submarine dive. It had cameras outside so you were watching so it was quite therapeutic to watch it go down.
Simon: A good feeling?
Midge: Yeah, to be fair, I have never had any real issues. I’ve never had a flood. I mean there have been floods on submarines. I’ve never had a major incident in a submarine whether it be a fire or anything that’s really scared me. I do know some people who’ve been on submarines that have hit underwater objects, whether that be something similar or a rock that shouldn’t have been there, and psychologically it’s one thing being a Submariner, being away from your family and having to go in to a mindset that, ok, I’ll suspend all reality for a while and I’ll just go away and do whatever I need to do, but it’s another thing coming to harm under there and having to put in all that training into it. I’ve never really had to do it, and touch wood I’ll never have to, and no Submariner will have to, but it’s always that knowledge you think you’ll be able to respond. I think, and I still think to this day, because of my training through the years and just my mental way, I think I would be able to cope, but I know onboard submarines, I’ve seen people shrink if something happens, because we’re not analysed before we go on there. We’re not evaluated, you’re just put you hand up and say, “I want to be a Submariner.” “Ok, if you can pass these tests, you can do it.” There should almost be some sort of analysis and tick box exercise, or not just a tick box but a scrutiny of who you are, so that psychological evaluation before you go like. Are you suited to be a Submariner? You’re going to be away, what happens if this news came in? How would that affect you? And that doesn’t happen. So, yeah, I’m not convinced that people are …
[Midge takes a break]
So yeah, I’m not convinced we’re any better at doing that. Because of the … you generally don’t get masses amounts of people joining the Navy. Equally, you don’t get a large number of those joining the Navy wanting to be a Submariner, so you’re almost held up as you need to recruit who you can, and that’s psychiatric evaluation. If you removes a percentage of the people applying, because you didn’t think they were psychologically stable enough to do it, you probably wouldn’t get many recruits.
Simon: I guess also it then comes down to the skill of people onboard to deal with that and then for the time that the person’s away.
Midge: I’ve got no doubt that if something happened onboard, there will be people in any walk of life and any .. like in a shop if something happens or in a car crash, people generally step up. You’ll get those that, ‘I think I know what I’m doing, I’ll help out’ and you get those that go ‘Oh I can’t do that’. I mean I’ve been sat in the Mess one day and it was a young Officer. He had joined, he was a Logistical Officer, he actually lived local to here. I’ve never met the guy since but he lived local to here. He was a bit of an extrovert in his own way. He was a bit of a Goth; you know the dark hair and makeup and the big, long matrix style jacket. Obviously in uniform he just looked the same as everybody else, but outside he was a little bit different, and he sat in the Mess one day and he started talking to himself. He started communicating with things that weren’t there. Whether that’s the way it drove him, or whether that’s because he knew that doing that might get him off … he’d obviously chosen the wrong career path I think and he needed a way out, but he didn’t last very long. He was out of there quite quickly at the Captain’s request (laughs). “You’re not fit for submarines, off you go.” I haven’t seen many people that do that. Once you go into submarines, generally you don’t really leave them and I don’t know whether it’s because it’s the camaraderie in them in the people you meet. I wouldn’t specifically say it’s because of the working routines ‘cos if I was to guess about who were the hardest working personnel in the Navy, I would certainly put Submariners up there amongst them because … and when I say I was lucky enough early enough to default almost to the position where I am now, in terms of being an Apprentice, an Engineer, a ‘Back-aftie’, a Marine Engineer on a Nuclear submarines, that’s what I wanted to be, but that came at great expense, because on a nuclear submarine, the first thing that you need to do is to get to sea, is to flash that reactor up.
61 minutes 31 seconds
Simon: What does that mean?
Midge: That means start the reactor. So, produce the heat, pull out the rods. So, if you think about a nuclear reactor onboard a submarine, it’s probably the most dangerous thing you can ever do. So, you’ve got a submarine full of people, stale air, full of high-pressure hydraulics, high pressure air, high voltage electrics and you put it all in a steel can and you submerge it under the water, with all the dangers that are in the water as well. To do that is fairly difficult and probably extreme, and then what did they decide to do? They put a nuclear reactor right in the middle of it and all the support systems. So, it’s probably the most hostile and dangerous environment you could possibly imagine other than maybe a space rocket or something like that. And you’ve got 130 -150 people living in it, so all those people have … you know, their lives depend on … we have a thing where every dive needs to be followed by a surface ‘cos if it doesn’t, there’s something wrong. Ok, so one down, one up. To get to that point, you always need to … it’s important obviously that we do come back up. Sorry, I lost my train of thought there.
Simon We’re talking about having a nuclear reactor onboard.
Midge: So, the nuclear reactor obviously has to be flashed up. We need to get to a point where we pull out the rods, we create the nuclear fission in there to create the heat to produce the steam and then the power to the engines and all that sort of stuff. But prior to doing that, we don’t turn up at 8 o’clock in the morning, jump on the submarine, turn the key and leave at half past 8. If we’re leaving at half past 8 on the Friday, I’m onboard on the Tuesday, so straightaway as an Engineer, you’re almost preparing for the weekend before, because you’re lining all those systems I talked about earlier on, your bilge system, your fresh water system, your chill water, your feed water, your air systems, hydraulic systems, you need to put them into a known standard line-up before we even start to attempt to flash up the reactor. ‘Cos if those systems are not in the right position, how do you know you’re getting the right amount of water, the right electrics? So, we spend about three days going round all those systems, touching every single valve with a check procedure. Say for instance that valve is called B 504. B is the system code, 504 is the number of the valve. B 504 it’s supposed to be open. Somebody will go and physically open that valve if it’s not already and make sure it’s in that position, you line it up, you sign the declaration to say, I’ve done it, it’s in that position, and professionally nobody will go round and change those valves ‘cos you’re working on that system and you’re signing it off. You go through every system that’s onboard the submarine. You then get to a point where the MEO will say, “Right, I’m happy now.” He’ll sign all his checklists. There’s a series of progressive checklists that work their way up the hierarchy. The MEO will then say, “Right, I’m now happy, you can flash up the reactor.” We’ll then sit down and do a whole load of checks within the Manoeuvring Room which is the room where we control the reactor from, and there’s about 4 or 5 of us in there at any one time, “I’m now happy, let’s pull the rods out, let’s create fission, let’s produce power and let’s go.” So, as a ‘back-aftie’, you’re on that submarine for about three days prior to anybody else. So, in the morning of us going to sea, everybody else walks on, turns on the machine, turns on their equipment because we’ve made it all work, and stow their kit and then we go to sea. And then at the other end of it, you hit the wall, you put the gangway on, you tie up the ropes, the sailors disappear. The WEOs have already gone, because they don’t have to do anything, and then the Engineers, most of us will go but 2 Watches at least will stay back until we’ve shut the reactor down, and then carry out a cool-down of the reactor, so you can add 3, possibly 4 days on to a deployment as well as crew training and everything else if you’re a ‘back-aftie’ so you generally pick up the crap end of the stick as we would say.
65 minutes 47 seconds
Simon: So, your itching to get off when you … I mean you know that you’ve got to do these things …
Midge: I’ve always been lucky enough in that when we would come in, it’s not that I wasn’t desperate to get away. I spent a lot of my time in Faslane, where I would almost be offered the first night off because a lot of the English, there was no point in them getting off. They would have been the next morning anyway, but what would happen is, they would do that night, I would go home, see my family, have to come back in and spend the next day shutting down the reactor. Equally, when I was in Plymouth, I would do the first night and the second night and then when there was a break, I got a chance to go home for 2 or 3 days. So, you’re almost having people from all round the country and having two operating bases, one north and one south, you always invariably had someone who would volunteer, “I’m quite happy to do the first night in.” It’s a bit different when you go to Diego Garcia, or Gibraltar, or Singapore or Australia. You don’t particularly want to be on the boat. As soon as the boat hits the wall, you want to be off. You really want to go ashore, get a drink and party up ‘cos you’ve probably just been at sea for three weeks, eight weeks.
Simon: How is that time when you’re onshore then after having been down for …?
Midge: I tactically, as I got a bit older, I always decided to do the first night in, because the first night in …
Simon: Because everyone gets crazy.
Midge: … it is mental.
Simon: Right. It’s just that all of that time you’ve been under being released is it?
Midge: Exactly. So, as a Submariner, what you do is when you travel abroad, there’s two or three distinct things that happen. So, you know where you’re going. For instance, you’re going to Gibraltar or you’re going to Souda Bay, or maybe Fujairah in the Middle East.
Simon: So you know when you set off, you know where you are going.
Midge: Yeah, because the submarine’s booked into different places. Don’t get me wrong, that can change, but your submarine is booked in advance into different Ports, so you almost know on your deployment, that there will be periods of travelling … say our deployment was in the Middle East, and I’ve done a few of them ok? You would leave here, invariable you’d pull into Gibraltar as a stop-over, refuel, get stuff. I don’t mean refuel as in fill up, I mean like food and water and all that sort of stuff and as a courtesy visit in there because it’s a nice place to go. So, you go there and maybe go to Crete, further along the Med. You pull in there and you get some possibly weapons or I couldn’t possibly say, but you might do something there. Then you go through the Suez Canal and you end up out in the Middle East, so you almost know that you’re going to be in certain areas at certain times. Going through the Suez is quite good ‘cos you get to go up on top and have a look out and if you can you make phone calls and all that sort of stuff. You’re anchored off.
Simon: That’s on the sort of upper deck is it? What do you call the top part of it?
Midge: The Casing. So, the pressure hull is the bit that you don’t see. That’s the pressurised thick steel tube underneath, and then outside of that is the casing and the outer shell effectively, and in-between them are your main ballast tanks that we can fill with air or water to make the submarine rise or sink.
Simon: So people have phones onboard that they can then use?
Midge: Yeah, but 99% of the time you can’t use them because you’re under the water. But there are surface transits or you may have … don’t get me wrong, you can only do it in certain areas. If you’re in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there’s not many signals out there so other than maybe the radio that you’ve got with the satellite. They do have satellite phones onboard but you’ve got 150 people trying to either access the casing to do it, and remember you’ve still got the normal Watch Keeping routines, so if you’re 38th on the list to get up top and you’re only up for an hour, you’re just not getting it.
Simon: So, that’s timetables almost, the time on the casing is it?
Midge: It definitely can be. So, the best times on the casing are either going through the Suez, or the hands to bathe or barbecue.
Simon: What was the first thing called? Hands to Bathe?
Midge: Hands to Bathe.
Simon: What does that mean?
Midge: Swimming time. So, the Captain will surface the vessel, as long as the weather looks good and normally in these far-off places it usually is quite good, he will declare ‘hands to bathe’ for an hour, so you can go up on the top and he tries to tie it in with a barbecue. I think that’s become less and less just purely because of Health and Safety.
70 minutes 7 seconds
Simon: You’ve got barbecues on the casing?
Midge: So, what they do, they’ve got old oil drums and they’ve got some sort of holder that will hold a barbecue in place, put a load of coals in there. Chefs will come up, cook a load of burgers, sausages and you eat all of them on top. It’s all hands in. It’s everybody mucking in, getting that done, and then we’ll have a ‘Hands to Bathe’. So, what they do is, again depending on where you are in the world and it was safe to do so and it was nice and warm, you will literally put a cargo net down the side of the submarine, and then you’re allowed to run off the side of the casing at certain areas, jump off the fins and stuff like that, into the water, be in there for a short period of time and come back out because you just never know what’s in the water. We always have Shark Watch, so there will be a guy on the Conning Tower. In fact, there will be two or three. There will be a Navigator, there will be a Sailor and there will be somebody on binoculars and there will be somebody with a gun. I don’t know many Matelots that can shoot guns straight. I would hedge my bets it would never hit a shark if it came up and tried to get you. He would probably kill more Matelots than he would sharks, so I don’t even know why he was there half the time but you took a risk, you jumped in the water and quite often we did that, it was good. And then obviously you’d make your way to the submarine. But this submarine is a massive, big wall in front of you so you’ve got to then climb that cargo net to get back up. And by the time you’ve done that three of four times jumping on and off, you just think ‘oh, I can’t be bothered with that anymore’ (laughs).
Simon: It’s the first couple of times the novelty …
Midge: It feels great, yeah, you do somersaults and all sorts of stuff and then you just think, … and then you start to think about what could be under you, 3,000 feet of water and sharks …
Simon: So, you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Midge: Absolutely yeah. I’ve actually got some pictures. I don’t have physical pictures, but they’re all on my thing. I’ve got some pictures of hands to bathe that I could send you if that’s something you wanted to see.
Simon: Yes, it would be interesting, yeah.
Midge: Yeah, so many ‘hands to bathe’, barbecues on the upper deck, but you do always sort of know what ports you’re going to and when you’re booked in as you travel.
Simon: Do you get regular … ok, we know we’re going to go to this Bar because we went last time and it was fantastic.
Midge: Well, on my last submarine, HMS Tireless, I spent about 3 years on there, and I spent a good part of 2 years in the Middle East, so I did an 11-month Patrol over there, or deployment, it wasn’t a Patrol. A Patrol tends to be the time you’re at sea under the water. A deployment is the leaving Devonport, going somewhere and coming back, through which you might do several Patrols and various bits. So, we went out there and we did the standard Gibraltar, Crete, Suez Canal, through in to the Middle East area shall we say. We did a bit of Diego Garcia, which is further down towards the Seychelles.
Simon: Is that an Island or …
Midge: It’s an atoll in the middle of the … it’s British owned, British Indian Ocean Territory. It’s primarily used as an American stop-over Base in the South Pacific, so that the Indian Territories to be fair, and it’s almost a natural harbour. If there’s any action out that way, that where the American’s will base all their Carriers and their Royal Fleet Auxiliary and their stores. It’s British territory but we almost loan it to the Americans. So, we go in there quite often and it’s a tropical island. I’ve been to two or three in my time on submarines. Andros Island in the Bahamas and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and they are exactly the palm trees, flat water, cocktails, but they’re Military Bases. They’re lovely, they’re stunning. I’ve been there several times. I’ve just had a friend who did a 2-year draft, sorry about a 1 ½ year draft out in the Indian Ocean territory and he was there the first time with me. There’s everything you could want out there. There’s the swimming pools, you’ve got a NAAFI, you’ve got cinemas, it’s all put on by the Military. You’ve got local inhabitants that you can play football against. We played football against them, we went fishing, we did barbecues.
Simon: How long are you there then? A week or so?
Midge: It’s never really a week. It’s probably four or five days so invariably it gives you maybe two days in the submarine, maybe duty, and three days off tax free. You can just go off and do whatever you want to do. That’s usually enough. You know you can make phone calls home. I’d imagine nowadays it’s Face Time and full communications. Back then it was trying to find a phone box, or trying to find a … yeah, it wasn’t great. I remember phoning home. What you need to try and do though was find, and my wife will back me up on this, you really need to make those phone calls the minute you step off the submarine. You don’t want to be phoning …
Simon: A couple of hours in.
Midge: … or if you go past .. I’ve found myself having been ashore for a day or two and then finding out that I haven’t phoned home yet, because you just get in the mind-set, go, get to a Bar, have a party, wake up the next morning. I better not phone her now, it’s 3 o’clock back home. I’ll go out, have a few drinks or a meal or sort myself. Next thing you know you’re in a Bar again, so when you’re approaching … when you know you’re going into for instance, a port, you’ll have a visit liaison talk in the Mess. Somebody will come in and brief you on ,”Right, last time we were here, we found that the services at the Base were all OK. We had water, we had food, all that sort of stuff was taken care of. Access in and out is good, do this, do that, show that, take your passport or don’t take your passport” or whatever. So, they tell you all that good information. Then you go on to the “This is where you should go and visit” and then at the end they say, “This is the places not to go”, so they’ll tell you the nice hospitable places but they tell you the places ‘do not go here’ so of course what the Matelots do, “I’ll write that down and I’ll head there” so that’s where they go so invariably they end up in all sorts of trouble.
76 minutes 6 seconds
Simon: Why are they marked as ‘do not go there’?
Midges It would generally be Bars where there was known prostitutes or gangsters or trouble before, previously maybe the Landlord because somebody hadn’t paid or something like that. In the Middle East it was once you started going into the black flag areas, like the Sudanese and the Shiites and stuff. Certain areas you’re ok, once you start to see this, you go no further. I personally found myself in some of those areas and you soon know when you’re there. It’s like windows start shutting on you and you can’t be here. You get out before any diplomatic incidents. So, you have those sorts of chats onboard, do not go here, don’t do this, have a good time and al that sort of stuff. This is the number to call, this is where you’re staying, and what they do is … because it’s a nuclear submarine, we’re not allowed to stay onboard the nuclear submarine unless your Duty, so of the 130, 150 people onboard depending on how many they’ve got, they’ll probably keep a core , a Duty Watch onboard to maintain safety onboard the submarine and the Watch Keeping routines. Everybody else is entitled to go and live ashore in a Hotel. So, they give you a Hotel room for the night. If you’re like a Rating, if you’re a lad or a girl of a certain Rate, you’ll be given maybe two in a room. As a Senior Rate, or a Warrant Officer or Officers you’re entitled be victualed in just a room on your own, so as you work up, you get your own room and that’s quite good, but peer pressure turns to working out the Junior Rates where it’s if somebody wants to have a quiet night in, they’re not having it because it’s partying, so there’s all that sort of stuff goes on. But before you go ashore and get into your Hotel, you’re given a subsistence, so wherever you are in the world, there’s a rate of daily subsistence. So, for instance, if it’s a really cheap country and it would cost you a tenner a day to live there, they’ll give you £15 a day.
Simon: In the local currency.
Midge: In the local currency. So, Goa was always like … it looks a lot ‘cos it’s like that, but actually it doesn’t mean a lot. If you go to Gibraltar now, you’ll probably get £50 a day or £70 a day or whatever to go and … wherever it was you went you got … and it always worked out that you can party for a few days and loads of food and buy some Duty Free and stuff like that. So, before you even leave the ship, you get counted out all this money, whether it was Euros, we used to just call them ‘dib dabs’ ‘cos Rials or whatever it was, it took you a while to get used to it. “What does this mean, what is 100? 100 last week was £10, 100 today is like 50 pence.” You just never knew, so you got given all this wedge of cash to go off. Your Hotel Room was paid for, you had a wedge of cash, so you didn’t have to touch your own money for a day or two. You just went out and the first night was always messy ‘cos you had that big lump of money. It was free money. You know, you’d just been at sea for 8 weeks, so unless you had family back home spending all of your money, some people would have a little side Bank Account where they’ve maybe got a couple of hundred or a thousand or whatever in there, but if you were a young person on your own with no outgoings while you’re away, and you’ve been paid ‘x’ amount per month, you probably had a good wedge in there ready to go and party with. So, first night was always a bad night. Well, I wouldn’t say a bad night. A good night but it was messy. For me it was very messy. You take the first sort of Pubs and most people would end up …
Simon: I guess the first Bars get the most action and then …
Midge: Definitely, and there was a few … I remember Fujairah, when I did HMS Tireless’s 11-month deployment out in the Middle East, we did various Patrols of various areas, but it must have been an agreement that we would go to the Arab Emirates, Fujairah. It was a small Port that would take Cruise Liners, Military, all sorts of stuff. The town itself was ok, it was a bit dusty, it had a McDonald’s, it had some Lebanese Restaurants, had some tower blocks. Over the period that we went there, over two or three years, it built up. I think even now it’s a big old place now. So, it was in its infancy I suppose, Fujairah, it was almost ‘not a lot there’. You weren’t allowed to drink. However, Hilton Hotel served drink except during Ramadan. The first time we ever got there, it happened to be during Ramadan, and I think they half expected us to come in asking for drink, so they would only serve us alcohol, but they had to serve it in a Coca-Cola plastic tumbler, and we had to drink it in a certain area and keep ourselves out the way. We didn’t fully respect it because we did drink alcohol, but having been at sea for 8 weeks, I would like a beer, but you kept yourself out of the way. We didn’t have any concerns and the Captain was fairly happy with us doing that and all that sort of stuff. But there were occasions where we would … I wouldn’t say flout the laws but you would get involved in something … maybe you would try and purchase a beer and they would say, “No” and a couple of lads who’d had a few would get involved and stuff, because Fujairah, we went in there 11 times during that deployment for 3,4,5 days stays, and the one I do remember was my wife and kids … it was probably the 4th or 5th time we’d been to Fujairah … the itinerary was that we’d be in Goa around about the middle of December. We would then leave Goa, transit back up to the Middle East, Goa being in India and we’d travel back up to the Middle East and my wife said, “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to come out and visit you” ‘cos we had almost a two week stay over Christmas and the New Year. I said, “That’s brilliant” so we cancelled Christmas. We said, “We’re not having Christmas as such” and the kids will even tell you they gave up their Christmas. It cost us a couple of thousand pounds, and they came out. The worry, the struggles to get that done, so although we knew we were going there, when I left Goa, about seven of eight days prior to Christmas, and I think we were to arrive on the 23rd of December back in Fujairah, there was already rumours about bad weather back home, so she goes, “Oh the weather’s not meant to be good next week.” “Well, we don’t really know.” What did happen, off the back of that, a snowstorm came in, Airports were shutting down left right and centre in Britain, so that put us up against it straight away, so my wife didn’t know whether she was going to get out because of the snow. I was on the submarine the day we left Goa, having spoken to my wife saying, “I hope I see you there, if not get the insurance.” The day we left, they then announced onboard, “We’re not travelling to Fujairah, there’s some complications with the port, the booking at the Jetty.” A Cruise Liner had had to pull in and were offering more money for the port, for the Jetty. I thought, hold on a minute, this should have been booked up last year, two years ago. It turned out it hadn’t been, so I now left in the knowledge that my wife might make it out and I wasn’t going to the port where she was arriving in.
83 minutes 21 seconds
Simon: And you couldn’t communicate.
Midge: Couldn’t communicate. So, I think we had some surface transit. I managed to get an email off to her, saying, “Look, I don’t know what’s happening. I still hope to see you on that day but there might be …” so there was no news. We were trying to get to Fujairah, but it was never guaranteed. Until the moment I docked and got on to the phone in Fujairah, I didn’t know where my wife was, I didn’t know what she’d done and when I phoned her she was actually in Dubai, having travelled from London Heathrow I think it was to Qatar. Overnight stay in Qatar with two young children, and then Qatar to Dubai and then Dubai taxi across the desert down to Fujairah with two young kids. A woman alone on her own and when I met her, obviously it was all tears and everything else, and she goes, “You do not even want to know how I’ve got here.” And I almost felt like a fraud, saying, “You don’t know how close I was to not getting here” ‘cos we were moments away from not getting in at the Port. So, everything worked out, we got there and we had a good few days. We spent what was probably one of the best Christmas’s we’ve had, so although I was still working, having to go down to the boat every now and again, carry out a 24-hour Duty, come back, see the kids. They were left on the beach, by the pool. They were really well looked after and to be fair to the Hotel, ‘cos I had a room. I was a Warrant Officer; I had a room and on the first two days I emailed the Hotel. I spoke to the … “My wife and my family are coming out; how do I pay to put them on inclusive?” She said, “Ok, give me £50 day 1, £50 day 2.” She stopped asking, so they stayed there almost rent free, eating what they could and they had to pay for some stuff but they loved it and the two kids will tell you even to this day. So, on Christmas Day, we bought them 1 present each, it was a little game that I think for the Play Station or whatever, very minimal effort, but what happened on that day, the submarine, the Captain put on a full Christmas Day spread at the local ex-pats Tennis Club. It wasn’t just a Tennis Club, it was a Tennis Club, it was Badminton, it was a swimming pool, it was a Gym, it was the local area for … basically people had done well out there so all the ex-pat’s migrated there for the day, and on Christmas Day, they put on this massive big spread. I’ve got pictures again; I can show you some. It was a real mixture. So, there weren’t many kids there but there was a lot of wives and husbands had flown out and stuff like that and we had a lot of ex-pats that we’d met during our three or four previous times we invited them all along. A massive, big Christmas Day dinner. So, what they tried to do was they tried to give us a proper English, British style Christmas Day dinner. So, there was elements of roast beef, there was turkey, but there was also spicy samosas and pasta, you imagine everything about your Christmas Dinner with every other world food around it. My kids loved it. They were in the swimming pool all day,
Simon: So, from now on that’s been standard Christmas has it? You’ve got to have samosas for Christmas now?
Midge: That’s what I said to them. I said, “Look, people don’t eat like us all around the world.” It was good for them.
Simon: An eye-opener I guess.
Midge: An absolute eye-opener for them. They spent the whole of Christmas Day, the only time they’ve done it in a swimming pool, surrounded by 100 odd people that were dressed in Santa Suits and all sorts of … and giving out gifts. It was really good. I mean it was a life experience for them. But off the back of that, even to this day, it’s one of my worst life experiences. There was nothing sinister about it, but what it was, when it came time for them to come home, so this was almost mid-deployment and they were out there for 11 months. This was probably, I’m trying to think, maybe month five or six, five or six months in, knowing that when they went home I still had probably three or four months to still serve out there, not knowing when I was getting home, so all was well but what happened, and it happened throughout my career, when she was my girlfriend and my wife, Lesley, she would almost go into a shut-down mode, three of four days before I would leave in preparation for me leaving, and I could tell straight away. It took me a long time to work out what was going on, but it was almost like, “Well, I know you’re going in a few days, I need to go back to being self-sufficient, organising everything and doing everything and blanking out that you’re here” so that left me … I was expecting that to happen on the day I would leave, not happen days before, so I almost spent two or three days … we didn’t fall out, but it became quite … it wasn’t your standard family set-up. She’s almost released me three or four … so when we were in Fujairah, and they were out for 10 days, she almost started doing that again, but on the last day, we went to Dubai, we jumped in a cab and went across the desert, we saw camels, all this sort of … we went to Dubai for the day and we almost had to say our goodbyes on that day ‘cos the next day I was going to be on the submarine, putting them in a taxi, they were going and I think we’d hired a second car to get them … and anyway it was the best day and the worst day because that day in Dubai was amazing. The kids went to the Tower and the big Shopping Centre and the beach, the Palm, we did the whole lot. I started to drive them up to the Airport, we got to the Airport, parked the car up, and the way it was, I thought … we got into the Airport, they had all the suitcases and the kids were obviously “We don’t want you to go dad” and they’re all a bit tense, not very happy, and we got into the Airport and going through Security. That was the natural point for me to say goodbye. They didn’t want to go through. The kids wouldn’t leave me, they were hanging on me and she’s crying by this time, I’m crying and one of the Guards came over and said, “What is the problem?” I said, “It’s ok, I’m not going to see them for months.” He said, “Oh, you go through.” I said, “What?” I had no passport. He said, “You military?” “Yeah.” He says, “You go through, you sit with your family.” So, I went in there and we sat for a couple of hours. They let me right up to the point I was almost in the plane, so it was slightly different, but it was one of the, even Lesley will tell you, it was one of the best and worst moments. Those kids, they broke down, she broke down, I broke down, everybody around us broke down. It was horrendous, and it was just one of those things, because we’d had such a good time over the Christmas and New Year, but that takes its toll on kids and your wife. So, for all those good moments you get, there’s a dawning realisation that it doesn’t last forever. So, the real good moments are usually followed up by me to go away again, or I’m away and it’s a bit crap. The reunion, it’s me coming back and everything.
90 minutes 31 seconds
Simon: So, what age did you get married and …
Midge: I’ve known Lesley now for over 20 years, having met down here when I was on a Training Course in 2001, so 21 years I’ve known her now, and we’ve been married half of them, so it will be 11 years this year. We married in 2012. It will be 11 years …
Simon: Did she know what she was signing up for as a wife of a Submariner?
Midge: As a wife she did, but she was with me for 10 years prior to being my wife, and we had kids from an early age. We were 8 or 9 years together with kids before we even got married. So, she didn’t know when she met me on that first night and we met each other, what a Submariner really meant. She didn’t know that.
Simon: It must be, as you say, describe it, there’s challenges.
Midge: Massive challenges. So, Lesley now, she works with a Trust for the local school around here and she works specifically looking at armed forces families and what she can bring to help them settle in the area, prepare for deployment, so she’s using all that good skill set that she’s developed over the years ‘cos she was very good at it. We would both say, I don’t know how it’s affected her … there was always those moments of her shutting down before I’d go away, and you do get a lot of bad news on the way through. You get, “I’m not coming home tonight, I’m extending, I have to stay at work today,” but you’re in the Military Service. I think ultimately she knew that. You have to have a very, very, stable family at home and a self-sufficient one. What I see now and what I’ve had to do as a Course Manager as I’ve gone through my career at HMS Sultan, it can be just as challenging having people down here on Training Courses with their wives up in Scotland, ‘cos they’re not that far away and you go, “It’s not that important that you’re down there, can you come home?” and of course there’s always a necessity for you to be somewhere and it’s not always at home. When you’re in the Middle East, two or three times I’ve had phone calls out when I’m on a submarine in Diego Garcia, I got brought home because there was incidents back home where you have to drop everything and go but that takes its toll on the Submariner as well because the Submariner … we only have so many people qualified in any one position in a submarine, so as an Engineer in the back end of a submarine, generally you would like to … each Watch Keeping position has 5 people assigned to it, so at any one time, there will be 3 qualified and able to do the job, one about to leave and one joining as a Trainee stepping up to the plate, so you’ve never got 5 people for very long that are all in date and available to do that job. If you did, you only need to take three of them to sea ‘cos of the room onboard, so those 3 people who are qualified will go to sea, there will be one left back home maybe doing some training, or there will be one going to sea as an additional trainee, so out of 5, maybe one gets left home so we call it a ‘Fifth Watch System’. So, whenever a submarine sails, there’s almost a Fifth Watch, so of a 150 crew, we only take 120 – 130 to sea. There’s people left back home. So, if you’re one of them that you’re lucks, and the thing is with that, that Fifth Watch might only be a week and a half. The next Fifth Watch period might be six weeks ‘cos they’re on Patrol. You just happen to fit into whenever it’s your turn, you get that period of time off, so that Fifth Watch, you’re not always on a submarine, but when you are on that submarine it’s crucial that you remain healthy, sane and able to do the job. Quite often when you pull up alongside, that’s when the problem … you get a letter, you get a phone call, someone comes in and says, “You’re kids in hospital.” Depends on how you react to that. You might say, “Well, I need to go home.” If you need to go home, that needs to pull somebody from a Training Billet, or from back home or somebody else needs to step up. Most of my time, any of those challenges I would always resist. I would say, “Well, I don’t want to go home. This is where I need to be.” That puts the pressure on me, puts the pressure on the family back home, because you now realise that if you fly home, somebody has to come out and leave their family to join, and that in itself is a pressure on you. Don’t get me wrong, there are some situations where it’s accepted. Somebody has died at home, yeah of course you need to go, I’ll come out and cut short my … that’s a given, but if it’s one of those grey areas where somebody, I don’t know, a wife isn’t coping or a child is having difficulties at school, you want to be there for them, but you can’t always …
95 minutes 14 seconds
Simon: You realise the repercussions but …
Midge: But you can’t always be there for every incident that happens, so you really need the backing of a strong partner at home. Somebody that recognises when they need you and when they don’t. Fortunately, and unfortunately, Lesley at one point realised she didn’t realise she needed me, it went too far and ultimately the Doctor made the call and said, “You need to come home.” So, I came home, and that one instance, you wouldn’t believe this, all three of us that were on that submarine, so one was due to come home anyway and had things booked so he had to go home, I reached Diego Garcia and found out that my wife wasn’t coping, she was my girlfriend at the time, Lesley wasn’t coping and I had to come home, which I had to do and on the next day, we were carrying out work onboard the submarine and the third guy from our Watch Keeping union, he sliced the top of his finger off whilst carrying out maintenance onboard the submarine, so all three of us that had docked with that submarine all came home on the same flight, which meant there was a whole Watch Keeping union there that had to be back-filled, so luckily we managed to pull people in from … so, for instance say when you get to Chief and Warrant Officer, you’ve generally done all the subordinate co-ordination, the qualification, so you can back-fill them, you can drop in, carry out. ‘Cos there’s Nuclear Regulations set around who can man each position. You have to be qualified to a certain level, so you can only sort of back-fill, you can’t fill from below, unless they’ve done all the requisite training and qualification and so on. That was a challenge for the Marine Engineering Officer to fil three positions that he wasn’t expecting. He was expecting to fill one of them and he had somebody coming out to fill that place, but then within about a 24-hour period, I got called home and the other ME of the Watch took the top of his finger off.
Simon: So, with the pressures we are speaking about Lesley your wife, what do you think … is there an impact if any on the children? Do you think, ‘cos they have a different … although around here there are a lot of Service families …
Midge: There’s a lot of Service families, so what I did, I did a lot of my time away when they were between almost being born and let’s say 10 years old, so they’re formative years. When I came home, I almost found that the wife went, “They’re yours” a lot of the time ‘cos she had …
Simon: Fair enough.
Midge: “They’re yours, get on with it.” The youngest one didn’t really know me because I hadn’t spent a lot of time with him, the oldest one was old enough I think at that time to understand and when I came home we had a good bond and got good bonds with the both of them now. You would have to ask them what impact it’s had on them, but one of them want to join the Military. The other one I … both of them I have good relationships with. I think we’ve been very lucky. I do know people that even to this day, I’ve got people that work with me just now, and because they work away, they’ve been given compassionate drafts down here because their kids have gone off the rails. Now whether that’s because that was going to happen anyway, whether that was in the stars or as a result of them being up north and being away for a long time, I don’t know. I’d like to think we’ve come through reasonably unscathed. Not entirely, there are a few scars and things that have happened. For instance, those month in Dubai, that was … when I was leaving, it was a horrendous scene, but actually it was one of those moments we all talk about now and it’s something that bonded us as a family. So, to go through that … to have never left your family, you’ll never understand what it is to come back I suppose. It’s horrible going away …
Simon: It’s a stronger appreciation then.
Midge: The time together. I’ve now been back home in a position where I’ve been off submarines for quite a while and I wouldn’t say it was boring, but I think we all appreciate well, it used to be really exciting. It wasn’t always great, but it was exciting. Now it’s like …
Simon: It’s change as well I guess, it’s a variable all the time.
Midge: Absolutely. So yeah, it’s definitely affected the family, we’ve definitely gone through things together as a family that you wouldn’t normally go through. You know I’ve taken my kids out to Dubai, I’ve taken onboard submarines, we’ve been to events that only military people can go to, and been in that military environment, so in the Submariner world especially, I think the Submariner world is quite unique in terms of what we go through and the things you have to deal with as a Submariner. So, for instance, a Sailor on like a General Service type Destroyer or Carrier would have access to family the whole time they’re away. When you know that somebody is going through a hard time in a submarine, 6 weeks in to a 12-week Patrol, you need to look out for them because if one person starts to become isolated, you don’t know the endgame, you don’t know whether they’re going to crumble, you really need to get them back on board, you need to cheer them up. You might not like the person, and there’s people onboard submarines you do not like, I mean you can’t like every one of the 120 people onboard that submarine.
100 minutes 26 seconds
Simon: So, that’s quite a skilled thing.
Midge: You have to understand that you have to be able to manage that situation. You’ll have a couple of good friends on there. You’ll have your own little groups that you really … so, you generally find that when you sail, you’re put on a Watch. There’s five or six of you, or probably eight of you on that Watch and you all sit in the wee dark hours of the morning and you’ve got 4 hours on Watch in an area where what else are you going to do? You’re going to sit and tell stories, jokes, …
Simon: That’s where the ‘dits’ come from?
Midge: That’s your dits. And then when you’ve been on a run ashore, you come back and you tell all those dits, maybe with a different Watch, you may be in a different Watch now. So, you get bonds with different people. Some people you know to be a bit nutty, some people you know to be a bit eccentric, some people are very sporty, some people are very … and you just develop different bonds, so it’s almost skills for life that you’re able to work with people, up the way and down the way and manage and … I think you definitely wouldn’t get that; I’ve never worked in an office …
Simon: There is that thing of you all being … you can’t escape.
Midge: You can’t escape your problems or if you have a fight with somebody in the scram queue, you can go to one end of the submarine but you’re still going to meet each other again, don’t get me wrong, of course fights happen in submarines or generally the release comes when you get that money, you get your Hotel key and you go out. That’s when the release comes, so we had a particular draft. I was on HMS Superb, and we’d spent … it was fairly uneventful as far as submarine travels … the submarines had a particular problem in the reactor, and Rolls Royce were doing deep investigations, research into what was causing these problems on the reactor, which meant that the submarines were tied up alongside, had the Nuclear License taken off them, but they were still manned with a crew. There was still 150 people on that submarine, going down every day, being told “Well we’re not going anywhere, we’re not doing anything.” We were working hard because I was the Engineer. We were down there working very hard and at some point we got the authority again, or the permission to flash the reactor back up and go and we ended up out in the Middle East, and we ended up going to a place called Diego Garcia, the atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean and I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t the first run ashore we were on, but it was the first time we were out of the public … you’re almost in the middle of nowhere over there. Gibraltar is always pretty high profile, then through Diego Garcia and for some reason, I think there was a few, we called them Yanks, a few Americans over there ‘cos they hire the Base off us, there was a few Special Forces there, there was some ships in, there was some stuff so we weren’t the only ones there. Most of our people went ashore the first night, and for some reason it just all went wrong. We had an ex-Paratrooper who had come across to be a Submariner, it was his first time, he went looking for these Special Forces to try and drink and ended up fighting with them all. Somebody pulled the flag down off the Consulate building, there was fights in the Bar, somebody tried to steal a motorbike I think it was, and jet skis. It was an accumulation of offences. So that was the first night I think ashore. The second and third and fourth there was more events happened. I would like to say we were in for about 10 days, because we were in for quite a while, and what we had, we had a group of Engineers flying out from Faslane, to help with some issues we had on the submarine, so they flew out, al the civilian Engineers flew out and they were living in the same accommodation, drinking in the same Bars and all sorts of stuff. Remember it’s just a small Naval Base there. When I say Bars, I mean the Mess or there was a NAAFI that you could buy bottles of vodka for £3 . That was the problem. You’re given a load of money, you’ve got time on your hands, you’re drinking. It was party after party after party, and it got to a point where there were two or three things happened. One of the Engineers that worked for me at the time, I won’t give his name, but he thought it would be funny to try and get as smashed as he could, and then for some reason he tried to jump into the boot of a Police car. When I say Police, it was the British Indian Ocean Territory Police, so they’re not military, they’re civilian but they’re for the military. He tried to jump into the boot of the car. He got into the boot, but unfortunately that’s where they keep their guns and their ammunition, so that was seen as a massive offence. They pinned him down they were going to shoot, there was all sorts of hell kicking off that night, so he had to go to Court. When I say Court, it was a hastily put together group of people and they fined him $1000 within hours. I mean literally we were only there … this happened in days, he got fined $1000 and told to remain onboard, so that got back to the Captain.
105 minutes 32 seconds
Simon: So, the local authority fined him $1000 and then said, “You’re not welcome on land here.”
Midge: So, he was told, “You’re not welcome on our bit of land, so he got sent back to the submarine. I think the Paratrooper, who’d gone out the first night and caused a load of trouble was pulled back onto the submarine and was not allowed shore leave for the rest of the period, and there was a few other incidents, people stealing stuff and doing stuff and setting fire. There was a whole load of series of events that led to it, so what they ultimately did, they’d had enough of convening a Court every other day, they gave the submarine an ASBO. They basically said, “Anyone from the …” I’ve got it in a picture actually in the folder and I can read it out to you, but in effect it was an ASBO served upon the whole submarine. I’ve got it here actually. So, this was ‘British Indian Ocean Territory Court Order, 1 of 06.’ It’s probably the only one they’ve ever given out. What does it say? This was issued by Mr Waddle, the Acting British Rep. ‘Let it be known on this day the 28th of August 2006, the Acting Commissioner’s Representative in the British Indian Ocean Territory, has decreed that no member of Her Majesty’s submarine Superb, can enter any Island facility that sells alcohol or purchase alcohol from the ship’s Store. Contravention of this Order may result in arrest and possible prosecution. This Order remains extant for 31 days.’ So, they basically gave us … they served the ship with an ASBO, to which the Captain wasn’t happy obviously because he’d got called in front of various people …
Simon: So, the repercussions go on from there I guess do they?
Midge: So what happened, we were allowed ashore, but we weren’t allowed to drink, but that didn’t stop us trying to drink. When you know there’s a shop there, we’re sitting outside the shop there that’s full of £3 bottles of vodka. And it wasn’t, it was like exotic vodka as well. Back in 2006, that’s 15 years ago, it was vanilla vodka, peach vodka, apple vodka. We really need to get in there and of course you had to go into the shop to buy food anyway, but you weren’t allowed to buy alcohol. So, they would ask for ID, but what they hadn’t banked on was that the civilian Engineers who had flown out to carry out the work onboard the submarine, they could buy whatever they wanted. So, they were now going in and buying trolly loads of Budweiser, vodka, and they knew what we were doing but they couldn’t stop them buying it because tey weren’t under the suspension, so we still managed to party, we still managed to do things but that was a … that wasn’t unknown for people to be returning to ship because you’ve been away for eight weeks. You go out. You even get people who didn’t drink really made a mess of it because they’d go out the first night and have a bottle of some exotic flavoured fruits or whatever. Yeah, they’d be returning onboard.
Simon: So how, on the sort of camaraderie within the boat and within the Submarine Service as a whole, how would you sum that up? How would you describe it?
Midge: If you meet a Submariner anywhere, you’ll quite happily have a drink with them. You might not have a long-lasting friendship with them.
Simon: Just UK Forces or …?
Midge: No, Submariners worldwide, and I think that was shown no more so than when the San Juan went down a few years ago, the Argentinian. So, whenever there’s a submarine, it doesn’t matter whether they’re Russian, Chinese, Argentinian, American, you know it doesn’t matter what your allegiances are. In time of peace, if a submarine was to go down, it’s almost felt across … like the Kursk, those things are felt across the entire … they’re felt across the world ‘cos everybody hears them on the News, but as a Submariner, you really feel like, Jesus, you put yourself almost instantly in that position because you spend … you don’t spend all your time on a submarine wondering what if, but there must be moments when you’re away thinking ‘what would I do, how would get out of here, what would happen? There are so many dangers. I’ll go back to what we what we talked about earlier. There are so many dangers in a submarine. When you watch what happened with the Kursk. There was an explosion, but it’s not just that explosion that may put a hole in the side of the submarine, it’s the follow up, the gasses and the atmosphere going out of control. If you can’t power the submarine and you can’t remove the gasses, the CO2 and it builds up and it becomes explosive. All that sort of stuff, you don’t even want to venture on to what could happen, so when you know that someone’s in a … and remember, whenever you’re hearing News, you’re hearing it post it happening. By the time you’re hearing the News, the inevitable has probably happened, let’s be honest. I think the San Juan and others, a submarine sinks and if it goes down and under it’s gone. There’s no coming back from that. If it’s on the bottom, you’re getting the News possibly as it’s just happened and maybe some people couldn’t get off, ‘cos the Kursk wasn’t in deep water when it went down whereas the San Juan went down and it was far away. You definitely feel it. There’s moments when you think, ‘there but for the grace of God.’ Let’s say I managed to go all the way through my career, when I left Superb, on the next deployment out into the Mediterranean, they hit an underwater rock that the Navigator had missed for some reason. A 500-metre rock sticking up and he missed it, and I have friends that served on that and they said, “I won’t go back on a submarine.” You imagine a submarine, it’s 8-9000 tonnes, it comes up against another immovable object and somethings got to give, and it’s generally everything inside that submarine. So, that submarine stops, or knocks a bit off, but in that collision, they said you go from one end of a compartment and you don’t stop until you hit the other wall, or whatever is in-between you. I was lucky enough never to really have to go through any of that. I’ve known people who have been involved in fires, leaks within the reactor which had its own problems. I’ve known people flood the Engine Room. Not a flood but what was perceived as a flood at the time. I’ve had steam leaks happen on my submarine when you think, “God, is this the end?” You have to react very quickly. If you don’t react, you’re not going … if there is water coming into the submarine, you have to stop it or you have to do something to stop it. You can’t just sit and cross your … so you have to be ready to do something. So yeah, when something happens across the world-wide fleet, you definitely …
112 minutes 13 seconds
Simon: And that’s across the whole world. What about the camaraderie …?
Midge: So, if I met a Submariner down the Bar, like I say, you’re not always going to like a person but you have that mutual respect. They’ve gone through what you’ve done, they’ve been there, they’ve seen the family, you know they’ve gone away from their family, they’ve been at sea, they’ve lived the life style, they’ve gone through what you’ve gone through, and I find that some of the people that I have most respect for and have great friendships now with, are people who have served onboard submarines with me, because you’ve been away in those moments and you’ve sat like you and I, across the table from each other. So, the currency onboard is usually tea and coffee, maybe biscuits but you get to a point where the coffee starts off quite good and then it’s whatever crap you’ve got left. The teabags are good or you can’t source any, but just sitting and you’d be amazed at how much tea and coffee you drink. So, you sit there on Watch for 4 hours. Ok, you’ve got to go off and do your set of rounds, you’ve got to some shift work, you’ve got to do some samples, you’ve got to do stuff, but a lot of the time you’re just sat about, looking at each other thinking of things to do onboard a nuclear submarine, or once you’ve finished spinning your dit, the next day you’re up, you’ve got 7 hours on Watch, ‘what will we do today?’ You drink tea, you drink coffee, and you open up quite a lot. You get to find out … and equally there’s people who I know now after 30 years of knowing them, I still know them as ‘Smudge’, or ‘Whisky’ or people will know me as Midge but they won’t know who my wife, my kids, or where I come from. So, there’s some people you invest a lot of time in and you know everything about them. You meet them, and I’ve got friends now, a lot of Welsh friends for some reason. I’ve got one in Bulgaria, that we go out and visit and he lives, he defaulted, he gave up what he had here and he moved over to Bulgaria. He had a holiday let, whilst he was in the Navy, came to the end of his Naval career and decided I’m moving out there. He moved out there and bought like a brand-new build that he was moving out to, expecting it to be built. When he got there it wasn’t built. He’d given up everything, he’d drove out with his wife and dog, and he got there and realised the house wasn’t built. So, I have ongoing friendships with people, deep ingrained friendships. I might not see them or hear of them even for two or three years, but the moment you see them, it’s like you’re transported back to what happened before. Doesn’t matter that you’ve both aged, and you’ve both gone through different paths. I went up to Liverpool three, four weeks ago with my eldest son. I took him up to watch a football match and I’d contacted a friend of mine that used to work for me. He was a Stoker on board HMS Superb, and I phoned him up and I said, “Look, I’m coming up for the weekend if you’re about, so he quickly phoned round a few others. There was three Stokers, all worked for me, all met us in a Bar in Matthew’s Street in Liverpool after the football match. All three of them, remember I’ve done 31 years. Collectively I think they’d done less than 10. I think one had done three, one had done two, and one had done four or six, so relatively short stints, and each one of them, whilst we were sat there, they said, “I can’t believe you’re still in.” I said, “I can’t believe you are not still in because why wouldn’t you have stayed in?” But they’ve gone off and done their own things, travelled the world and been unemployed. One was homeless and had been homeless recently, but it didn’t feel any different from the day we were on that submarine and you had that collective … and like I say, it was only a two-year window we knew each other, possibly three years.
115 minutes 52 seconds
Simon: But it’s all day, every day while you’re out …
Midge: It is, and you knew each other, and you knew characters. So, you knew how people would respond under duress. Even though we’re not at war, you do a lot of training that puts people under duress and stress in various ways. You do your firefighting training that trains you how to be a Fire Fighter, so you become a Fire Fighter for the day, and you see how people might be good at that or might not be good at that and you need to do something with them. You also understand how as an Engineer they are, so they’re working. The extracurricular stuff. Do they play football, are they interested in this , do they go to the Pub, do they go to the Gym, what’s their down-time like? So, you understand all of that, whereas, you go to an Office, and work, or go to school. I don’t suppose you see much of the …
Simon: You understand how people cope with …
Midge: ‘Cos you don’t live with each other. So, we used to live with each other on the Base at night, so 18 hours a day you can be in each other’s pockets. So, that meeting a few weeks ago, each one of them to a man they were like, “We need to do this more often. We need to do this.” They’d realised that something I’d been living through all the time because I’ve always been in the Navy, they’ve come out and then, ‘I don’t have this in civvy street. I don’t have friends where I can meet and it’s like ‘How you doing?’ I took them little presents of … so we’ve got this thing in the Navy that you get given free socks. Well, you get given free uniform in the Navy and they give you two variations of socks. Thin black, thick black, so there’s a thin polyester, never really liked them, they don’t fit well, they don’t do anything for your feet, or you get the thick Pussers black socks we call them. Thick wool, heavy wool with a cotton mix or whatever, but again your feet sweat in them, your feet are torn to bits. You wear them for 8 weeks at sea; you know about it. So, that was always the thing. I had a few friends that collected them, and they had a garage box full of them. He said, “Once I’ve got enough socks up there, I will retire out the Navy and I’ll never need to need socks again, and it was always a running joke in amongst our little group, you know, socks were the thing. “Oh, get me a pair of socks when you’re up there” ‘cos they were free. You just get them; you didn’t have to account for them. So, when I went up there the other week, I got 3 pairs of these Pusser thick black socks and I got 3 sets of Dolphins and handed them over and they were like, “Bloody hell, never seen these for years” so each one to a man, they were like, “We need to do this again soon. I have no one in civvy street that I can just phone up and say, ‘I want to go and get smashed, I want to go and have a beer’” And it’s not all about the drink because on that night there were a few … we had a chat with each one of them and they’ve all got their own problems, but they’ve also done some good things and I was telling them some things. It was a really good night. I now have people I can … if I was to go to, say for instance I needed to go to London … I was at a West Ham football match recently and I was there in my rig. It was a Submariner’s weekend. I went there in my rig. It was Liverpool versus West Ham. I took my eldest boy, we managed to get tickets for him, but what we were going up there to do, was do the flag waving for West Ham as part of their Remembrance weekend, or the Remembrance Celebration, and we were on the pitch prior to the game, waving the flags, me and another Warrant Officer and a whole load of people we took up. As the game started, we came off the pitch, we made our way round the Stadium, up into the high seats right up the top of the West Ham end, and we were all in rig, and as we came up through the crowd, everybody stood up to clap and applaud and it was quite moving to be fair. I’m not really used to that. The Army get that a lot, but we came through and everybody was like … we sat down and within 5 minutes, I could hear, “Midge, Midge” and I’m thinking someone’s not shouting at me, and I turned round and three rows behind me, was an ex-Submariner, Bernie Clifton, who was a Steward onboard my submarine back in the day. He goes, “Midge, I thought that was you out there.” I says, “I’ve been watching it on the telly” ‘cos I saw the Dolphins. So, I got to meet him and we had a good chat. So, it’s things like that. I may not have spent a lot of time with him but we both knew that what we’d been through. That those trips out to the Middle East, leaving family, doing stuff, and I’ve kept up to date with a lot of them on Facebook, so you still see their lives now. Whether they’re good, bad or indifferent, because you’ll probably appreciate, people leaving the Military, if they don’t do a full career, they tend to … some people do well, go on and do really good things, some people do average things, some people end up homeless or without a job or without a career and all that sorts of stuff and really struggle. And that’s what I found the other week when I went up to Liverpool. One was doing really well; one was doing average and one had been homeless and all the rest of it. Bernie suffers seriously from like PTSD and stuff in London and has a lot of issues, but he’s kept going I think by the people that he met and the people that he continues to meet through the Submarine Fleet and the Navy as a whole. There’s almost like a dark humour. I think it exists in a lot of different careers. So, NHS have a bit of a … certainly it is in the NHS, they talk about dark things ‘cos you’re dealing with death, they’re dealing with stuff. The Army, they deal with war, Marines, there’s a very dark humour in amongst all of it, Submariners are the same. There’s no two ways about it. If you cleanse that, you lose the essence, and it’s not me saying we have to keep it, but what I’m saying is, I think to be the fighting machine at the Submarine Fleet needs to be, or to be a Royal Marine, don’t try and make a Royal Marine what you want him to be, or what the world expects him to be, ‘cos you can’t mollycoddle and make him a certain thing and then send him to War and expect to come back ok. You need to prepare people for what they’re doing. You need to prepare people for being a Submariner, which I’m not convinced we do for everybody. I’ve been very lucky in that I think I was the right type of person to go and do it. I didn’t know that. You don’t know when joining that you’re the right type. I got through it, I did alright at it and I had no problems doing it. Would I do it all again? Certain parts of it definitely, and those relationships that have built up over the years I’ve managed to keep my family together. That’s not something that every Submariner can say, for obvious reasons. You’re away a lot, things change over the years, things happen, working and living in different areas of the country. Lesley’s lived down here while I’m in Faslane, or whether I’m in Plymouth, she’s lived down here while I was working up there, or she lives here whilst I’m in the Middle East. It doesn’t always work for every person, so I’ve done well to keep it, and I’ve done well. We like to think we’ve done well for ourselves and you know we’ve ended up with a reasonably nice house in a good area. We’re bringing up two kids who are doing reasonably well at what they’re doing, so from that point of view I cannot … there’s other sides of me when I’m at sea but other people doing a Military, I think, ‘I’d would have liked to have done that and not be stuck under the water’ but I knew what I was doing, I did it for a reason. The only thing I’d say is that I was kept in for the money more as I went through because there was a progression and it became a job after … it wasn’t a career, it was more of a … even now I still love what I do, I don’t serve in the submarines, but I now train the Submarine Fleet, or I now help in some way in the training. I’ve got a slightly different role now that I’m moving a lot of the stuff so just a little point that Marine Engineering Submariners historically have come down here, so you’re talking about the SETT, as part of this project. Where we used to come down here to carry out our Submarine Escape Training, …
123 minutes 31 seconds
Simon: How was your experience of that then?
Midge: I’ve only done it a couple of times because when I came through, what they realised that actually operating under pressurised training, you always heard of someone … now Dr Campbell will tell you more about this probably, but you always heard of someone having complications, or somebody died in that …
Simon: So, you go in in trepidation in some way.
Midge: So you always go down there like, ‘God, is this my …’ so what they’ve tended to do is, quite rightly they’ve started to risk assess it and say, “Well if you have a cold when you turn up, you can’t do the training.” Remember, I was based in Faslane so the first time I ever did it was here, travelled done there to do the Tank, and it’s all new and big blue column of water and you think, “Yeah, I want to go in there” but you’re also really, really scared about doing it. Of course, you are, you’ve got a column of water above you that they’re going to ask you to go through.
Simon: Because of the stories you’ve heard before you got there.
Midge: Well, because you’d heard that people had died, or they’re shutting it down and it’s not safe anymore, we don’t train, and of course you’ve been told to get in there and go up yourself, course it’s safe. But it’s one of those things. You don’t know until you do it. It’s like running a marathon. You don’t know your fit to run a marathon until you do it. You don’t know that your heart’s good enough to sustain a shock, until you do it. Or you’re going to put me under that pressure in that water tank, what happens if my lungs collapse? You just don’t know do you? Until you do something, you don’t know, and when you’re young, it’s ok. If you ask me to do it now, I’d go, “Wooah, stop.” I’ve seen a lot of programs about submarines safety and submarine rescue. You don’t escape from submarines historically.
Simon: I understand that’s the third option.
Midge: It’s always the last option. Of course, it is. I mean if you’re on the bottom of an Ocean and there’s all that column of water above you, would you rather be out there? You think, ‘I need get up through that blue column of water and sit at the top where it’s going to nice and there’s going to be people up there.
Simon: Palm trees and cocktails.
Midge: You’re probably going to be in the middle of an Ocean, somewhere based on where you’ve been operating. It might be hostile, it might be flat calm, there are sharks, it might be 10-foot, 100-foot waves. You just don’t know. If the submarine’s safe at the time, stay there. It was always the first thought in my mind. We were trained, submarine hits the bottom, you escape. That was what I thought. Alright, they told you otherwise, but they didn’t train you otherwise. They didn’t train you to sit in a submarine for 3 days waiting on rescue ‘cos it very rarely happened. If the submarine went down, it either imploded and people lost their lives and that was that, or occurrences would happen on a submarine that led to either maybe somebody being rescued or ultimately everybody being entombed in the submarine. You just hoped it never happened. I mean you really hoped, so when I went down there, I did my first one, I loved it once I was in, but something that always lasted with me, and I don’t know if it was through fear or what. When you get put in, there’s a … you’ve probably seen the Tank, there used to be a wire that went all the way up the middle to the top of the Tank. So, when they released you, they clipped you onto like a travelator wire, and you had your jacket on and stuff, and you would naturally just go up the send up free.
126 minutes 39 seconds
Simon: So, you didn’t … you did it with a suit on did you?
Midge: I did it with a suit. I’ve done the other ones but the one I remember is when I went up through, PADI jacket on, and I was lifted up through, and I was actually holding onto the wire in the middle, but my finger appeared to be caught underneath the shackle, so I had no time to think about my breathing. All I could think about was finger was caught and I thought … it had become so numb, I thought, ‘I’ve lost my finger’ but I didn’t see any blood, so I thought, ‘Oh, I must be ok’ and that was my first time I ever did it, so obviously I made sure I kept … ‘cos you were told to hold on to this wire I think it was. I must have held it in the wrong place. Got to the top, did it all.
Simon: But you obviously did the breathing otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Midge: Well, they show you the wine bag and all the rest of it. They used to have the wine bag, they’d put it up and ‘poof’ it explodes in the water.
Simon: So, that focusses the mind seeing that bag.
Midge: Absolutely. I don’t think I’m blessed with massive lung capacity, so that blowing out takes … I think it naturally kicks in when you’re in a situation like that, but what they try and do know is, they try and get you to do … so, they shut down the Pressurised Training I think in 2012 I think it was. They got rid of all Pressurised, but you would still do like ascents to the top, or you would do on the top of the water training, and you had to try and prove by replicating the breathing that you would do before you did your ascents. I think I did it two or three times during my early career. You had to prove to them that you could breathe at the right rate and you would do it and they would say, “That’s not enough.” They always said to me …
Simon: This is the medical checks beforehand?
Midge: Yeah. They always said to me, “You can’t breathe enough. You’ve got to really go for it, you’ve got to go for it” and even to this day, I still struggle with the breathing exercises we do. I tried to be a Diver at one point. They said, “Your lung capacity is not good” but you’re supposed to have that decent lung capacity to be a Submariner to pass that test down there. So, I always had problems doing that. But the other problems were, if you turn up on Day 1, say you’d travelled down from Scotland, you woke up in the morning with a sore throat, a snotty nose or …
Simon: They think your ears are going to blow.
Midge: They would say, “Can you blow your ears, can you do this? Right, you’re not doing it.” So, you’d travelled all the way down, you sit in the class, you do the practical element in showing you the bits of kit, but you weren’t able to do the run, so they would just take you off and say, “Well, you need to do some Tank top training and you come back down in a year’s time” or whatever. So, the more and more that went on, it was always a thing that if you could wake up with a cold or pretend you had a sore head or something, you didn’t have to do the Pressurised Training, ‘cos why would you put yourself that? Some people loved it, but if you didn’t want to do that, why would you? And inevitably, they would be the people at the Bar first at night, ‘cos it almost gave … ‘cos you weren’t allowed to drink during your period under training because of the effects on the body, so if you didn’t have to do the Pressurised Training, you could drink, so that night, it was a 2-day thing, you would stay in. Obviously there was the night you arrived, which you wouldn’t drink. The second night, a Monday or a Wednesday night whatever it was, you would go straight down to the Town and get smashed while everybody else had to remain sober, ‘cos they were doing the Pressurised Training the next day. So, it was to your advantage if you didn’t do the Pressurised Training.
130 minutes 3 seconds
Simon: What was the experience of having … I went in and got a proper tour and went in the Bell at the bottom and I hadn’t had a perception of how fast the water comes in. It’s under such pressure when it comes in.
Midge: Yeah, it comes in, so they’ve not been able to show you that. It does come in.
Simon: Well, I didn’t do the wet bit but I did all the …
Midge: So, it comes up. You feel it and obviously it gets to a natural point where …
Simon: Pushing on your body.
Midge: Absolutely, and you think, God. You get to a point, you think, ‘I hope this opens’ ‘cos there’s an actual balancing point when the spring takes over and the water come down, but as soon as that water comes down on top of you, it start to rain. It appears to rain and then it just floods and then you’re off. Would I want to do it for real? So, I always thought in that training environment it’s nice ‘cos people can see you, it’s controlled, there’s a door …
Simon: And there’s people at levels for you.
Midge: You put that onto a submarine where it’s probably dark, really cold, people lying about dead, you just don’t know do you? There’s always this thing, first out, last out, so the first person going out, you imagine that first person going out, he has to get it right and he has to get out. If he doesn’t get out safely, nobody else gets out. And ultimately, being the last person to get out, there’s a set of drills that you have to do that you need to them correctly to leave, so there’s a whole … you’re better off being somewhere in the middle, but you want to be third, fourth or fifth getting out because then you know you are out, but equally you don’t know what’s up there. I always thought, it’s ok doing it down there, nice blue warmish water with people telling you what’s going to happen. If you were only to do that once in your career on a submarine, you’d probably at that point forgotten. What you would envisage was that the Coxswain would take over or somebody would take over and senior people would then say, “Right, we’re going to talk about this, how we’re going to do it,” and you’d run through it 50 times, 100 times before you start to do it. Down there, you get to see people doing it but when you’re in there, you still doubt whether that is going to open and you still think, ‘I’m going to be stuck in here.’ You know you’re not because if you open drains and drain it all away they know what they’re doing, but that doesn’t happen in real life on a submarine. If you had to do that in a real-life scenario on a submarine, I would doubt whether … the adrenaline would be flowing, put it that way.
Simon: You mentioned a time when you are doing the training, going out to Town and into Gosport, and part of this is funded by the High Street Action Zone, so what was your … I mean you still live in Gosport, so you must like it around here. What’s your memories of Gosport?
Midge: So Gosport back in the early … I tried to explain to my two younger ones, there were decent, what I perceived as being decent Pubs back then. You had the George and Dragon, you had Arks on the Front, you had nightclubs, Emma’s which is still there to an extent. It just seemed more vibrant and there was certainly more people about. The High Street, although it wasn’t the best High Street in the world, but it had the big Supermarkets, it had Littlewoods, it had Woolworth’s, it had Top Man. There was an element of … it was busy. There was a Saturday Market when I was young, so when I was doing my Apprenticeship down here, I was a footballer and thankfully I got selected to play for the Navy Youth Team, so I used to spend a lot of time down here on my Apprenticeship staying here at weekends, to join up with the football team, and we would go out on a Friday night and a Saturday night as a football team, but you would naturally and it was a really good vibe because you’d come down into Gosport and … what to me at the time felt really classy Pubs. You know, what are you looking for? You’re looking for a beer and you’re looking for women to be there and other blokes and you want that environment. Gosport had some of that. You then went over into the Guildhall, remember Gun Wharf wasn’t there. You went over into Guildhall and that was a level above again. That was like, ‘God, this is really classy over here.’ I don’t know whether that was my youth. Ultimately you always ended up at Joanna’s anyway, right along the far end of Southsea. Joanna’s is a world-famous nightclub.
Simon: Oh, was it, ok.
Midge: You probably want to do some research. So, there’s two nightclubs. Emma’s which is …
Simon: I heard about Emma’s just recently.
Midge: Joanna’s was a bigger than Emma’s, it was worse than Emma’s and it was more …
Simon: sticky carpets
Midge: Oh, it was terrible. Matelots had gone there just to pour beer on the carpet or just … it was horrendous. So yeah, you would ultimately end up over there but it felt like there was some real good options back then, it was a real classy … again, I don’t know if that was my youth or what but now classy to me is the Gun Wharf is a bit nicer now and Old Portsmouth and stuff like that. A lot of the drinking establishments have gone. The George and Dragon, I say to my kids, I said to one of them the other week, “That used to be a really good …” You used to not get into there because you didn’t have the right clothes on. Now you can walk in there in whatever you want. You’re maybe the only person in it at any time of the week. They’d welcome you with open arms. Back then it was Bouncers to keep you out because you didn’t look right. It was definitely … so, Gosport has definitely suffered with the decline of the Navy. You know, the Navy isn’t what it used to be, going from hundreds of thousands or a bit more to a reasonably small Navy now, dispersed across the country. It’s definitely taken its toll, so a lot of things … I was saying earlier on about the facades of the … the frontages of Pubs, a lot of them are now turned into flats, and I’m not saying it’s wrong, because there’s no place for something like 300 Pubs to exist in Gosport.
135 minutes 51 seconds
Simon: Apart from Emma’s, what was the other nightclubs that were in the Gosport area?
Midge: So, in Gosport, there was Ark’s, right by the Ferry. When you come walking off the Ferry, you’re looking towards the High Street. On the right-hand side there’s a Coffee Lounge underneath now I think, Coffee #1 or something, that was a big Bar, and above it, two floors worth was, it might have been the middle floor, but ultimately there was something up the top, a Bar up the top as well. There was a full nightclub, Ark’s, and it was another … when I first met Lesley 20 years ago it was there and would go up there and it was another full on nightclub. There was one half-way up the High Street which I think existed until recently. There’s just no foot fall for any of them. So, Emma’s was one that you got in with your ID card, and on certain nights of the week it was free. You would go in there and when I first joined it, when I first came down here, I was told about it and it was this mythical place everybody went to, and I was quite young and I didn’t really go out ‘cos when I stayed here I had a lot of football initially until I was like 18, 19, maybe 20, and then I would start to go out and hit the Pubs and stuff like that. But my first time of going to Emma’s, it was at a time when they did something called, ‘Wine and Dine’. It was a Wine Dine ticket. They give you a ticket, so it was in two halves, one was wine and one was dine, and one I think gave you an entitlement in, I don’t think you got free beer but the dine ticket, you kept it. I can’t remember how much, say it was £3 to get in or maybe £5, I can’t remember, but you were entitled to food, so you went in, you got a drink and then there would be a little cubby hole would open up and then it wasn’t very romantic or very special, it was basically a polystyrene tray with sausage and chips, chicken and chips, chicken and chips, burger and chips or whatever. Of course, in a nightclub, everybody’s dancing and they’re generally drunk. First thing you did, you’d take a couple of chips and you’d probably just do that, so that’s how the carpets ended up full of potato, full of … oh it was disgusting. So, they had their own … but people always went there because that was known as somewhere Matelots would go. There was certain Pubs Matelots wouldn’t go. There were certain Pubs in the area you just wouldn’t have went to. Ark’s was one of those that was neither fully civilian or … you always took a chance going in Ark’s that you would meet civilians. Emma’s was pretty safe.
Simon: And what would be the downside of meeting civilians then?
Midge: There was always a fight of some sort. I’d like to think it sort of waned a little bit, but when I came through on my Apprenticeship, I remember it’s actually a couple of hundred yards up from there is a Garage and a Domino’s and a Fish and Chip shop now. There was something there before and I can’t remember what it was, going back 25 years ago. There was one of the big lads about a year or two ahead of me in age back then, which was a lot. You know he was a big, tall rugby player, and we got told one Saturday, we all heard on the Base that he’d been beaten up down here and he was huge, he was a big, big bloke and he’d been beaten up by 5 or 6 civvies. ‘Skate Bashing’ they used to call it. That was a term …
Simon: Escape?
Midge: No, Skate. So, they used to call Matelots, Skate. You’d need to look up the terminology in Jack’s, but I know why it is but I won’t say why it’s here. A reference to the sea and stuff. So, they used to have like groups. I wouldn’t say they specifically went round looking for Matelots to beat up, but if they came across them, invariably they’d get involved in a bit … there was almost a jealousy, you know, you’re coming into our area and … it’s not one of those ‘you’re coming into our area and you’re taking our jobs and stealing …’, but there was an element of ‘You’re here, you got probably more money because you’re earning a wage in the Navy’ I suppose, so there was definitely animosity. I never really got caught up in it , although I’ve seen it over the years. I now live here and I don’t see myself as being a Matelot living here, I just live here now. I think the worlds changed slightly. Most people growing up around here probably have now got to the point where, ‘I want to join the Navy.’ I know a lot of young lads, I still play some football, and my eldest son there and a few others, and they’ve now joined the Navy, the local lads. And I suppose they always did but you’re always going to get an element that don’t want to see you doing well. So, there’s less Matelots here in general. There’s even less Submariners here I suppose and there’s only three or four Pubs you can really drink in now, so the High Street is definitely, it will be no surprise to anyone that the High Street’s had a downturn as have most High Streets in Britain. The lack of people living in the area, well, certainly Matelots, ‘cos they always had money to spend. I mean they would always go out, so the drinking culture isn’t there amongst young people anymore. Young people generally look after themselves a bit better. I know they still drink, but they go to the Gym, they eat decent food, they probably shop online so it’s not got the same impact in it. From Gosport, although there’s still that … there’s the Navy Bases and the history there, it probably needs to be looking else … I mean the Marinas have sprung up. Marinas weren’t all there when I was younger. We had a Marina but it wasn’t the coast length that it is now and all the opportunities that’s got, so yeah, the Pubs have definitely disappeared, the nightclubs have disappeared slowly but surely. I think Emma’s is only open two nights a week now and I couldn’t even tell you what nights those are. I’m of an age now where I don’t go but I don’t even hear people very often going.
141 minutes 39 seconds
Simon: Well, someone said to me about the … this was when they were on diesels, that if you were to go into a Pub in Gosport, a Submariner’s Pub and you didn’t smell of diesel, people looked at you suspiciously because they are like, “Well, why are you in here?” and it was at the height of the Cold War, so they thought people were trying to listen in on conversations and learn information.
Midge: Yeah, I don’t really see …so what you do now …
Simon: I guess you don’t get that on nuclear.
Midge: Well, there’s still a smell. Oh, submarines in general so …
Simon: Is there? What’s the smell then? How would you …?
Midge: You’d have to ask my wife and my kids. So, you obviously sail on a submarine. You go down in a submarine, you sail, you shut the hatch, you sail, then you go away and then you come back. Now you’re only exposed to the smells, but once you’re in that environment, it’s there.
Simon: It’s the environment.
Midge: When you open the hatch, and any Submariner will tell you, the minute they open the hatch, the weird smell is the fresh air rushing in, or your smell going out and you’re like, “This smells a bit weird.” You’re then not aware until you then bring your bag home and you’d put it somewhere, and my missus would always grab it and throw it straight out, because it stunk. You didn’t realise it until maybe the next day and go ‘ooof’.
Simon: That wasn’t just you, your body odour or …
Midge: No, obviously there is an element, but any material that you had onboard just stunk.
Simon: Right, that’s the recirculating air.
Midge: So there was an accumulation of offenses there. There’s diesel, ‘cos we still have diesel onboard, we’ve got hydraulic mist, we’ve got oil.
Simon: On a nuclear?
Midge: Well we still have diesel engines onboard submarines, so if the reactor was to not work, or to fail, you have a battery onboard but that battery it’s rechargeable but you need to be able to recharge it, so you have either a diesel or two diesel engines onboard that you can quickly flash up, but they’re the very last option because you appreciate that you’ve got to bring in air. When you see a submarine dieseling, it’s inherently just under the surface with some sort of exhaust or snort mast stuck up, so you’re not covert anymore, so that’s the last option. So, you hope to be able to exist … so nuclear submarines effectively live under the water the whole time and can only do so if the reactors working. If the reactor shuts down for any period of time, you have a finite amount of time to get to restore the reactor to it’s normal operating capacity, or else your battery runs out, and then you have to break silence and break water.
Simon: So, you’re the first one … I guess it’s been diesel up to now, so that idea of the air onboard the nuclear having a particular …
Midge: Well it doesn’t smell of diesel but it will be completely different because it isn’t that diesel … so they used to call it ‘diesel and shale’ was the saying that they used … that was the smell, that’s what you operated onboard. Nowadays, I imagine it’s … so the way we cook onboard, the oils, the mists, the bodily smells, all that combined and ran throughout the submarine ‘cos it just travels through the ventilation. Alright, we have machines that scrub the air and clean the air but it doesn’t remove everything. It removes bad stuff, but that smell’s still there. But when you’re in it and remember you might go to sea for 10 weeks at a time, and have a sleeping bag and some bedding, in 10 weeks’ time you’re probably still got the same sleeping bag and bedding. I’m not saying you haven’t washed in that time ‘cos you will have washed it but you sleep in it a lot, you’re in it a lot, and it takes a bit of a hammering, so a smell generates and in a bunk space, you’ve got anywhere between maybe 9 and 20 -30 people sleeping in bunk space together. That generates its own smells and it can be horrible, but when you’re in it, you don’t smell it. It’s when you’re out of it. And you don’t really notice it until you crack that hatch, you come out and then you’re somewhere and it’s an unexpected smell. You go, “Oh God” and in my overalls and all my clothing used to stink. The wife would throw it out for days before she would even wash it, so yeah, there’s a definite smell from nuclear. The diesel smell, I was never really around. So, like I say, by the time I’d finished my Apprenticeship, the diesel boats had been sold, so I didn’t really … the only time I ever attended HMS Dolphin, was to pick up … you might be familiar with it, was the Submariner Rig. So, when you become a Submariner, when you get selected to be a Submariner, you get given … so, in the Navy, when you join on Day 1, HMS Raleigh, you get given your trousers, your shirt, your shoes, your beret, all that sort of stuff, jumpers and it’s a basic RN attire. When you join the Submarine Service, in addition to that you get even a woolly pully, a string vest, and it was a real crap string vest, there was 2 or 3 of them, there was green leggings, and you got socks. But the woolly pully was the one thing that everybody wanted ‘cos that earmarked you as Submariner, and that was the only time I ever went down to Dolphin, outside of going to the SETT. I went to Dolphin to draw that bit of kit and even then Dolphin had almost, I wouldn’t say it had shut down, but we had to phone down there or we travelled down there expecting it to be open, to be told, “No, it’s not open today, it’s open on a Tuesday at 10am, or you need to phone” so we ultimately … we got I touch with someone, we then got to draw the kit, and of course you walk about in this big jumper. I don’t know where it is to this day. I don’t know if I got rid of it or just in house moves, or it might be still … my mum’s moved and I’ve moved and it might have gone. But we were down the Remembrance Sunday last year, we went down as part of the Submarine Association, we went down to the Submarine Museum …
147 minutes 49 seconds
Simon: They’ve got them in there haven’t they?
Midge: … and they’ve got them in there. £99.99 for a jumper, and I just looked and I went, I cannot believe how much that jumper is, ‘cos we always get people on like the Old Pages or the Submarine Association saying, “Oh, can anybody get me a jumper?” I always thought I’d be able to get you one, they’ll be dirt cheap. Not buying many at £100 a jumper, but that was the only time I …
Simon: A fundraising thing.
Midge: That’s the only thing I ever really remember going down to Dolphin for. I had a few friends that shipped out in Dolphin and they loved it, they really did because of it’s proximity to the Pubs and Haslar, where all the women were, and the Dockyard on the other side. You know, submarines were based down there.
Simon: In some of the photos I saw there were 33 lined up I saw.
Midge: They’ve I’ve got a few pictures on the wall as you go in there. There’s a few pictures … I keep getting boxed stuff with submarines and we’ve framed a few of them and there’s a few of them that show Dolphin when it was full and you just think, what an amazing time that must have been. You can understand why Gosport had so many Pubs and so many people and the way it was. We’re not that type of Navy anymore. It’s like the Army, the Army is smaller but actually more effective in what it does now, ‘cos Army’s and Navy’s are different.
Simon: I guess it’s the introduction of technology is a big part of it.
Midge: Absolutely yeah. And that’s come into submarines as well. I mean our submarines we’re looking as part of the job that I do now, we’re looking at the analysis of future training and what they’re proposing for. HMS Dreadnought which will be the next incarnation of the Vanguard Class, the bomber, they’re already looking at reduced manpower and more tech, all that sort of stuff, so we’re going through that process at the moment of developing that tech. It’s like anything, what we’re doing is designing people out the system. We’re almost taking jobs away from people by doing that. Instead of having of having 15 Engineers there, actually we only need 3 Engineers with a camera. They can see all that, or everything comes up on a screen now and tells you when it’s not working, or VR or AR. So, there’s a bit of me that I like hands on, I like people on things and that. There’s a mindset of Submariners that for us to train on anything, and it’s something I’m going through just now, for me to train as a Submariner, I want to see the equipment. I don’t want to be told about it in a Classroom and not get to see it all. I’m happy to be briefed about it, the theory, the technology, but I also want to go there and press the button, turn it, make sure it works, be able to open it up. That’s an Engineer as well, but as a Submariner you just like … if the first time I ever need to use that, or the first time I ever come in to difficulty, I want to have gone through the training, so there’s a bit of me at the moment, I’m fighting against a lot of civvy Companies saying, they keep saying to me, “Oh, we’ll put that on the computer, we’ll put it on a touch screen for you” and I’m like, “No, no, you’re not getting this.” It’s like a Pilot, do you want your Pilot the first time a Pilot ever has a difficulty in the cockpit, do you want it to be on something he has not trained on? No, well don’t do it to me then. I’m in charge. My job now is to be a Nuclear Supervisor on those submarines. I want the people who are working for me, and with me, to have gone through that scenario 100 times in the head.
151 minutes 12 seconds
Simon: Right, so it’s natural.
Midge: And physically, so that the fidelity of it needs to be exact. I want them to do it and understand, so that the one time it does happen, they get it right. What I don’t want is to turn round and the Board of Enquiry afterwards and say, “But it wasn’t like that in Training. It was a little button that was up there.” Or the button didn’t work.
Simon: 13 menus down on the screen.
Midge: “I had to scroll down through stuff” or “The page blanked out on me.” So, I’m having a lot of questions with people about how we go forward in terms of training. As a Submariner, ultimately you want … that’s almost a bit of me, you like to see the bit of kit you want to work on, you want to feel comfortable on it and that’s … I always thought that was a Submariner’s way because you spent so much time in your space, you knew your equipment, you had to learn it inside out from a very early age or stage in your career, because that SMQ or that Part 3 drove you towards … it got you to challenge yourself and question, so what does the system look like on a bit of paper, what does that physically look like down the boat? Where is that valve, what does that valve do? What happens if it’s not open, what happens …?
Simon: Right. The repercussions of it not being open.
Midge: So, the Task Books almost set it up in a way that you did that theoretical bit to start with. Then there was a practical. How do you flash it up, how do you shut it down? What’s the emergency stop? What’s the … and you had to do that with every bit of equipment onboard, so just repetition and doing that, you almost knew how everything worked. I’m not saying there wasn’t a bit of skill feed for people but to earn those Dolphins, you had to get that, whereas our General Service counterparts, to the best of my knowledge, they would join a ship and learn their little compartment. There was no requirement for them to meet the broader …
Simon: That’s what’s been said from people I’ve interviewed that have been Submariners, but prior to that were on surface ships. They said it was very much, you just did the stuff that you knew and they didn’t have the mucking in part of everyone like on a submarine’s would help you out. It was delineated they said.
Midge: Was it? So, during my Apprenticeship, I did a three-month sort of, what did we call it? Sea Training, we called it so you effectively everybody together whether you were a Submariner or a Skimmer or whatever, you went on this, and we went on HMS Juno. It was a training ship at the time I got on there it was an old Leander Class Frigate, but it was a training ship. No real weapons as such, it was almost like a taking young Officers and young Apprentices to sea to learn a bit of seamanship, how to cook, scrub, eat, engineer. I think we did three months and you did almost a week in sort of each Department, out Stations, so you were maybe working with the Chippy at one point, what we would call a Wrecker, somebody who was fixing all the woodwork and the bits and pieces. You’d maybe working in the Engine Room with the Boiler Staff, you maybe working with the WE’s in an Office somewhere or the Caterers in the Galley scrubbing potatoes, so you got to experience the whole thing, but that was the only time I ever really saw … and it was almost a false General Service introduction because it was a training environment, although you got to learn things but, apart from the ability to get up on the ‘Upper Scuppers’ as we would call them, to get on the Main Deck and be able to see out and … what I did like about it was you know, you come into Port, well you dressed the ship. You all stand there and you see the Port when you come in. I’ve never seen a Port when I’ve come in. I couldn’t tell you what a Port looks like. I only know now what Gibraltar looks like through the telly because apart from a couple of ‘Dabbers’ and Sailors that stand on the casing, whereas on a Surface, you used to all dress up and you’d line the ship all the way down and you’d come in. I’ve never really experienced that. I’ve experienced it once or twice when we did it on there and it was quite nice, and I gave it all up for money and fame (laughs).
155 minutes 5 seconds
Simon: I mean you mentioned the job, so there was a point where … what was it that made you decide to leave the Submarine Service?
Midge: Well, it wasn’t leaving the Submarine Service, it was leaving the Navy, so when I got to a point where I’d trained almost to the point where I … it’s not that I couldn’t be promoted any more. I was a Warrant Officer 2, so I still had that Warrant Officer 1 I could have went to, but it almost got to a point where I was due to come off, just the way our career plans out. You do 3 years on a submarine on a draft, you then come off and you do maybe 18 months, 2 years on a shore facility or billet. So, I’ve done various shore jobs over the years, whether it’s training here at Sultan, working in the Nuclear Repair Party up in Faslane, so I alternated what I did. When we moved the family down here, and this ended up being our base, it came to a natural point where I’m coming out the Navy ‘cos it was my 22-year point, it was where I wanted to be. I then extended a couple of years. I did 23, 24 when they extended me in post, still full-time Navy, extended me a little bit more and at one point, I think, so this here wasn’t here and I’ve been moved into this house and we needed to do stuff to the house and I said, “Well, it’s a natural point, I’ll leave the Navy, I’ll get my lump sum when I leave and we’ll go on pension. I’ll go and work somewhere else.” And I gave it all up. I was in my resettlement phase, I had a couple of job interviews, I was hopeful of getting at least one, maybe two offers. And I did, I got an offer until I went out one night with a few Matelots, one who happened to be the Drafting Officer at the time. He said, “Why are you leaving?” He said, “I can’t get anyone to fill your billet.” I said, “Well, I need my money” and we’d now decided, we’ve got the plans in for the house and we’re going to do it. I said, “It’s just a natural time for me to go.” He said, “Well do that and then come back in and work” so I’d given up the Navy rather than the Submarine Service, and it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it, ‘cos I know a lot of people go out and instantly regret it ‘cos they’ve spent a lot of time, but I was given an opportunity to almost leave, take my gratuity and my pension, and join up. And they made it real easy. Shortage of people these days, they made it real easy for me. It was a tick in a box, couple of forms, you’re back in.
Simon: How does that work then? What do you go back in as then?
Midge: Exactly the same. So, I was in the exact same role, the same desk, with the same logons, same ID Card, everything was exactly the same. All that had happened was, I was now on a full-time reserve, I was now classified as a full-time Reservist. So, what it means in essence is there’s different liabilities. I can either have home commitment only, which effectively means that they cannot send me to sea, or outside of this area. I can be limited capacity or limited availability, limited commitment which then means that I work in this area but they can expect to send me to various places, maybe Faslane or whatever, or full commitment which ultimately means I can serve onboard a submarine. I wasn’t against the operating on submarines, but they didn’t offer me it. It was like limited capacity; you’ll do this job for 2 years. I did it and I did it again and, I extended and extended and now I’m into a new role. So, I never ever stopped doing what I do, or was doing, but as the years have gone on, all I’ve effectively done is move from being onboard as an Operator, a Maintainer onboard a nuclear submarine, to almost going into the Training environment that trains those future Operators, so that’s what I did for about 8 or 9 years before moving into my new role now, which is looking to the future in terms of what training will look like. So, we’re moving a lot of the submarine training from down here. It’s a massive move. The submarines school from here up to Faslane now, so we talked about the SETT. The SETT’s now been de-commissioned and moved up north. I don’t know if you’re aware of the …
Simon: Is that the one with the waves on?
Midge: The SMERAS. So, the SMERAS has been commissioned last year. Next door to that is the new Submarine School, the Dolphin Building, and we’re in the process of … so my Boss is the Infrastructure Manager up there at the moment, is running that side of stuff. I’m looking at HMS Sultan with a view to getting all the equipment and picking it up and moving it up north with all the worries that we’ve got there, and the Submarine School down in Raleigh, they’re also picking up all their equipment and the training and moving it north, so we’re going to move everything submarine into a what they call a ‘Single Integrated Operating Base’. It’s basically moving the Submarine Fleet north which we’ve always known was going there, but we’re moving the entire Submarine Training and Fleet up north, but we’re not, because ultimately Submariners still join HMS Sultan to do generic courses. So, there will still be Submariners down here. They’ll still come through HMS Sultan, they’ll still come through Collingwood, Raleigh, but for the submarine specific elements, everything will be delivered up north.
160 minutes 17 seconds
Simon: So, that’s the sort of mock ups when people use the equipment that …
Midge: So, without giving too much away, we’re not doing diesels ‘cos they’re sort of particular to both, but specifically reverse osmosis plant that’s used specifically on a submarine, we’re picking it up from here and moving it up north and then they’ll train on that up north in future. The Nuclear School where I spent years delivering academic training to, and simulator training, we are picking that up, it doesn’t belong to us, a lot of it belongs to Rolls Royce, the simulators and stuff, bur we’ve got an agreement. We’re picking it up and we’re either going to update it and move it up there. We’ve a new version up there or we’re picking up what we’ve got and we’re moving it up there at the moment. Let’s say, people will still spend a period of time down here, but it will be shorter and there will be bespoke Submariner Training will now all move up north into that single Base up north. The idea I think is it will grow a community within a community ‘cos Faslane is …
Simon: This is what Dolphin used to be.
Midge: Exactly. So, we’ll now have that up north. You’ll have the SETT, SMERAS, you’ve got the Weapons Engineering School, the Marine Engineering School, all in the one area up there in a brand-new shiny building with big flat screens and solar panels or whatever it’s going to look like. Yes, so that’s what I do now. So, I never feel as though I’ve left the Navy. I still wear the same uniform; I’m still entitled to almost everything I was entitled to before. The two things I’m not entitled to, dentistry and doctor, which is becoming more challenging as we move on, but I’ve not been caught out yet. So, I’ve never really left and I’ve never left the submarine fraternity because like I say, I’ve picked up the organising and planning and implementation of the Submarine Memorial Weekend, the Remembrance Weekend, so every year I arrange for 100 of us to go up to London, and I organise the events across the weekend for everybody, and that’s things like visiting the Imperial War Museum. We get a free lecture in there; we all go in rig or T-Shirts and stuff. In fact, this is one of the T-Shirts we developed for going up there, and we get given a free tour, we get given a free entry into the whole Imperial War Museum. We go to St Paul’s Cathedral and get a tour of Nelson’s Column underneath, his tomb at the bottom. We’ve had access to the Football Stadium, rugby games, Downing Street. I’ve got pictures. I don’t know if you want to see, I’ve got some pictures on there that just give a little snapshot but they’re on the computer, of Downing Street, me and the wife outside No 10,
Simon: That would be good. We can put them on the web site.
Midge: It would be easier for me to send them to you. I never print anything out, but I’ve got them all.
Simon: The photos that are printed, we just take photos of them and …
Midge: So, I’ve got all them. So, I’ve been able to do load of things that, so that planning of that weekend, and ultimately it culminates in … we do Westminster on the Saturday afternoon. We then do Downing Street and then we bomb burst and go and do whatever you want to do for the night, and then on the Sunday morning is the Remembrance Service itself. On the North Embankment in London, and we’ve had dignitaries from all over. Three or four years ago I took my wife, my friend took his wife, like a foursome. We all went up and stayed up there together and we went in rig and it was the right year for my wife and her friend to come up because it was Prince William that turned up and came in at the Gardens and they said they met him but they were stood next to him and all that, ‘cos he’s the Patron of the Submarine Service now. So, just being a Submariner, you get him as our figurehead. I’ve met him quite a few times. I meet him at that sort of event but I’ve met him at Dolphin, the Museum. I don’t know if you’re aware of the Lottery Funding that we’re in to doing up HMS Alliance, and they did a Rededication Ceremony, I’d like to say in 2012, ’13, I can’t remember the exact year, and he attended as the Patron to open the new facility, so we got to meet him that day again. For some reason I got put in charge of the marching and the Ceremonial which as a Submariner, that’s not the right thing to do. We do not march. We do not do Ceremonial.
Simon: I guess there’s not much space in a submarine to do marching.
Midge: It’s always been a joke that if you can’t march, you go into submarines. There’s no room for marching. In the submarine community, is such that we don’t really adhere to the normal … you can always tell a Submariner ‘cos he can’t march, he looks like a bag of spanners, unshaven usually, and long hair. It’s just the way they were, and what we’ve done now, we’ve almost gone full circle. So, we’ve got a Head of the Fleet at the moment is a Commodore Jim Perks, and he has instituted quite a few things now. He’s instituted the black cap covers. I don’t know if you’ve seen them.
Simon: Where do you sit on the controversy of black caps?
Midge: I don’t like then but I’ve got one. So, there’s a little bit of me, I don’t like it but I’m going to wear it because you want to provoke a reaction from people. I still don’t think it looks right. I think it looks like a Bus Conductor or a Train Driver, I don’t know. But everybody else started to wear them and I looked at it and I thought I still don’t like it, but I went on the web site the other week and I bought one and I’ll wear it. I think it … anything to get people into the Service and to keep them in there, and if it’s something as simple as that, I’m all for it, because I think you need … I’ve spent my entire career arguing against the money. They always say, “Oh, you get paid to do it.” I says, “Yeah, I know but money only buys you so many things, it doesn’t buy you happiness, it doesn’t buy you stability, it doesn’t keep your family together.” What I would like to do is for more people to be in the Service so that I didn’t have to spend so much time away fixing things. So, being an Engineer, the best time of your career, the best time that you ever want as an Engineer is to go to sea or leave. You’re on leave or you’re at sea. The bit in between, you’re fixing things, you’re on a submarine all day, you’re breaking things, you’re fixing ‘em, you’re helping fix things, you’re wondering why things don’t work or you’re just Watch Keeping. You’re not at home enjoying yourself or you’re not at sea. That time there is just … you want to be at home. You’ve just done 8 months at sea, you come back, you’ve got a maintenance period. The front end of the submarine does their maintenance at sea, so when they hit the wall, they go home. They go on Training Courses, they’re very rarely there. We’re there all the time and an Engineer, it does grate on you a little bit, you know that whole thing. It was a chosen path, so …
Simon: I mean we’ve covered so much. Is there anything that you think that you want to talk about that we haven’t touched on?
Midge: I don’t think so. I mean there’s little dits here and there but I don’t think there’s anything … I think through most of it, I think we definitely have, everything that I’d written down. We’ve covered a little bit about food and meal times and menus and … I’m pretty sure there isn’t. No, I don’t think so.
Simon: Ok. Well look, thank you very much for your time.
Interview ends
168 minutes 1 second
Transcribed April 2022
