Chris Groves – Time on first nuclear submarine

The first nuclear submarine called HMS Splendid. She was coming out of a very long refit. She’d been in refit for about 5 years down in Plymouth and so we were coming towards the last few months in refit, and so my wife and family then moved down to Plymouth and we lived in Plymouth for that sort of 6-7 months and then the submarine did a Base Port change to Faslane, which was its home Port after the refit. And then I was very lucky as the Navigator to experience the Operational Sea Training as the Navigator which is a really good training experience.

Not necessarily a pleasant training experience but it’s really beneficial and you learn an awful lot from it. We were the first nuclear submarine to go both south and north through the Suez Canal doing a period of operations in the deployment out to the Far East, so I took Splendid to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and then to Singapore for a maintenance period and then up in to the Gulf as well, so doing dive transits of the Straits of Hormuz which is a brilliant experience and visits to Dubai.

This would have been back in 1994, and whilst I was doing that work up, prior to going on that Patrol as the Navigator, my second child was born, so my son was born, Nicholas, who is now a Submariner in the Submarine Service now, so I missed his birth. I was on the work-up at sea when he was born so he was 8 days old when I first saw him.