Chris Groves – What the crew expects during Perisher

For me it was HMS Sovereign. Really nerve-racking and interesting time ‘cos we’d all spent time in nuclear submarines, we’d all come from sea pretty much.

I hadn’t been in an SSN, an Attack Submarine for a while but actually I found it very, very easy to just go straight back in to it and get into the routine, but it’s quite nerve-racking because it’s a ship’s company that you don’t know, and you know because of your experience of perhaps having done Perisher Courses, what we call ‘Perisher Running’ in a submarine before, what the ship’s company is looking at. They’re looking at you quite nervously because they’re thinking, ‘I’ve got a month of really, really busy and intense work here to do.

I’ve got six Captains, who I don’t really know and the first thing they’re doing is trying to get the measure of you.’ They immediately start, you know, a sweepstake. They’re immediately putting money on whose going to pass the Course, and there’s a huge element of this which is around character and leadership. They want you to be consistent, predictable. They don’t mind you being firm, but if you’re going to be firm, then they want you to be firm all the time so that they can read you and react and respond to you and in my view, they don’t like shouters, they don’t like people who are inconsistent. They don’t want to be your buddy. They don’t want you to come and try and court favour.

They want you to be their future Commanding Officer is actually what they want, and they want to see that in you, so it’s all about how you relate to them and if you start to make a bit of a name for yourself, you get a bit of a reputation, it goes around the ship’s company immediately and if it’s a bad reputation, that is pretty difficult to shake off. It’s also usually deserved, so it’s a really interesting almost social experiment.

And Teacher uses it to his advantage the whole time and I know that because when I was Captain Training North later on in my time, Teacher used to work for me and I used to go to Perisher for two weekends of the month that they’re at sea from an assessment perspective, so I was assessing both Teacher’s capabilities because I was responsible for the line management and reported on Teacher, but also I was responsible for just making sure that the end product was assured by more than just one person, the Teacher, so the first thing you did when you went onto the Perisher Running boat was you went to the Galley and chatted to the Chefs and you went to speak to the Stokers back aft and you very, very quickly get the ship’s company’s opinion of the students.

And particularly the very good students and the very bad students, they’re very happy to talk about them, and as I say, Teacher uses that as a big part of his assessment. I mean he sees it himself of course.

I mean he is looking at you, not only from a ‘can he keep the submarine safe, can he avoid counter-detection, can he achieve the aim?’, but he’s also looking at and saying, ”Do we want this individual to be Commanding one of our nuclear submarines and directly affecting 130 people?”