Colin Clarke – Make or break of Perisher course

Simon: I watched the Perisher series of programmes on TV and that seemed to be part of it was, remember you’re dealing with other humans, for some of the people going through the training.

Absolutely. And they definitely some of them … of course it’s their career. This is what they’ve worked through for all of their life, this is a make-or-break thing that Perisher Course. If you fail it, that’s it. Your submarine career is gone, you’re out of here, so there were times when they could be I suppose just blunt and rude in the moment. Didn’t mean anything by it but they were just so caught up in it all, especially if things weren’t going right. Lots of screaming and shouting.

Simon: I mean it seemed, as you say, the increase of 1 ship, 2,3,4, the pressure must be enormous on them. 

Well, if you think of something … they’re coming at you at 30 knots, and you’ve got to stay up at periscope depth looking at them for as long as you can, and then you need to go deep, rapidly, so that was often sometimes when you’d get the Teacher take over and send the submarine deep ‘cos they were fixated on the target, but they’ve got an Escort Ship now, that’s closer and more dangerous and they weren’t keeping the whole picture.