Colin Clarke – Returning to Dolphin as an instructor
Simon: You came back to Dolphin to be a Teacher or a Trainer?
So, that was a really good time actually, so there was a bunch of us Instructors at the time who would … nothing was too much trouble. So, if I needed to go somewhere and I had a course running, I could say, “Ginge, can you just take these guys this afternoon ‘cos I need to go and take the car down the garage” or whatever, and it was just nothing was too much trouble, and it was also a period when the Navy in early ‘90s, it stopped recruiting.
It was trying to shrink the size of the Navy, and so we also found ourselves as Instructors devoid of any classes to teach, so that sharpened our card skills quite a lot it’s got to be said, or we’d go off and one of them would say, “Right, I need my fence putting up” and you’ve have a working party of Instructors who’d go off and help somebody in their garden and things like that because we generally didn’t have the students, because the Navy had stopped bringing them through.
And what they called that ‘black hole’ interestingly enough, that carried through for about 2 or 3 decades. It’s only … it’s not that long that it’s passed through the system because if you don’t keep bottom feeding your recruitment and your succession plan, then eventually that hole is there isn’t it and you can’t just fill it ‘cos Submariners don’t live on a shelf in ASDA.
You can’t just go and buy one, you’ve got to train it and grow it, but it was a good time and I had a lot of fun.