Don Cleavin – Memories of Faslane

What’s your impression of Faslane? What did you think of Faslane?

Concrete jungle. Oh, it treacherous then.

The first time I went to Faslane, that was in late ‘50’s, very early ‘60’s, and it was just a compound with a link wire fence all the way round it.

The main road ran past it, you see, just a link wire fence all the way around it, and there was a ship there called the Narvik, a old tank loading ship. She worked as a Depot Ship really, stores, and this sort of stuff. A combination.

That’s all there was there.

There was a jetty, a H2O Jetty. We had two submarines called Excalibur and Explorer. These were propelled by high test peroxide. Lethal stuff that is.

They were trials boats. Using the HTP, they could really shift quite fast but we decided it was too dangerous. Explorer and Excalibur.

We had a submarine called Poseidon and she was working as a trial submarine, trials torpedoes, HTP torpedoes and one of them exploded, killed about three or four people. They don’t use it anymore, but the Russians did.