Ian Moore – Dealing with claustrophobia

One of the things that the Navy never ever tests you for is claustrophobia. Which always appealed to me as being a little bit strange, but in all that time that I was actually in submarines, there was only ever two occasions when claustrophobia came to the fore.

One of them was a young guy who joined the boat, he was absolutely fine and dandy, and as soon as we shut those hatches, he went to pieces.

Simon: Just literally …

Just literally, boom. He just shot himself and that was it. He’d literally just gone and there was nothing we could do.

He couldn’t function, and we’re not going to stop and let him off, so literally it was a matter of right, ok, let’s put him the biggest space we can actually find initially, give him a job to do, so for the next week and a half, he was peeling spuds in the Torpedo Storage Compartment, in the fore ends, because that is the biggest Compartment that we’ve actually got.

The widest open space if you want to call it that, and we also put a bunk up there for him as well. A week and a half later, was the first time that we actually liaised with a ship and we literally just evacuated him off onto there and that was him finished with submarines.