Jim Perks – Joining the Submarine Service

Honestly my whole Service Career’s has been about being in the right place at the right time funnily enough, so again my Divisional Officer and his Mate in Blake Division were both Submariners.

One of them had come through the Ranks, one of them hadn’t. Neither of them were Warfare Officers, they were both Weapons Engineers I think, or one was an ME and one was a W.

Added to the fact that a number of the other ‘upper-yardies’ so an ‘upper-yardy’ guy that’s come through the Ranks, there’s quite a big entry of ‘upper-yardies’ that year, especially in our Division, and the ‘upper-yardies’ in my entry, there were a number of Submariners in there and two of them were in my Division, who became, again to this day, great friends and to listen to their stories and in fact there was three actually, might even have been more.

There were definitely three, and I shared a cabin with one of them who was a Nuclear Engineer, so his career was in to Engineering and the other two were going into Warfare, and hearing their stories, it actually turned quite a lot of us actually.

There was a big … you know when the question came, “Are there any volunteers for the Submarine Service” there was no shortage of hands that went up, because our Divisional Officer was you know, helping us out and these three guys who were already wearing dolphins were there and we were just excited about it.

Their stories were amazing, and then when the submarine came in, we had conventional submarines, so diesel-electric submarines, they quite regularly used to come into Dartmouth and one of these three would know somebody onboard and get us down and we’d be poured off you know some hours later.

Just had great fun, so that was it for me. I said, “Right, I don’t want to be a Pilot anymore, I want to go in the Submarine Service.”