Steve Thorpe – Paved the way with the Field Gun

Have you heard of the Royal Navy Field Gun Competition in Collingwood? Well, it’s a little bit different. It’s a carpark of six tracks, a Parade Ground at Collingwood of six tracks. 24 teams enter.

It’s a tonne and a half of gun and limber and we were the first submarine crew to enter, and I did the training for that, but that was purely because Ambush had been delayed so much, that we needed to find something to do. So, we did that and we got three medals, three trophies out of it, so that was a really good accolade for the crew.

Simon: And that was the first-time submarines had done it?

First ever submarine entry into it.

Simon: Right, so it’s come in with a big bang …

Yeah, it was great. In the Plate 3 finals, we came 13th overall out of 24, but we only had 50 ship’s company or something and we had 24 of us down in Portsmouth doing it, so it was like 50% of the ship’s company involved in it.

We won the Scotland Command best time, and we won the ‘crew that had overcome the most endeavours to compete’ because we had to drive a 1944 tonner down to Portsmouth to collect the gun and we had a trike that wasn’t long enough to train on and we used 50% of the ship’s company and we won that award as well like so that was quite good.

Simon: They continued to stay, be part of it, the submarines?

Yeah there’s been a couple since, yeah. I think Anson and Audacious have both put crews in the past, so it’s been quite good, but we paved the way so that was good, yeah.

So that was a good accolade to have you know?