Under Pressure: Life on a Submarine. Richard Humphreys
terror. Maintaining exhalation from that depth seemed to me a close call, but the instructor informed me that if I ran out of puff, and if I felt like I couldn’t breathe out anymore, then I needn’t worry – I should just keep blowing, as I’d still have 25 per cent of my lung capacity left. Of course, I didn’t believe him. Water pressure increases the lower you go; at a depth of 60 feet, I’d be experiencing 30 pounds per square inch of pressure on my body. In addition, the greater the pressure, the greater the chance of a burst eardrum while equalising to the pressure in the tank. All of this information turned me into a nervous wreck as the water began to enter the chamber in preparation for the mock escape. I cleared my ears, and then I was next. ‘Take a good, deep breath,’ someone bellowed at me as I ducked down and pushed out into the tank. Within seconds a barrel-chested, slightly pot-bellied instructor appeared from a diving bell in the tank to make sure I was breathing out correctly. Meanwhile, in my head I was screaming: Shit, let go of me before I run out of puff and my lungs give way!
Slowly I started to rise, but this time I was really struggling to breathe out – the natural bodily response is of course to hold your breath. I got halfway up and a second instructor who’d been hiding in another diving bell came out to meet me and jabbed his outstretched hand into my rib cage to make sure I was exhaling. I clocked the depth gauges as I ascended, and I realised how deep this actually was. I had to regulate the blow, as I felt I was running out of capacity, but eventually I breached the surface, relieved I’d made it through unscathed.
The final part of these two days of hell was an ascent from 100 feet, with a simulated evacuation from a replica submarine escape tower. This involved climbing into a tiny compartment beneath the 100-foot tower in a hooded pressure suit. I clambered in, having only half-listened to the instructor, overcome by an adrenaline rush and heart palpitations. I couldn’t yet vote, I was about the age at which I could learn to drive, yet it felt like I was putting my life in completely unnecessary danger, as if I’d sleepwalked into this nightmare in the hands of total strangers. The tower closed shut behind me and I was stuck in a minuscule space that was about to be flooded. I guessed that they were checking for signs of claustrophobia and stress, and I saw there was an implement for me to start banging on the pipes with if I couldn’t hack it. Pleasant thought.
I climbed gingerly into the escape hatch, head to toe in a self-contained submarine escape suit; I knew I needed to plug myself into an air pipe that would inflate it as the water came in, making it fully pressurised. Suddenly it was time, and the water started to shoot in, my stress levels becoming almost unbearable as I was squashed into this tower, the suit inflating around me. As the water pushed against me, I tried to clear the pressure from my ears with the help of a nose plug, all the while trying to remember what I’d been told. I recalled all the stories of what could go wrong; at the very least I was expecting my eardrums to burst.
The pressure on my suit was immense now, around 50 pounds per square inch, and bubbles blurred my vision as water rapidly filled the tank. I was terrified beyond comprehension, but within 30 seconds the hatch suddenly opened. After floating out I said my name and RN ID number to the instructor, who had gone to the bottom of the tower to meet me in a diving bell. I was then attached to a pole and shot up the 100 feet of water in around ten seconds. As I was now in a fully inflatable suit I remembered to breathe normally, in, out, in, out, reminding myself constantly that my ascent needed to be smooth, and that I should breathe all the way to the top. I suddenly popped to the surface, almost fully breaching out of the water, then floated onto my back doing a fair impression of the Michelin man, before I was finally led to the side of the pool and handed over to the medical staff for a once-over.
At once terrifying and exhilarating – a trainee breaks the surface after successfully completing the 100-foot ascent. (POA Phot Gary Davies/MOD)
This was both the high point and the most nerve-wracking part of initial submarine training. The Navy stopped all pressurised escapes in 2009 and worked on a simulation basis instead. This seems like a shame to me as it takes away the key element of danger. Although I found it a suitably terrifying experience at the time, which I’m sure pales into insignificance compared with a real-life submarine escape, the retirement of the tank-ascents programme strikes me as an example of modern-day health and safety gone mad. It’s worth noting that in 1987 on board HMS Otus in Norway,‡ two staff members from the SETT team escaped in pressurised suits from a depth very close to 600 feet, a truly remarkable achievement by an extraordinary group of men.
I was told shortly after my final examinations that, subject to vetting, I would be drafted to the 10th Submarine Squadron, which meant only one thing: nuclear deterrence. The 10th Submarine Squadron took their name from the heroic 10th Submarine Flotilla, who performed miracles in the Second World War in their defence of Malta from German forces, by keeping the country in supplies, as well as sinking German ships destined for Rommel and his troops in North Africa. In total the flotilla sank around 412,000 tonnes of Axis shipping. At the forefront of this effort was Lieutenant Commander M. D. Wanklyn, who torpedoed, sank or disabled around 127,000 tonnes of shipping, an astonishing feat that earned him the Victoria Cross and Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He was declared missing in action in 1942, aged just 30.
* Naval training is split into three parts: Part 1 is basic training; Part 2 is shore-side specialist training; Part 3 is at-sea training.
† The dolphins badge is awarded to fully qualified submariners after Part 3 sea training and an oral exam.
‡ ‘HMS’ can mean both ‘Her Majesty’s Ship’ and ‘Her Majesty’s Submarine’, with the context usually giving a clue as to which is meant. Here it’s clearly a submarine.
2
It was time to head north to Scotland. Far from being an alien land to me, this was where my mother and father had moved for Dad’s last job before retirement, to a small village called Houston, just outside Paisley, near the wonderful city of Glasgow. Dad then worked in Govan. I was going further north-west to Gare Loch, a sea loch in Argyll and Bute, about 25 miles from Glasgow. The loch, around six miles long and on average about a mile wide, is not at all what you might associate with potential Armageddon, as it’s mostly a very peaceful place, almost suburban in much of its appearance, flanked by the picturesque, affluent seaside town of Helensburgh, with its polished Edwardian and Victorian houses dominating the skyline of the eastern shore. The village of Rosneath lies on the western shore, among blue-green hills, and it’s at this point that Gare Loch narrows to just 600 metres wide, at what’s known as the Rhu Narrows, after the tiny village of the same name. Here, at its southern end, Gare Loch joins the Firth of Clyde, providing access through the North Channel to the main submarine patrolling areas of the North Atlantic.
It was further north on the eastern shore that the dominating fixture of the landscape lay in wait for this somewhat nervous-looking, anxious 18-year-old ‘man’. The Clyde Submarine Base, Faslane, had been the home of the British nuclear deterrent since 1968, and was the Royal Navy’s main presence in Scotland. Known as HMS Neptune, I was struck by its razor-wire security fences, the MOD policeman patrolling the perimeter fencing armed to the teeth, and the Comacchio Group of the Royal Marines doing hand-brake turns in their RIBs* as they raced up and down Gare Loch, keeping at bay any unwanted trespassers from the Faslane Peace Camp, a permanent CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) site since 1982.
The base had the usual accommodation blocks, parade squares, offices and training centres, as