HMS Aeneas (P427): The Submarine That Played a Bond Villain's Boat

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Aeneas was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 28 April 1944, launched on 5 October 1945 and commissioned on 31 July 1946, an Amphion-class submarine developed from the wartime T-class design, displacing 1,385 tons on the surface and armed with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes alongside a 4-inch deck gun, three machine guns and an Oerlikon 20mm cannon.

She is another of the A boats laid down for the Pacific war and finished after it, and like her sisters she went through the 1950s streamlining programme that stripped the gun off the casing and reshaped her for underwater speed. She also wore three different pennant numbers in her life, which is worth knowing when looking at photographs of her: P427 as completed, S72 after the Royal Navy moved submarines off the wartime P-series, and briefly SSG72 in the 1970s while she was carrying an experimental missile system. HMS Alderney and HMS Andrew went through the same renumbering.

Training a Future Admiral of the Fleet

In 1950, Aeneas was visited by nuclear submarine engineers from the Harwell Laboratory, an early sign of the direction the Submarine Service was heading, and between 1951 and 1952 she carried a young officer named John Fieldhouse, who would go on to become Admiral of the Fleet and command British forces during the Falklands War.

That visit is a small thing with a long shadow. In 1950 Britain had no nuclear submarine, no design for one and no reactor small enough to put in a hull, and the men from Harwell who came aboard a diesel-electric boat at the start of that decade were trying to work out what the problem even looked like. It took another ten years and a great deal of American help before HMS Dreadnought commissioned, and by then Aeneas was fourteen years old. She spent her whole career being the sort of submarine that the thing they were designing would make obsolete. As for the young officer aboard her in 1951, HMS Walrus carries the rest of what became of John Fieldhouse.

She took part in the Coronation Review of the Fleet for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a proud moment for any warship of the era.

A Star Turn in You Only Live Twice

Aeneas achieved a rather different kind of fame in 1967, playing the part of the fictional submarine M1 in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, a fun bit of Cold War-era cinema trivia for a boat that spent most of her career in far less glamorous, entirely serious naval work.

The details of that are better than the fact. Her pennant number was repainted for the cameras, P427 becoming M1, which is why the submarine in the film has a designation no real boat has carried since the 1920s. She is the vessel M and Moneypenny work from after Bond's faked burial at sea, so a good deal of the first act happens inside a genuine Royal Navy submarine rather than a set.

The famous shot did not work. Aeneas was supposed to surface underneath the rubber dinghy carrying Bond and Kissy Suzuki and lift it clear of the water, and every attempt washed the dinghy away instead, which is what several thousand tons of submarine coming up under a small inflatable will reliably do. The solution was to film her diving beneath the boat and then run the footage backwards. It is a neat piece of practical film-making and it means the most-watched few seconds of any Royal Navy submarine's career are, technically, happening in reverse.

Testing Anti-Helicopter Missiles

In 1972, Aeneas was loaned to Vickers to support trials of the Submarine-Launched Airflight Missile, or SLAM, an experimental system intended to let a submerged submarine engage helicopters and low-flying aircraft, a particularly inventive if ultimately niche piece of Cold War weapons development.

SLAM deserves describing, because it is the only anti-aircraft missile system the Royal Navy has ever put on a submarine. The problem it addressed was real: by the 1960s the greatest threat to a conventional submarine was a helicopter, which can hover over a contact, drop torpedoes and cannot be reached by anything a submarine carries. A boat at periscope depth that has been found by a helicopter has essentially no answer except to go deep and hope.

Vickers fitted her with a cluster of Shorts Blowpipe missiles, the shoulder-launched weapon the Army used, mounted on a mast that could be raised from the fin like a periscope. The commanding officer could come to periscope depth, put the launcher up, aim it through an optical sight and fire at a helicopter without ever surfacing the boat. She carried the pennant SSG72 while it was fitted, the G marking her as a guided-missile submarine, which she was in the narrowest possible sense.

The trials worked, in that the thing functioned. It went no further because Blowpipe was the weak link: it was visually guided, meaning the operator had to fly it onto the target by eye through a sight, which was hard enough from solid ground and considerably harder from a mast on a submarine in a seaway. The Israeli navy fitted the system to its Gal-class boats for a time and later took it off again. Nobody has seriously tried to arm a submarine against aircraft since, and the helicopter remains the thing a conventional submarine fears most.

The End of the Line

HMS Aeneas was placed on the disposal list by the UK government in 1973 and sold on 14 November 1974, before being scrapped at Dunston on Tyne, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose service ranged from training future admirals to a memorable supporting role on the silver screen.

The name was well chosen for a boat of her generation. Aeneas is the Trojan who carries his father out of the burning city on his back and sails away to found something else, which is as good a description as any of what the A class did: built for a war that ended before they were finished, rebuilt in the 1950s for a different one, and then spent twenty years carrying the Royal Navy's submarine expertise forward until the boats that replaced them were ready.

By the time she went, the class was going with her. Sixteen A boats were completed out of forty-six ordered and almost all of them were gone within a few years of each other in the mid-1970s, pushed out by the Oberons below them and the nuclear boats above. Aeneas was broken up at Dunston on the Tyne, which is an unremarkable end, and she is remembered chiefly for two things she did that were nothing to do with what she was built for: appearing in a Bond film and carrying a missile system nobody adopted. There are worse ways for a submarine to be remembered than for the odd jobs, given that everything she did in her actual trade remains classified.