HMS Alderney (S66): Eight Commissions and a Home in Nova Scotia

Constructed at Barrow

HMS Alderney was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow, launched on 25 June 1945 with Mrs Molly Wallis, wife of the bouncing bomb inventor Barnes Wallis, serving as sponsor, a nice link between two very different branches of British wartime engineering.

She was the twelfth of her Amphion-class sisters, displacing 1,360 tons on the surface and armed with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes carrying twenty torpedoes, alongside a 4-inch gun and a 20mm cannon.

A Remarkable Eight Commissions

Few submarines can claim to have been recommissioned as many times as Alderney, who by 1965 was recommissioning for the eighth time, a genuine testament to how much useful service the Navy continued to extract from a well-built Amphion-class hull long after her original construction.

Three of those commissions, between 1954 and 1963, were spent with the 6th Submarine Squadron based at Halifax, Nova Scotia, conducting training exercises alongside Canadian forces, a valuable slice of Cold War-era Commonwealth naval cooperation.

Modernisation and Public Appearances

Alderney underwent a substantial modernisation at Portsmouth Dockyard between 1956 and 1958, keeping her equipment current, before making public appearances at Portsmouth Navy Days in both 1965 and 1966, giving the public a rare close-up look at one of the Navy's hardworking Cold War submarines.

The End of Her Service

HMS Alderney was decommissioned in 1966 and eventually broken up at Troon in Scotland on 1 February 1970, bringing to a close a long and well-travelled career that had taken her across the Atlantic to train alongside Canada's own submariners on multiple occasions.