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.

Her keel had gone down on 6 February 1945 and she was not commissioned until 10 December 1946, which tells you most of what you need to know about her. The Amphions, the A class, were designed for the Pacific: long-ranged, fast on the surface, air-conditioned for tropical work, and built to cross enormous distances to reach a patrol area off Japan. Alderney was launched seven weeks before the Japanese surrender and accepted into service sixteen months after the war she had been designed for was over. Forty-six were ordered and only sixteen were ever finished.

She also carried two different pennant numbers in her life, which causes confusion to this day among people looking at old photographs. She was completed as P416, under the wartime system, and became S66 when the Royal Navy dropped the P-series for submarines and moved them to S numbers. Both are correct, they refer to the same boat, and a print captioned P416 and one captioned S66 are simply pictures taken either side of the change. Her sisters in this collection kept their old numbers in their article titles, so HMS Andrew, HMS Aeneas and HMS Astute (P447) appear here under P-numbers while Alderney appears under her later one.

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.

On one occasion it stopped being training. In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Alderney and her sister HMS Astute (P447) were placed under Canadian operational control and sent to form part of an anti-submarine barrier strung between Newfoundland and the Azores, across the routes a Soviet submarine would take coming south into the Atlantic.

They found nothing, which was not for want of trying and not because there was nothing to find. Four Soviet Foxtrot-class boats had sailed for the Caribbean at the start of that month, each carrying a torpedo with a nuclear warhead. They went nowhere near the barrier, and three of the four were eventually forced to the surface by American forces a long way further south.

So the Halifax squadron spent the most dangerous fortnight of the Cold War doing in earnest precisely what it had spent eight years rehearsing, and the crews were told almost nothing about why. It is the clearest possible argument for the whole arrangement: the training was the point, and the one time it was needed it was already in place.

The Squadron Canada Borrowed

That arrangement is worth setting out, because it explains a good deal about how navies learn. Hunting submarines is the hardest thing a surface fleet does and it cannot be practised against anything but a real submarine, competently handled and genuinely trying not to be found. The Royal Canadian Navy in the early 1950s had a large and capable anti-submarine force and no submarines whatever to practise against. Until 1955 it made do by borrowing two Royal Navy boats a year at Halifax and by begging time from the Americans on both coasts, which was not enough.

In March 1955 the two navies agreed something more permanent. The 6th Submarine Squadron was formed at Halifax, made up largely of Royal Navy A-class boats under Royal Navy commanding officers, with the understanding that no more than half of any crew would be Canadian. Three A-boats had already arrived in 1954. It was a curious hybrid: British submarines, in a Canadian port, run for Canadian purposes, and it lasted until the late 1960s. Alderney did three of her eight commissions there, working against Canadian ships and Royal Canadian Air Force maritime patrol aircraft.

The squadron was always a stopgap and everybody knew it. What Canada actually wanted was submarines of her own, and she eventually got them: three Oberons built at Chatham and commissioned between 1965 and 1968, which is when the borrowed British boats began to go home. The long tail of that decision runs right through to HMS Osiris, sold to Canada for spares in 1989 to keep those same three running. Alderney was at the very beginning of a relationship that lasted half a century.

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.

Two years alongside is not a refit, it is a rebuild, and it changed what she was for. The A and T boats were reworked across the second half of the 1950s because their job had altered completely: they had been designed to sink Japanese merchant ships and were now expected to hunt Soviet submarines, which is a different problem requiring a different animal. The forward and after sections of the hull were rebuilt, the upper deck and the conning tower were lengthened and faired into a smooth streamlined fin, the sonar was greatly improved, and a snort mast was fitted, copied in principle from the schnorkel the Germans had used, so that she could run her diesels at periscope depth instead of surfacing.

The guns went, and so did four of her torpedo tubes. The 4-inch and the 20mm came off because a gun on the casing is a drag penalty and a noise source and there was nothing left worth shooting at with it; the two external tubes forward and the two aft were removed for the same reason, leaving six. Everything about the conversion was aimed at the same end: more speed and less noise underwater, at the cost of everything that had made her useful on the surface. The specification she was launched with in 1945 and the boat that came out of Portsmouth in 1958 were not really the same vessel.

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.

Her eighth and last commission, from 1965, was served much closer to home with the 1st Submarine Squadron at HMS Dolphin in Gosport, and it did not last long. Twenty-one years and eight commissions is a great deal of service out of a hull laid down in the last winter of the war, and by the middle sixties the A boats were being overtaken by the Porpoises and Oberons, which were quieter, deeper-diving and built for a different kind of war altogether. She lay around for another four years before the breakers at Troon got her.

It is worth pausing on the sponsor for a moment, because the coincidence is a good one. Molly Wallis launched her in June 1945, and her husband Barnes Wallis had spent the war designing things to destroy targets nobody could otherwise reach: the bouncing bomb, then Tallboy and Grand Slam. Alderney went on to spend her career being the target, letting other people practise finding her. Two entirely opposite approaches to the same problem, connected by a bottle of champagne on a Barrow slipway.