HMS Artful (P456): The First of the A Boats to Be Streamlined

A Long Time Building

HMS Artful was ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 7 April 1943, one of the big A-class submarines designed for the war against Japan, whose origins are told in HMS Andrew (P423). She was laid down on 8 June 1944.

When Japan surrendered in August 1945 the Admiralty cancelled most of the class, but boats already well advanced were finished, and Artful was one of them, though nobody was in any hurry. She was launched on 22 May 1947, commissioned on 15 December that year for the 2nd Submarine Flotilla at Portland, and formally completed on 23 February 1948. It had taken nearly five years.

Her badge, approved in October 1945, showed a monkey on a green field, looking out at whoever was looking at it. It was a good choice for a ship called Artful. Her crew of six officers and fifty-five men may or may not have thought so.

A Slow Start

The Navy of the late 1940s had more submarines than it had men or money to run them, and Artful's first years were stop and start. In October 1948, eight months after she was completed, she was put into reserve.

In September 1949 she was recommissioned with the crew of HMS Aeneas to wait for a refit in Portsmouth Dockyard, which ran from that October to July 1950, when she joined the 3rd Submarine Flotilla. Within three weeks, on 26 July 1950, there was a fire in her control room, the heart of the boat, and she was back in dockyard hands until the end of August.

Somewhere in those years, too, she was pooped, the sailors' term for a sea breaking over the stern of a ship; one of her crew's accounts of it begins, memorably, "At about 0255 we were pooped."

Lent to Canada

From August to December 1951 Artful was on loan to the Royal Canadian Navy as a training submarine. Canada had a large anti-submarine fleet and aircraft to match, built up in the Battle of the Atlantic, but no submarines of its own to practise against, and in the early 1950s it borrowed Royal Navy boats to fill the gap.

The arrangement was later made permanent with a British squadron at Halifax, and that story is told in Andrew's article and in HMS Alderney (S66)'s. Artful was one of the early boats to go.

Being a target is not a glamorous job for a submarine, but it is a useful one: an escort crew that has never heard a real submarine on its sonar has very little chance against an enemy one.

Back home, she was brought forward from reserve in October 1952 for the 5th Submarine Squadron, and in June 1953 she was at Spithead for the Coronation Review of the Fleet.

The First to Be Streamlined

By then the Navy had learned a hard lesson from the last U-boats of the war. The German Type XXI had shown that a submarine built to be fast and quiet underwater, rather than on the surface, was very much harder to catch, and every navy wanted the same.

The A boats had been designed for the surface, with a big deck gun, a wide casing and a bridge cluttered with fittings, all of which slowed them down and made noise underwater. The answer was to rebuild them: guns off, casings cleaned up, and a tall new fin to enclose the periscopes and masts.

Artful was the first of her class to go through it. She went into reserve at Portsmouth for the work in August 1954 and came out in November 1955, rejoining the 3rd Squadron in her new form. She now needed fifty-eight men instead of fifty-five, and she looked like a different submarine.

The rest of the class followed her, all except HMS Aurochs, which was never rebuilt and kept her wartime looks to the end.

The Photograph

The photograph at the top of this page shows what the rebuilding was for. It was taken from the air in the mid-1950s, not long after her conversion, and she is running on the surface at speed, leaving a long white wake, her casing clean and uncluttered and her periscopes and masts raised above the new fin.

Low overhead, filling the top of the frame, is a Grumman Avenger AS.3 of the Royal Canadian Navy, a carrier-borne anti-submarine aircraft carrying the Canadian roundel. Joint exercises like this were the whole point of boats like Artful in the Cold War.

The submarine practised evading the aircraft, the aircraft practised finding the submarine, and both sides went home a little better at a job that, in a real war against the Soviet submarine fleet, would have mattered enormously.

Later Years

She went back into reserve in January 1957 for a further refit, returned to the 3rd Squadron in August 1959, and moved to the 2nd in November 1960. In July 1966, after one last refit, she joined the 1st Submarine Squadron at Gosport, and in 1967 she went with a Home Fleet squadron on a tour of the West Indies and was at Portsmouth Navy Days the same summer.

It was a good last year. By September 1968 she was lying at Portsmouth awaiting disposal, and she was formally decommissioned in September 1969. In June 1972 she was sold to be broken up, and she was scrapped at Cairnryan, near Stranraer.

The name did not die with her. In 2016 a new HMS Artful (S121) was commissioned, an Astute-class nuclear submarine, which is a very long way from a monkey on a green field and a deck gun that came off in 1955.