HMS Cachalot (S06): A Postwar Pioneer at the Silver Jubilee Review

Constructed at Greenock

HMS Cachalot was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, launched on 11 December 1957 and commissioned on 1 September 1959, one of the Porpoise-class submarines that were the first operational submarines built for the Royal Navy after the Second World War.

Their design deliberately incorporated lessons drawn from captured German Type XXI U-boats alongside Britain's own wartime experimental work, resulting in a particularly modern postwar submarine displacing 2,080 tons on the surface and armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes.

What the Porpoises were and why they mattered is set out with HMS Porpoise, the lead boat, and the class went on to do a great deal: HMS Finwhale took a submarine ninety-five miles in under the polar ice, HMS Grampus spent three weeks looking for holes in it, and HMS Sealion finished her days as a schoolroom. Cachalot did none of that. The standard reference works give her a relatively uneventful career, and the surviving record bears them out: no collision, no incident, no operation that has been released. Eighteen years of it, and one very well documented afternoon.

The yard is worth more attention than she usually gets. Scotts of Greenock had been building ships on that stretch of the lower Clyde since 1711 and have a decent claim to being the oldest shipbuilding firm in the world. They took up submarines before the First World War and were still at it half a century later, which is a very long run in a trade that ate companies. Cachalot was laid down there on 1 August 1955, launched on 11 December 1957 and handed over on 1 September 1959, and within a decade the firm had been folded into Scott Lithgow as the Clyde consolidated its way towards the end.

The Cachalot Before Her

Scotts had built a submarine of that name once already, and hers is the career this one never had. HMS Cachalot (N83) was launched at Greenock on 2 December 1937, a Grampus class minelayer, from the family of big, slow boats HMS Porpoise (N14) had begun: built to carry mines out and lay them in somebody else's water. In August 1940 she torpedoed and sank the German submarine U-51 in the Bay of Biscay, which is a rare thing for any submarine to manage. The following month a German auxiliary minesweeper ran onto one of the mines she had laid and went down. Two kinds of kill, by two entirely different methods, inside five weeks.

She went to the Mediterranean in 1941 and did not come back. On 26 July she left Malta for Alexandria with instructions to look out for a tanker running to Benghazi. At two in the morning on 30 July a destroyer came at her and she dived; when she surfaced again the Italian torpedo boat Generale Achille Papa rammed her. Her people scuttled her in two hundred fathoms and abandoned ship. The whole ship's company was taken prisoner and survived, with one exception: a Maltese steward named Muscat was lost. Losing one man from a submarine sunk in the Mediterranean in 1941 is an extraordinary outcome, and it is worth recording that it was the steward.

There is a neatness in the two boats being built by the same firm on the same river, twenty years apart, to do completely different jobs. The first was a minelayer built for a war everybody could see coming and she was on the bottom inside four years. The second was built to hunt Soviet submarines in a war that was never fought, and she lasted eighteen years and died in a scrapyard. Which of those is the better outcome depends entirely on what you think navies are for.

Taking Her Place at the Silver Jubilee

Cachalot took part in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review off Spithead as part of the Submarine Flotilla, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the Royal Navy and a proud moment for any vessel in the fleet, marking Queen Elizabeth II's twenty-fifth year on the throne.

It is worth setting out what she was lying in the middle of, because the numbers do not come round again. The Queen reviewed the fleet at Spithead on 28 June 1977 from the Royal Yacht, and the lines she passed down held two aircraft carriers, Ark Royal among them, two cruisers, an assault ship, seventeen destroyers, eighteen frigates and fourteen submarines, with a crowd of minor warships and auxiliaries behind them and eighteen foreign ships as guests. Britain was still the third naval power in the world after the United States and the Soviet Union, and Spithead was full.

Fourteen submarines is the figure to hold onto. They lay in their own lines, low and black and much less impressive from a distance than a frigate, which is the usual fate of submarines at a fleet review. Cachalot was one of them, eighteen years old and ten weeks from the end of her front-line life, and nobody watching from Southsea would have picked her out from her sisters.

Nor was she the only thing there that was nearly finished. Ark Royal, the great attraction of the day and the last conventional British aircraft carrier, paid off in 1978 and was sold for scrap in 1980. The 1977 Review is remembered now as the last of the really large British fleet reviews, and a good deal of what was moored at Spithead that afternoon was gone within five years. It was a photograph of a navy on the way down, taken in bright sunshine with everybody in their best uniform.

The End of Her Service

HMS Cachalot came off the front line at Devonport in September 1977, shortly after her appearance at the Fleet Review, and spent two years laid up in reserve before being sold for scrap on 12 November 1979 and broken up at Blyth in Northumberland, bringing to a close the career of one of the boats that had helped rebuild Britain's submarine service in the years immediately following the Second World War.

Ten weeks after the Review she was finished. She came alongside at Devonport in September 1977 and never went to sea operationally again, which made her one of the first of the Porpoises to go: HMS Walrus ran on into the second half of the 1980s, and several of the others outlasted Cachalot by years. Why she was picked first is not recorded anywhere worth quoting. It may have been her material state, it may have been the running down of the conventional flotillas as the Oberons and the nuclear boats took over, and it may simply have been that a decision had to fall on somebody.

Blyth, where they broke her up, is a Northumberland coal port that spent the later twentieth century taking apart the ships the yards further up the coast had spent the earlier half building. It is a fitting enough place for her to have ended. She was a good submarine that was never asked to do anything hard, which is what a deterrent force looks like when it works, and the only day of her life anybody photographed was the one where she lay still at anchor and was looked at.