HMS Churchill (S46): The Last Submarine Chatham Ever Refitted

A Name Fit for a Submarine

There is a pleasing circularity to a submarine called Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty in the Second World War, Winston Churchill had taken a dim view of the Navy's habit of giving its submarines numbers instead of names, and insisted that the boats, and the men who were dying in them in considerable numbers, deserved better.

From the end of 1942 they got names, a few of them chosen personally by the Prime Minister, as the story of HMS Tiptoe relates. Twenty-odd years later the Navy returned the compliment.

The boat that became HMS Churchill owed her existence to a decision not to build something else. Through the early 1960s the Polaris programme had first call on every British yard and every nuclear engineer capable of building a submarine, and the fleet submarine programme that had begun with HMS Dreadnought and HMS Valiant had been put on hold to make room for it.

When the Labour government decided in 1965 not to build a fifth Polaris boat, the slot at Barrow was freed up, and Churchill was ordered from Vickers on 21 October 1965, nine months after Sir Winston's death. She was laid down on 30 June 1967 and cost, by the official estimate, £24,780,000, which in 1960s money was a great deal for something designed never to be seen.

She was the lead boat of a class of three, with HMS Conqueror and HMS Courageous following her. Inside the Navy they were known, a little unkindly, as the Valiant Repeats, because that is broadly what they were: the Valiant design again, with a long list of internal improvements, among them a binocular search periscope.

She was 285 feet long, displaced about 4,500 tons dived and carried thirteen officers and ninety men. One pressurised water reactor drove her at 28 knots under water, faster than she could manage on the surface, and six 21-inch bow tubes gave her the means to make use of the fact.

The Fin She Gave Away

Churchill managed to do a sister ship a considerable favour before she had even been launched. In October 1968 HMS Warspite came home from the Barents Sea with her fin badly damaged, after what is generally understood to have been a collision with a Soviet Echo II submarine she was shadowing; the official story involved an iceberg.

Warspite went to Barrow for repair, and the quickest way to give her a new fin was to take the one that had been built for Churchill, which was standing in the same yard waiting for a submarine to be attached to it. So Warspite went back to sea wearing Churchill's fin, and Churchill waited for another.

She was launched on 20 December 1968 by the Hon. Mrs Christopher Soames, born Mary Churchill, the youngest of Sir Winston's five children.

The Imperial War Museum holds the Ministry of Defence film of the day, and it is a very British occasion: a grey Cumbrian winter morning, a candy-striped launching pavilion, Vickers workers and naval cadets in the crowd, a White Ensign at the stern and a flag flying from the fin. The camera notes that the propeller and stabilising fins had not yet been fitted, which nobody seems to have minded.

Mrs Soames received her flowers, the bottle swung, and the lead boat of a new class of nuclear attack submarines slid down the ways into Walney Channel. Churchill was commissioned on 15 July 1970.

The Pump Jet Pioneer

Her most lasting contribution to the Royal Navy was something hardly anyone ever saw. Churchill was chosen to trial the first full-size submarine pump jet: instead of an open propeller, a rotor spinning inside a fixed duct, which is quieter, because an open propeller at speed sheds noise into the water, and noise is the one thing a hunter-killer submarine cannot afford.

A high-speed unit was tried first and then a low-speed one, and the results were good enough for the pump jet to be fitted to the rest of the class. Almost every British attack submarine since, through the Swiftsures and Trafalgars to the Astutes, has been driven by one (the first boats of the Swiftsure and Trafalgar classes went to sea with propellers and were the exceptions).

If the modern submarine service has a family tree, Churchill's stern is somewhere near the root.

She was also the boat the Navy used to evaluate American weapons. She tried out the United States Navy's Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo and the Harpoon anti-ship missile, and of the two only the Harpoon was taken into British service, going to sea operationally in Courageous in 1981.

The Navy had its own home-grown torpedo, the Tigerfish, and stayed loyal to it, a decision that did not always look clever in the years that followed.

The Work Nobody Talks About

For the rest of what Churchill did at sea, the honest answer is that very little of it is public. She spent her career in the submarine squadrons on the Clyde doing what the fleet submarines were built for: finding Soviet submarines, above all the missile boats, and following them, sometimes for weeks on end, so that if the worst ever happened they could be dealt with before they fired.

That work took the British boats into the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea and the North Atlantic, and the Ministry of Defence's line on it has not changed in fifty years: it is not the practice to disclose the operational movements of submarines. Ministers were still saying exactly that in the House of Commons in December 1990. Her patrol reports remain closed.

The photograph at the top of this page belongs to these years. It shows her in 1975, running hard on the surface in a grey, choppy sea, seen from the air off her port bow, with a white bow wave and a long wake trailing astern of the fin. 1975 was also the year she finished her first major refit, at Chatham, in November, which was the start of a long relationship with that dockyard.

Chatham's Last and Best

Churchill went back to Chatham in September 1980 for her second major refit. She arrived on 10 September, was docked in No. 6 Dock, part of the yard's nuclear complex, two days later, and work began on 13 October.

Planning had begun eighteen months before she arrived, and the package was the largest and most complicated, in man-hours, that the yard had ever taken on for a submarine: her propulsion and weapon systems were brought up to date and she came out of it a considerably more modern boat than she went in. She was the ninth nuclear submarine major refit Chatham had carried out, and she would be the last.

The refit was meant to take two years. It took longer, and with some excuse. In 1981, the year after she arrived, the government announced that Chatham Dockyard, which had been building and repairing ships for the Navy for four centuries, would close.

The men refitting Churchill spent roughly seventy per cent of the job knowing that their yard was going to shut and that many of them would be out of work when she left. On top of that came earlier financial restrictions, the national dispute of 1981 among civil servants, serious delays in stores and the technical problems that any job of that size throws up.

At the end of it the Project Manager described the refit, without obvious exaggeration, as "as difficult as anything attempted by anyone anywhere".

All of which meant that when the Falklands War broke out in April 1982, the lead boat of the Churchill class was sitting in a dry dock in Kent. Her sisters went south: Conqueror to sink the General Belgrano, Courageous to patrol the approaches, alongside HMS Spartan and the rest.

Churchill missed the war entirely, through no fault of her own, which is the sort of thing a submarine crew tends to mind a good deal more than the public might expect.

She was re-dedicated at Chatham on 7 May 1983, and it was a family affair. The guests of honour were Winston Churchill, the Conservative MP and Sir Winston's grandson, and his wife, fourteen and a half years after his aunt had launched the boat at Barrow. Chatham closed in 1984.

The yard's own historians, writing about her since, have called her their last and best, which is a fair epitaph for a refit carried out by people who knew it would be the final one.

The Refit That Stopped

Churchill went back to the Clyde and served through the later 1980s, the last full decade of the Cold War, when the Soviet submarine force was larger and quieter than it had ever been and the British fleet boats were busier than ever. In 1989 she went into Rosyth for another refit, a year after Warspite had gone in for hers.

She never came out of it. On 25 July 1990, eight months after the Berlin Wall came down, the Defence Secretary announced the Options for Change review, and with it the news that the Navy would keep about sixteen submarines in the longer term.

The oldest nuclear boats were the obvious candidates to go, and in the autumn of 1990 ministers confirmed that Churchill, Conqueror and Warspite would all be decommissioned.

Age, capability, material state and running costs had all been weighed, the Commons was told, and in one terse sentence in October: "Work on Churchill's refit has therefore stopped." When MPs asked what the refit had cost, including the bill for cancelling it, the answer was that this was still being negotiated with the contractors and was commercially confidential.

Churchill was formally decommissioned on 28 February 1991, after a little over twenty years in commission, and she has not moved far since.

Waiting at Rosyth

Her fuel was removed and she was laid up afloat at Rosyth, in the non-tidal basin on the Forth where the Navy keeps its decommissioned nuclear submarines in Scotland.

The defuelling, de-equipping and preparation for lay-up cost £11.2 million, according to figures given to Parliament in 1996, and every boat in that basin costs around £50,000 a year to keep afloat and needs docking roughly every ten years at around £3 million a time. She has now been laid up for well over thirty years, a good deal longer than she was ever in commission.

She has company. Seven decommissioned nuclear submarines are earmarked for dismantling at Rosyth and twenty at Devonport, part of a queue that began to form when the original plan, to sink the old hulls in the deep ocean, was ruled out by the international ban on dumping radioactive waste at sea.

The first boat to be taken apart completely is HMS Swiftsure, in dry dock at Rosyth, which lost her fin to the cutters in June 2025. Churchill is further down the list. It would not be the first time she has handed a fin over to someone else, although this time she will not be getting it back.

A Spark of the Old Flame

Her badge and motto came to her from her predecessor, the destroyer HMS Churchill (I45), one of the fifty old American destroyers handed to Britain in 1940. The badge, approved in October 1941, takes the white lion of the Churchills' ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, holding a staff and a red flag, with a five-pointed star added to mark her American origins.

The motto is Veteris vestigia flammae: a spark of the old flame. It suited a submarine named after a man who had once fought for submarines to be given names at all.

Churchill never fired a shot in anger, and her moment of fame in 1982 went to her sister. But she gave the Royal Navy the pump jet, she gave Warspite a fin, she gave Chatham a final job worth being proud of, and she gave the deterrent's hunters two decades of work in waters nobody will tell us about.

For a boat whose career was spent avoiding attention, that is a good deal to leave behind.