HMS Courageous (S50): A Cold War Veteran Preserved at Devonport

A Churchill-Class Fleet Submarine

HMS Courageous was a Churchill-class nuclear fleet submarine, commissioned on 16 October 1971 as part of the same class as HMS Conqueror and Churchill herself, built to hunt Soviet submarines at the height of the Cold War.

She was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, her keel laid on 15 May 1968 and her hull launched on 7 March 1970, and she was the last of only three Churchills ever completed. The class had a rather deflating unofficial name inside the Navy: the Valiant Repeats, because they were essentially improved copies of HMS Valiant, which had followed Britain's first nuclear boat HMS Dreadnought. Repeat or not, Courageous was a substantial thing: 285 feet long, 4,300 tons on the surface and 4,800 dived, better than 28 knots underwater against 18 on the surface, six 21-inch tubes, and 116 men living inside her. A nuclear submarine is faster submerged than surfaced, which sounds wrong until you remember that a hull shaped for the deep does not enjoy the waves at all.

Her whole operational life was spent with the Third Submarine Squadron at Faslane, on the Gareloch, and her patrols ran mostly into the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Her first commission alone took in six extended patrols and a Mediterranean deployment, and earned her the Hook 'Em award from the United States Navy, which is the sort of recognition an American anti-submarine community does not hand out for turning up. In between she showed herself off at Corfu, Gibraltar, Bergen, Liverpool, Hull and Barry Island, the last of which must have made for an interesting contrast with the Cold War North Atlantic.

She went into Chatham in September 1976 for a major refit and did not come out until August 1978, nearly two years alongside in a dockyard that would itself be closed within six years. What followed was the most quietly significant thing she did. Courageous became the Royal Navy's trials submarine for the Sub-Harpoon anti-ship missile, spending nine months based at San Diego in California working the weapon up, and in 1981 she became the first British submarine to carry it operationally. A submarine that can strike a surface ship from over the horizon, rather than closing to torpedo range and hoping, is a different proposition altogether, and Courageous is where that capability entered the fleet.

Deployed to the Falklands

In 1982, Courageous was sent south with the British task force during the Falklands War to help retake the islands from occupying Argentine forces, returning home later that year without damage, a demanding and lengthy deployment that formed one of the defining moments of her career.

The specifics are worth having. She sailed on 12 May 1982 under Commander Rupert Best, who had taken command only that January, and she was one of several nuclear boats committed to the South Atlantic. HMS Conqueror, her own sister, was already there and had sunk the General Belgrano on 2 May. HMS Spartan had been first on station. HMS Splendid was south as well, and so, remarkably for 1982, was the diesel-electric HMS Onyx, the only conventional British submarine to reach the war.

What Courageous actually did down there is another matter. The Royal Navy has never given a full public account of its submarine operations in the Falklands, and the patrol reports remain closed. What can be said is that the nuclear boats spent the campaign enforcing the exclusion zone and, after 2 May, holding the Argentine surface fleet in harbour, where it largely remained for the rest of the war. That is an achievement that leaves almost no trace in a logbook, because the measure of it is a thing that did not happen.

Decommissioning and Preservation

HMS Courageous was decommissioned in 1992, and rather than being scrapped like so many of her contemporaries, she survives today as a preserved museum ship managed by the Devonport Naval Heritage Centre.

She paid off in April 1992 after twenty years and six months in commission, and she was defuelled, which is the step that makes the difference between a preserved submarine and a stored one. Volunteers opened her to visitors from around 2002, and across the following fourteen years some 300,000 people went through her. After a refurbishment she was formally reopened on 7 June 2016 by Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, a former First Sea Lord, and taken into the National Museum of the Royal Navy's collection.

A far larger plan grew up around her. In October 2021 the National Museum of the Royal Navy agreed to adopt and lead the first phase of a scheme to move Courageous into No.1 Historic Dock in Devonport's South Yard and build a Cold War Centre around her, with total costs put at roughly fifteen million pounds and an ambition to keep her as a dry-docked exhibit for fifty years or more. It did not survive the decade's finances. On 22 February 2023 the museum published a statement announcing that it would withdraw from its activity at Devonport from the start of April that year, saying it had not proved possible to find the funds or the staff to support the operation of Courageous, and the project team later confirmed the centre could not be delivered in the immediate future.

So she waits, which is a slightly melancholy end for a boat named Courageous. She is berthed inside Devonport Naval Base, and it is worth being clear that she is not open to the public in any ordinary sense: access is normally restricted to dockyard passholders, with a limited number of eligible group visits arranged on at least twenty-eight days' notice. Anyone who does get aboard walks through the messes, the control room, the bunk spaces, the radio shack and the torpedo compartment, and comes out with a much clearer idea of what 116 men shared for months at a time. She remains the only decommissioned nuclear submarine anywhere in the United Kingdom that anybody can walk through at all, which is precisely why the stalled plan still matters.

The Boats She Left Behind

Her position makes a good deal more sense next to what became of everybody else. Britain built nuclear submarines for decades without ever settling how to take one apart again. The original intention was to fill the hulls with concrete and sink them in deep ocean, which stopped being an option when the disposal of nuclear waste at sea was banned in 1983, and no funded replacement plan appeared for a very long time afterwards. The result is a queue. More than twenty decommissioned nuclear submarines are still floating in the non-tidal basins at Devonport and Rosyth, seven in Scotland and sixteen in Devon, and most of the Devonport boats have still not had their fuel removed. HMS Dreadnought paid off in 1980 and has now been laid up for longer than she was ever in commission.

The backlog has at last begun to move. HMS Swiftsure, decommissioned in the same year as Courageous, was picked as the demonstrator boat and is being taken apart at Rosyth by a method no other country has attempted. That leaves Courageous in a genuinely unusual position. Of all the boats of her generation she is the one that was defuelled, tidied up and kept whole rather than stored, cut up or waiting her turn, and whatever happens to the museum plan, that decision has already preserved something the other twenty-odd will not leave behind.