HMS Grampus (S04): Three Weeks Hunting for Holes in the Polar Ice

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Grampus was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 30 May 1957 and commissioned on 19 December 1958, a Porpoise-class submarine displacing 2,080 tons on the surface and 2,450 tons submerged, capable of 17 knots submerged.

She was one of eight Porpoises, the first British submarines designed from scratch after the war, and HMS Porpoise explains what the class was for. Seventeen knots dived was a great deal for a diesel boat in 1958 and it is the number that made the Arctic work possible at all, because speed under ice is the difference between reaching the next hole in it and not.

Three Weeks Under the Ice

Grampus came back to Gosport on 1 April 1963 with her hull lightly damaged, after spending three demanding weeks beneath the polar icecap, searching for the gaps and thin patches, known as polynyas, that would allow a submarine to surface safely through Arctic ice, exactly the kind of specialised, high-stakes navigation that defined Cold War submarine operations in northern waters.

Looking for Holes

It is worth being clear what she was actually doing, because three weeks looking for gaps is not sightseeing. A polynya is an area of open water surrounded by ice, kept clear by current or wind, and a lead is a crack between floes. For a diesel submarine they are not a convenience, they are the only way of staying alive: she has to reach the air to charge her batteries, and under a solid pack there is none. HMS Finwhale sets out how brutal that arithmetic is.

The problem is that polynyas move. They open and close with the wind and the current, they freeze over, and one that was there last week may be four feet of new ice today. A chart of them is out of date almost as soon as it is drawn. So the job was not to find a particular hole but to learn the pattern: where they tend to form, how thick the ice is in different places, and what the underside of the pack looks like on an upward-pointing echo sounder.

That last detail is the one that matters, because it is how you tell four feet of ice from forty. A submarine coming up under thin ice can break through it with her fin. Coming up under thick ice destroys the fin, the masts and the periscopes, and leaves her blind, deaf and unable to signal, several hundred miles under a roof.

Which brings us to five easily missed words: "with her hull lightly damaged". Grampus did not come home marked because of the weather. She came home marked because she had been in physical contact with the ice, repeatedly, which is what the job required. Every lesson she brought back was paid for with a dent.

She was commanded the following year by Lieutenant-Commander J.F. Woodward, who would go on to a distinguished later career.

A Distinguished Later Career

That is one of the great understatements. J. F. Woodward is Admiral Sir John Woodward, known universally as Sandy, and in 1982 he commanded the British carrier battle group in the Falklands War.

He had come to Grampus by the usual road and rather faster than most. He passed the Submarine Command Course in 1960, the examination the Royal Navy calls the Perisher because failing it ends your career in submarines that afternoon, and got HMS Tireless as his first command. Promoted lieutenant commander in May 1962, he was given Grampus not long afterwards, taking her on from the boat that had just come back from the icecap. He was in his early thirties and still learning his trade in a diesel submarine.

After her he went nuclear, as second in command of HMS Valiant, and left her as a commander in 1967. He then went back to HMS Dolphin as Teacher, the officer who runs the Perisher and decides who is fit to command a submarine and who is not, which is about as clear a statement of the Navy's opinion of him as exists. He took HMS Warspite in December 1969.

Then the South Atlantic. As Rear Admiral he commanded Task Force 317.8 from HMS Hermes, fighting a war eight thousand miles from home with no land-based air cover, against an enemy flying from his own mainland, and he brought it off. He was knighted for it. He was also the officer whose request for a change to the rules of engagement led to HMS Conqueror sinking the Belgrano, which is still argued about and which he defended for the rest of his life.

He was made Flag Officer Submarines in 1983, vice-admiral in 1984 and admiral in 1989. All of which began, as far as command at sea goes, in a diesel submarine of 2,080 tons that spent her spring bumping into the underside of the Arctic.

A Tangle With a French Trawler

On 11 January 1968, Grampus became entangled in the nets of the French trawler Fomalhaut in the English Channel, an unglamorous but particularly hazardous hazard of submarine life in busy fishing waters, and surfaced so the two crews could spend the best part of three hours working the nets free together.

The word "hazardous" there is not decoration. A submarine at periscope depth cannot see a trawl and a trawler cannot see a submarine, and when the two meet the net wraps round the fin or the propeller and the two vessels are suddenly tied together. If the submarine is the heavier, the trawler is pulled over and down, and small fishing boats have been lost that way with all hands, in British waters, more than once. If the net fouls the screw the submarine may not be able to move.

What happened on 11 January 1968 is therefore the good version. Grampus surfaced, which is the right and honest thing to do and not something every submarine did, and both crews spent the best part of three hours in the Channel in January cutting and untangling a French trawler's gear until everybody could go home. Nobody was hurt and the Fomalhaut got her nets back.

She went on to take part in joint oceanographic operations with the American submarine USS Tigrone in 1972, and paid a visit to Funchal in Madeira that February.

A Final Role as a Target

Rather than ending her days at the breaker's yard, HMS Grampus sank on 18 September 1980 in Loch Fyne while under tow as a sonar target, settling upright on the loch bed at a depth of 120 metres, an unusual but oddly fitting final chapter for a submarine that had spent so much of her career hunting and being hunted beneath the waves.

She is still there, which is the part that surprises people. Loch Fyne is a deep sea loch on the Clyde, long used for acoustic trials because it is sheltered, steep-sided and quiet, and Grampus was being towed as a sonar target when she went down on 18 September 1980. She was not raised. She sits upright on the bottom in about a hundred and twenty metres.

There is a certain symmetry in it. Her most notable weeks were spent finding out what the underside of the Arctic looked like on a sonar set, and she finished by becoming the thing on the sonar set: a submarine-shaped object on the bottom of a Scottish loch, at exactly the depth and in exactly the conditions the Royal Navy wanted for practice. She had been twenty-two years in commission, and she has now been on the floor of Loch Fyne for rather longer than that.