HMS L53: A Submarine Built for a War That Ended Before She Was Finished

A Long Road to Completion

HMS L53 was built by Armstrong Whitworth at their Newcastle-upon-Tyne shipyard, laid down on 19 June 1917 in the midst of the First World War, launched on 12 August 1919 and finally completed at HM Dockyard Chatham on 16 January 1925, a long gestation that meant she entered service years after the conflict she had originally been ordered to fight in had ended.

Read those dates again, because they describe something close to abandonment. Seven and a half years passed between her keel being laid and her being handed over, and five and a half of them were spent in the water, launched, floating and unfinished. She went down the ways on the Tyne in August 1919 into a navy that had stopped wanting her nine months earlier, and there she stayed. In January 1925 she was towed the length of the east coast to Chatham Dockyard and completed there, by a different workforce in a different county, to a design that was by then eight years old.

The firm that launched her was in worse condition than the submarine. Armstrong Whitworth of Elswick had been one of the great armament builders of the world, and the collapse of warship orders after 1918 very nearly destroyed it. Attempts to move into cars and civil engineering went badly, the company became one of the earliest cases of the Bank of England stepping in to reconstruct a British industrial firm, and in 1927 what was left of it was folded into Vickers to become Vickers-Armstrongs. L53 was finished two years before the company that started her ceased to exist as an independent concern. The unfinished hull on the Tyne and the firm that owned it were both casualties of the same peace.

Her sister HMS L56 shows what a difference a few months made. L56 was launched eleven weeks earlier at Govan and was commissioned that September, and even she was not brought up to full crew until November 1921. The rest of their group was cancelled outright. Twenty-five boats of this design were ordered from seven yards and seven were completed, and which of them lived came down to little more than how far along the slip each one happened to be in November 1918.

A Capable Late-Model Design

As one of the late-model L-class submarines, L53 displaced 960 tons on the surface and 1,150 submerged, armed with six 21-inch bow torpedo tubes carrying twelve torpedoes in total, alongside two 4-inch deck guns, and crewed by 44 officers and ratings, a well-armed and capable design for her era even if she arrived rather later than originally intended.

By January 1925 the era in question had moved on without her. The design she was built to had been drawn for a war of surface gun actions against merchant shipping, which is why she carried two 4-inch guns, and HMS L56 sets out the thinking behind that at length. In the years she spent waiting on the Tyne the Royal Navy had tried and largely abandoned the steam-driven K class after a series of disasters, was building the enormous submarine cruiser X1 with four 5.2-inch guns in turrets, and had signed the Washington Treaty, which reshaped every navy that mattered. Submarines were being argued about at conference tables rather than designed for a war anybody expected next year.

None of which made her a bad boat. She was strongly built, well armed by the standards of anything her size, and she gave the Royal Navy fourteen years of service for a hull that had already been paid for. But a submarine that takes seven and a half years to finish is obsolescent on the day she commissions, and everyone involved knew it.

A Quiet Interwar Career

The boat left almost no record of what she did. Her commanding officers left a good deal more, and six of them are known by name: Lieutenant George Arthur Wallis Voelcker in 1926, Lieutenant Henry Leslie Spofforth Baker in 1931, Lieutenant Commander John Ronald Stewart Brown in 1932, Lieutenant Commander John Egerton Broome in 1933, Lieutenant Hugh Christopher Browne in 1935, and Lieutenant Commander William Kenneth Ramsden Cross in 1936.

Broome is the one to stop at. He had come out of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1923 and chosen submarines, and he had L53 as a lieutenant commander in his early thirties. Nine years later, as Commander Jack Broome, he was in charge of the close escort of convoy PQ 17, the Arctic convoy that the Admiralty ordered to scatter in July 1942 on a mistaken report that Tirpitz was at sea. Broome was ordered to take his destroyers away from the merchant ships he was protecting and did so, under protest, and twenty-four of the thirty-five merchantmen were hunted down over the following days. HMS Avenger carries the full account of what that convoy went through.

He spent much of the rest of his life on it. He wrote his own book about the convoy, and when David Irving published an account in 1968 that laid the disaster at his door, Broome sued. He won, took £40,000 in damages, an extraordinary sum for a libel at the time, and had the book withdrawn. Broome v Cassell and Co went on to the House of Lords and is still cited in English law on when exemplary damages may be awarded. It is a peculiar afterlife for a naval career, and none of it was foreseeable in 1933, when he was running an eight-year-old submarine that had taken seven and a half years to build.

The last of them shows the ordinary version of the same path. William Kenneth Ramsden Cross was born at Solihull in September 1903 and entered the Royal Navy as a cadet on 15 May 1917, aged thirteen, while the war he was too young for was still on. He was made lieutenant in 1926, went straight onto the submarine course at HMS Dolphin that August, and worked up through L25 as third hand, H48 as first lieutenant and then L18. By the time he was given L53 in 1936 he had spent a decade in small submarines learning how they behaved. That is what the interwar submarine service was for and it is why the boats were kept.

That is the real use of a boat like L53, and it is worth saying plainly because it does not appear in any list of achievements. She sank nothing and fought nobody. What she did was give a succession of young officers their own submarine to make mistakes in, in peacetime, before it mattered. The men who ran the Royal Navy's submarines and escorts in the Second World War learned their trade in boats exactly like her, and several of them learned it in this one.

The Ship She Lived Alongside

A submarine of that era had no proper home of her own. She was small, cramped and impossible to maintain from inside, so she lived alongside a depot ship that carried the workshops, the spare torpedoes, the sick bay, the offices and the bunks. From 1922 until 1936, which is very nearly the whole of L53's life, the depot ship for the L boats was HMS Lucia, and a photograph from 1931 shows L53 lying alongside her with L54, L56, L69 and L71. Those five were most of what remained of the group.

Lucia herself had a better story than any of the submarines she served. She had been built in England in 1907 as the Spreewald, a passenger and cargo liner for the Hamburg America Line running to the Caribbean, and the Royal Navy took her as a prize in 1914. She was converted into a submarine depot ship in 1916 and spent the next twenty years mothering British submarines, a German merchantman that had been captured and put to work and never went home.

She is also remembered for something that had nothing to do with her boats. On 4 January 1931 thirty of Lucia's own ship's company refused orders, because bad weather and a coming exercise had cost them their weekend leave, and on the 20th four of them were court martialled for mutiny. It was a small affair and it was settled quickly. It was also eight months before the far larger refusal at Invergordon, when the Atlantic Fleet stopped work over pay cuts, and the two are often mentioned together as symptoms of the same thing: a navy being squeezed hard through a decade of retrenchment, crewed by men whose conditions were getting worse rather than better. L53 was one of the submarines lying alongside while it happened.

Like many submarines completed after the war they were designed for, L53 went on to serve quietly through the interwar years, part of the Navy's peacetime submarine flotillas, before finally being sold for scrap on 23 January 1939, just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, closing the book on a submarine whose entire career had been shaped by arriving just too late for the conflict that created her.