HMS L56: A Govan-Built Submarine of the Interwar Years

Built at Govan

HMS L56 was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at their Govan shipyard on the Clyde, launched on 29 May 1919 and commissioned on 3 September that year, one of the late-model L-class submarines that, like several of her sisters, entered service only after the First World War had already ended.

She had been laid down on 16 October 1917, when the war she was meant for still had thirteen months to run, and she belongs to the last and largest group of the class, the L50 boats. Twenty-five of those were ordered from seven different yards in the expectation that the fighting would continue into 1919 and 1920. Seven were finished, L52, L53, L54, L55, L56, L69 and L71. The Armistice cancelled the rest where they stood, some of them already on the slip, and L56 is one of the handful that got far enough along to be worth completing. HMS L53, built by Armstrong Whitworth on the Tyne, is another.

Being commissioned and being at sea were not the same thing in 1919. The Royal Navy that had ended the war with the largest submarine force in the world spent the following three years shrinking it hard, and boats that were technically complete sat with reduced complements waiting for men and money. L56 was not brought up to full crew until 29 November 1921, two and a half years after she went down the ways at Govan. She had been a commissioned warship for longer than most people spend in a job before she had enough people aboard to fight her.

A Well-Armed Design

L56 displaced 960 tons on the surface and 1,150 submerged, capable of 17 knots on the surface and 10.5 knots submerged, powered by two Vickers diesel engines and armed with six 21-inch bow torpedo tubes carrying twelve torpedoes, alongside two 4-inch deck guns, crewed by 44 officers and ratings, a solid and capable design that continued to serve the Navy well through the interwar years despite arriving just after the conflict she was built for.

The pair of 4-inch guns is the detail worth pausing on, because it made her among the most heavily gun-armed submarines Britain ever built and it tells you what the Admiralty thought submarines were for. One sat forward of the conning tower and one abaft it, on a structure lengthened specifically to carry them. The earlier L boats had four bow tubes and two beam tubes; the L50 group dropped the beam tubes, went to six in the bow, and put the weight saved into artillery.

The thinking behind that was perfectly sound and turned out to be wrong. A torpedo in 1918 was slow, temperamental and carried in small numbers, while a submarine on the surface was faster than most merchant ships and could sink one with a few shells for nothing. Gun action was the efficient way to do the job, and a boat that could out-shoot an armed trawler had a real advantage. What killed the idea was aircraft and radar, neither of which mattered much in 1918 and both of which made surfacing to fight a way of getting killed. The guns came off British submarines steadily thereafter, and the six bow tubes turned out to be the part of the L50 design worth keeping.

The Sister Who Did Not Come Home

Six days after L56 was launched at Govan, one of the seven completed boats of her group was lost with every man aboard. On 4 June 1919 L55 was operating in the Gulf of Finland against the Bolshevik fleet, part of a British campaign in the Baltic that is now almost entirely forgotten. She fired two torpedoes at the destroyers Gavriil and Azard, missed with both, broke surface where she should not have been and was shelled. The pressure hull held. She then went into a British-laid minefield and did not come up. Forty-two men were killed.

That is not where it ends. The Soviet navy raised her in 1928, nine years later, and the bodies of her crew were put aboard the merchantman Truro, handed over at Reval in Estonia on 30 August 1928 with an Estonian guard of honour firing three volleys and Royal Marine buglers sounding the Last Post, and brought home for burial at Haslar. The submarine herself was rebuilt at Leningrad and recommissioned into the Soviet navy on 7 August 1931, still carrying her British number. She spent longer serving Russia than she had served Britain.

It is worth setting L56 against that. The two boats came from the same programme and were built to the same drawings, and one of them was lost within months of entering service while the other lasted nineteen years. Nothing L56 did explains the difference. She was simply not sent to the Baltic in the summer of 1919.

Nineteen Years on the Navy List

What she did in between is recorded in the Navy Lists rather than in anybody's memoirs, and it amounts to this. By March 1925 she was serving with the Second Submarine Flotilla in the Mediterranean, and she was still on that station into 1929. By the middle of 1931 she had come home to the Fifth Submarine Flotilla, where she remained on the books until at least mid-1937. She was reduced to reserve on 8 January 1936. That is the whole of it. No patrol, exercise or incident of hers survives in any source worth relying on, and the honest position is that a great deal happened aboard her which nobody wrote down.

The men who commanded her are better recorded than the boat. Lieutenant-Commander George C. P. Menzies had her through the summer and autumn of 1930; Lieutenant-Commander Sydney M. Raw for most of 1932; Lieutenant in Command Guy Grantham from 4 November 1932 to 1 May 1933; Lieutenant-Commander Lewis B. A. Majendie for the year after that; and Lieutenant-Commander Cyril J. Firth from 16 May 1934.

Grantham is the name to notice. He had joined the Royal Navy in 1918 and was thirty-two when he had L56, a lieutenant running a thirteen-year-old submarine out of a home flotilla. He finished as Admiral of the Fleet Sir Guy Grantham, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, the officer commanding the naval task force at Suez in 1956, and Governor of Malta from 1959 to 1962. Which is the ordinary shape of these things. Nobody aboard a small elderly boat in 1932 knew which of them it was going to be.

Her sisters had spread themselves across the empire. L boats were the backbone of the British submarine service through the 1920s, working from home waters, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the China Station, and roughly thirty of them were still running at the end of that decade with another ten in reserve. They were the boats on which the men who fought the next war learned the trade.

The End of Her Service

HMS L56 was sold for scrap on 25 March 1938, closing out nearly two decades of quiet interwar service just as Europe once again edged toward war, part of the steady turnover of older submarines that made way for the newer designs the Navy would need in the conflict soon to come.

The date was not arbitrary and it was not about her condition. The 1930 London Naval Treaty capped Britain at 52,700 tons of submarines, full stop, which turned the fleet into a fixed box: a new boat could only be built if an old one came out. By the middle of the decade the Admiralty wanted the S class for the North Sea and the Mediterranean and the T class for longer ranges, and the tonnage for them had to come from somewhere. It came from the L boats. L56 was sold so that something else could be laid down, which is a tidier ending than most submarines get.

Three of her class were still going in 1939 and finished their lives training the crews of the S boats that had displaced them. L56 missed that by a year. She had been launched into a navy that no longer needed her, kept for nineteen years because she was useful and paid for, and disposed of the moment her tonnage was worth more than she was. There is no drama in it at all, which is exactly why it is worth writing down: this, rather than the Baltic, is what happened to most submarines.