HMS Ocelot (S17): The Last Royal Navy Warship Built at Chatham

The Last Ship of Chatham Dockyard

HMS Ocelot was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 5 May 1962 and commissioned on 31 January 1964, an Oberon-class diesel-electric submarine and, remarkably, the last Royal Navy warship built there, though the yard went on to complete three further Oberon-class boats for the Royal Canadian Navy before shipbuilding at Chatham finally ended with the launch of HMCS Okanagan in 1966.

The distinction needs stating carefully, because it is easy to get wrong. Her keel was laid on 17 November 1960 and she went down No. 7 Slip in May 1962 as the last warship Chatham ever built for the Royal Navy. She was not the last hull off the slips: three more Oberons followed for Canada, and the story of what became of those is in HMS Osiris. But she was the last British one, and after four hundred years of building ships for the Navy, that is the line that mattered to the town.

Chatham had been a Royal Dockyard since the reign of Elizabeth I and had built HMS Victory. It survived the end of shipbuilding by turning to refitting submarines, including the nuclear ones, and then in 1981 it was announced that the yard would close altogether. It shut in 1984, taking some seven thousand jobs with it. So when Ocelot came home eight years later, she came back to a dockyard that no longer did any of the things it had been built for, and which had turned itself into a museum largely because there was nothing else left to do with four hundred years of buildings.

She displaced 1,610 tons standard and 2,410 tons submerged, armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes carrying 24 torpedoes, and crewed by 68 officers and ratings.

She used them hard. In her first three commissioned years alone Ocelot covered more than ninety thousand miles on exercises and trials, which is close to four times round the world, and she did it in the waters a Cold War conventional boat was expected to know: the Clyde approaches, the exercise areas off Londonderry, the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Later commissions took her to NATO exercises, more equipment trials and patrols as far out as the Caribbean. That is not a boat kept alongside for ceremonial purposes.

Clandestine Cold War Work

Ocelot joined the 3rd Submarine Squadron at Faslane for her first three years in service, and during the 1960s took part in clandestine operations, the kind of quietly sensitive Cold War work that Oberon-class boats became particularly well suited to, thanks to their exceptional quietness underwater. She also took her place in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review as part of the Submarine Flotilla.

What that work involved has never been described in any detail and it would be wrong to guess at it. The general shape of it is better set out in HMS Oracle and HMS Sealion, both of which carry what has actually been released about Oberon surveillance patrols.

The Night Artemis Went Down

One episode from her career is documented, and it is the best thing in her record. On 1 July 1971 the submarine HMS Artemis was lying alongside at HMS Dolphin in Gosport, taking on fuel. Her external tanks were being filled first, which pulled her down in the water, and the engine room hatch had been left open with power cables running through it so that it could not be shut. The sea came in over the sill and she went to the bottom of the creek in about nine metres of water, alongside her own berth, in peacetime, on a summer evening.

Twelve of the watchkeepers aboard got clear. Three did not, and were left in a forward compartment of a sunken submarine with the rescue teams talking to them from the surface. They stayed there through the night, and went up through the forward escape tower early the next morning when there was light enough to see them out. Ocelot's ship's company was among those who helped get them out. Artemis was raised on 6 July, never sailed again and was sold for scrap that December, which makes the three men who walked away the only thing salvaged from the whole business that was worth having.

Preserved at the Dockyard That Built Her

HMS Ocelot paid off in August 1991 and was sold in 1992, but rather than being scrapped, she was preserved as a museum ship at Chatham Historic Dockyard, the very yard where she had been launched three decades earlier, a fitting homecoming. Her interior was even added to Google Street View in November 2013, letting visitors explore the cramped world of a Cold War submariner from their own computer.

Getting her from scrap value to museum piece took three years of work between 1992 and 1995, including fitting out a sonar room she could be shown with, and since 1999 she has sat in a dry berth in No. 3 Dock rather than afloat, which is the arrangement most likely to keep a thin-skinned steel hull intact for another century. She is on the National Historic Fleet, the register of vessels judged to be of pre-eminent national significance, and she is toured in small groups because there is genuinely no other way to move people through her.

That last point is the argument for preserving a submarine at all. Reading that sixty-eight men lived inside a 295-foot tube conveys almost nothing. Edging along her passageway sideways, past bunks stacked between torpedo racks, conveys the whole thing in about four seconds.

She is not alone at Chatham either. The dockyard keeps three warships from three different centuries of its own history: the Victorian sloop HMS Gannet, built at Sheerness in 1878 for the sort of imperial policing that took her to the South Pacific, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea; the destroyer HMS Cavalier, launched in 1944 and now standing as the memorial to the 142 Royal Navy destroyers lost in the Second World War; and Ocelot. Sail and steam, guns, and a boat whose entire purpose was to be somewhere without anybody knowing.

Being preserved is not the same as being safe, which is worth saying because one of her sisters proves it. HMS Onyx was also saved, first as a floating museum at Birkenhead and then as the centrepiece of a heritage centre at Barrow. When that venture ran into debt she was taken by a liquidator as an asset, towed away to the Clyde in April 2014 and broken up that September. HMS Otus survives, but on the German Baltic coast, and HMS Otter only in pieces in a schoolroom in Orkney. Ocelot came through because she sits in a dry dock inside a national museum rather than afloat on somebody's balance sheet, which is the unglamorous reason most surviving ships survive.