HMS Opossum (S19): The Last Conventional Submarine Refit at Chatham

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Opossum was built by Cammell Laird and Company at Birkenhead, launched on 23 May 1963 with Lady Hezlet as sponsor, and commissioned on 5 June 1964, an Oberon-class submarine measuring 295 feet 3 inches in length, displacing 2,030 tons surfaced and 2,410 tons submerged, and capable of 17 knots underwater.

The sponsor is worth knowing about, because the name carries one of the great submarine reputations of the Second World War. Lady Hezlet was the wife of Arthur Hezlet, known throughout the service as Baldy, and on 8 June 1945 he had taken HMS Trenchant into the shallow, mined water of the Bangka Strait, found the Japanese heavy cruiser Ashigara, and fired a full bow salvo of eight torpedoes at four thousand yards. Five hit. HMS Terrapin carries that action in full, because Terrapin was Trenchant's regular partner until she was crippled three weeks earlier.

Hezlet commanded five submarines in the war, H44, Ursula, Trident, Thrasher and Trenchant, and afterwards went up faster than almost anybody: the Royal Navy's youngest captain at thirty-six and its youngest admiral at forty-five. He finished as Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Hezlet, KBE, CB, DSO and Bar, DSC, with an American Legion of Merit as well, and he lived until 2007. Having his wife break a bottle over a new submarine at Birkenhead in 1963 was the Royal Navy joining one generation of the trade to the next in the way it likes best.

The name had been in the fleet very recently. HMS Opossum (U33), a Black Swan class sloop, had spent the Second World War pulling downed airmen out of the sea and gone on to shell targets on the Korean coast, and she was sold for scrap in 1960, three years before this one was launched. HMS Opossum (U33) carries that story. The Royal Navy tends to bring a name back quickly when the previous holder did well, and a sloop that spent her career rescuing people and bombarding shore positions is about as far from a Cold War submarine as a warship can get while flying the same ensign.

The End of an Era at Chatham

Opossum arrived at Chatham Dockyard for refit on 27 November 1972 and departed on 9 August 1974, recommissioning that June following an extensive modernisation.

Her refit holds a genuine piece of dockyard history: it was the very last conventional submarine refit ever undertaken at Chatham before the yard moved over exclusively to nuclear vessels, a quiet but significant milestone in the story of one of Britain's oldest naval dockyards.

It is worth being clear how quiet, and how significant. Chatham had been building and repairing warships since the sixteenth century and had built a good share of the Oberons itself, HMS Ocelot among them. By the early 1970s the yard had been rebuilt around a nuclear refitting complex, and taking a diesel boat in was becoming an awkward use of an expensive facility. When Opossum came out in August 1974 that was the end of it: Chatham did nuclear submarines from then on, and nothing else.

It did not do them for long. The 1981 defence review marked Chatham for closure and the yard shut in 1984, ten years after Opossum left it. So her refit turns out to be the last of one kind of work in a dockyard that had only one more decade of any kind of work left in it. The nuclear complex, built at enormous cost, was used for barely a dozen years.

The Persian Gulf and the Last of Her Kind

Opossum deployed to the Persian Gulf during Operation Granby in 1991, the British contribution to the Gulf War, returning flying a Jolly Roger in the Royal Navy submarine tradition, before being decommissioned in June 1993 after roughly thirty years of service.

What the Jolly Roger Was Not Saying

The Jolly Roger is the part of that sentence carrying the weight. The custom goes back to the First World War, when an admiral called submarines underhand and un-English and suggested their crews should be hanged as pirates, and a submarine commander came home flying a skull and crossbones in response. It stuck. Boats sewed symbols onto it for what they had done: a bar for a ship torpedoed, a dagger for a special operation.

Opossum came back to Gosport in 1991 flying one, and that flag was the only public statement anybody made about what she had been doing. She had been landing and recovering Special Air Service and Special Boat Service parties in the Persian Gulf: putting men ashore on a hostile coast from a submerged submarine, and going back for them afterwards. The details have never been released and are not likely to be.

She was not alone at it. HMS Otus was doing the same work in the same war, and the whole business had a long Oberon pedigree that HMS Olympus sets out. It is also the clearest answer to the question of why a navy going all-nuclear kept a handful of old diesel boats on the books into the 1990s. A nuclear submarine cannot sit on the bottom in twenty metres of water off a defended coast for two days waiting for eight men in a canoe. An Oberon can.

She holds the distinction of being the last of the British Oberon-class submarines remaining in Royal Navy service, a fitting final chapter for a class that had served the Navy so well for so long.

It was the end of considerably more than a class. When Opossum paid off in June 1993, weeks after HMS Opportune and HMS Oracle, the Royal Navy stopped operating conventional submarines altogether, and it has not operated one since. Britain has been an all-nuclear submarine navy for over thirty years now, which puts her in a very small group: almost every other submarine-operating nation in the world runs diesel boats, because they are cheap, quiet and suited to shallow water.

Whether that was the right call is still argued about, and Opossum is the best exhibit for the case against, because the thing she was doing in 1991 is precisely the thing the Royal Navy can no longer do the same way. What the class was and why it was so good at that work is set out in HMS Oberon.

The other half of that argument is the export record, which is the strongest thing anybody can say for the design. Twenty-seven Oberons were built, and well under half of them were for the Royal Navy. The rest went to Australia, Canada, Brazil and Chile, which makes the class by a distance the most successful British submarine ever sold abroad, and several of those navies kept them running into the 1990s and beyond.

What replaced them in British service is the uncomfortable part. The four Upholders were built to take over the conventional role, entered service between 1990 and 1993, and were paid off within about four years when the decision was taken to go all-nuclear. All four were sold to Canada, where HMS Unseen became HMCS Victoria. Britain built a new class of conventional submarines, used them for four years, and gave the job up.

The End of the Line

HMS Opossum was scrapped in June 2001 at Pounds Shipbreakers in Tipner, Portsmouth, bringing to a close both her own career and, in a real sense, the story of the entire Oberon class in Royal Navy service.