HMS Oracle (S16): Secret Arctic Missions and a Starring Role on the BBC

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Oracle was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 26 September 1961 and commissioned on 14 February 1963, an Oberon-class submarine measuring 295.2 feet overall, displacing 2,410 tons submerged and crewed by 68 officers and ratings.

The name is unusually well chosen for what she turned out to do. An oracle sits in one place, listens, and tells you things you could not otherwise know, which is a fair description of a submarine on a surveillance patrol and a very fair description of a boat that spent her later years teaching other men how to do it. She was one of four Oberons off the Cammell Laird slips at Birkenhead, alongside HMS Odin among others.

The previous holder of the name had gone about things rather differently. HMS Oracle (1915) was a First World War destroyer who dealt with a U-boat by shooting at it and then driving straight into it, which is about as far from oracular subtlety as the Royal Navy has ever got. Two boats of one name, fifty years apart, and between them the whole change in how the Navy went about the submarine problem.

Secret Missions in the Arctic

In 1965, Oracle conducted a three-month secret Arctic observation mission as part of the wider Cold War intelligence-gathering effort, exactly the kind of sensitive, quietly dangerous work that Oberon-class boats excelled at thanks to their remarkably low underwater noise signature. She also took her place in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review.

That is very nearly everything that has ever been said about it in public, and it is worth resisting the urge to fill in the rest. What can be said is what the job generally consisted of: sitting quietly in cold water a long way from help, listening to Soviet ships and submarines, recording what they sounded like, and going home without anybody knowing you had been there. HMS Sealion carries more of what has been released about that kind of patrol. Three months is a long time to spend doing it.

Training the Navy's Future Submarine Commanders

Oracle went on to host trainee commanders for the legendarily demanding Perisher submarine command course, the gruelling assessment that every officer must pass before being trusted to command a Royal Navy submarine, and appeared in the BBC documentary series Submarine, which covered the course during the 1980s, giving television audiences a rare glimpse into one of the most secretive and high-pressure training programmes in the armed forces.

The course deserves explaining, because it is the reason her name is still known. Formally it is the Submarine Command Course, established by the Admiralty in 1917 when the war had made it obvious that officers could no longer be left to learn submarine command by doing it and hoping. It runs about four months: theory first, then simulators, then two months at sea off the west coast of Scotland, which is where a boat like Oracle came in. The last month is the hard part, a relentless run of search, detection, evasion, surveillance and simulated attack against as many as three frigates at once with aircraft overhead, and against another submarine.

Four or five officers take it at a time under a single instructor known simply as Teacher, always an experienced submarine commander. Teacher can take the boat if safety demands it and otherwise watches, questions and says nothing helpful. His assessment is final. There is no appeal and no resit, and this is where the nickname comes from: a little over half get through, and an officer who does not is finished in submarines. He does not get another posting in the branch and he does not go to sea in a boat again. By tradition he leaves the submarine the same day, and the rest of the course carries on without him.

What is being tested is narrower than it sounds and much harder. A submarine attacking a screened target has to raise a periscope into a sea full of people looking for periscopes, work out from a few seconds of glimpses how far away a ship is, which way it is heading and how fast, do the same for the escorts trying to run her down, and get the periscope back under before anybody sees the feather it makes. Then repeat, closing the range, while the escorts get nearer. The whole discipline is judgement under a stopwatch with an incomplete picture, and the reason Teacher can order the boat deep at any moment is that a student who misjudges it is not merely wrong, he is about to be run over by a frigate.

A boat of Oracle's type was close to ideal for teaching it. She was quiet enough to make the exercise realistic, small and handy enough to be worked hard in the confined water off the west of Scotland, and cheap enough to run that the Navy could afford to spend months of her life letting inexperienced officers make mistakes in her. Doing the same training in a nuclear boat, which is what eventually happened, costs a great deal more per hour and puts a far more valuable hull in the way of the frigates.

That is a great deal of pressure to apply to five men inside a hull three hundred feet long with nowhere in it to go and be alone, and it is exactly why the BBC wanted the story. The series was called Submarine, it ran to six parts, the first went out on 7 January 1985, and it was billed around the figure the Navy itself used: a million pounds a man to produce a submarine captain. It remains one of the few times the Submarine Service has let cameras anywhere near the thing it does not talk about. The course had run out of HMS Dolphin at Gosport for generations before moving north with the rest of submarine operations, and it is still run today, with boats like HMS Sovereign taking their turn as the training platform after Oracle's generation had gone.

The End of Her Service

HMS Oracle was decommissioned on 18 September 1993, transferred to Pounds scrapyard in Portsmouth in 1997, and completely broken up by mid-2003, bringing to a close the career of a submarine that had, in her time, played a real if quiet part in both Cold War intelligence gathering and the training of the Navy's future submarine captains.

The gap in those dates is worth noticing. She paid off in 1993, went to the scrapyard in 1997 and was not finally cut up until 2003, which means she spent a decade after the end of her career sitting at a wall, going nowhere, being slowly taken to pieces. That was not unusual. The Royal Navy retired its entire conventional submarine force inside a few years at the end of the Cold War, and the yards that could deal with them were neither numerous nor in any hurry. For a boat that spent thirty years being difficult to find, ten years tied up in Portsmouth in plain view is a peculiar way to finish.