HMS Otter (S15): The Target Boat That Ended Up in an Orkney Schoolroom

Greenock-Built

HMS Otter was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, launched on 15 May 1961 and commissioned on 20 August 1962, an Oberon-class submarine measuring 295.2 feet overall, displacing 2,410 tons submerged and crewed by 68 officers and ratings.

Her keel had been laid at Greenock on 14 January 1960, so she was the better part of three years in the making, and the Imperial War Museums hold photographs of her running her trials in December 1962, a few months after commissioning. Her badge was approved in September 1961 and is the best in the class by some distance: an otter, walking and looking out at the viewer, with a rainbow trout in its jaws, under the motto Hard to catch. Whoever settled on that had understood the job exactly. A submarine is an animal that takes what it wants and is extremely difficult to lay hands on afterwards.

She spent her first years with the 2nd Submarine Squadron at Devonport, working from the depot ships Forth and Adamant, and later with the 3rd Submarine Squadron at Faslane, based on Maidstone. Depot ships are one of the forgotten pieces of Cold War submarining: before the shore bases were built up, a squadron of boats lived alongside a converted mother ship that carried the workshops, the spare torpedoes, the sick bay and the bunks, so that crews came off patrol into something that at least had windows.

Her builders deserve a line of their own. Scotts of Greenock put more Oberons into the water than anybody else, eleven of the twenty-seven, and the export orders went through their sheds in particular: all six of the Australian boats and both of the Chilean ones were built on the lower Clyde. It was very nearly the last great run of work the yard had. Scotts had been building ships at Greenock since the eighteenth century, merged with Lithgows next door to form Scott Lithgow in 1967, and was gone as an independent concern within a generation. A good deal of the world's conventional submarine fleet spent the Cold War being built on a river that was in the process of losing the ability to build anything at all.

Built to Be a Target

Otter is generally credited with a distinction unique among her sister boats: she is said to have been the only Oberon-class submarine fitted with a reinforced mild steel casing, specifically designed to let her serve as a live target for practice torpedo attacks, a role that required her to be built tough enough to absorb the impact of exercise torpedoes without serious damage, a rather unglamorous but essential job in keeping the rest of the fleet's weapons crews sharp.

That is worth putting in context, because the Oberons were not built with steel casings at all. The casing is the free-flooding outer deck a submariner walks along in harbour, not the pressure hull that keeps the sea out, and on this class it was made of glass-reinforced plastic: lighter than steel, better for stability, and far easier to patch after a hard winter. Building one boat in the class with a heavy steel casing instead would indeed have been a deliberate and unusual decision, and only worth the weight penalty if you intended to have practice torpedoes thumping into her on purpose.

It should be said plainly that the detail is not easy to corroborate. The boat databases and class references that cover Otter closely do not mention it, and the same idea is documented firmly for a different submarine altogether: HMS Porpoise, of the preceding class, had her casing, ballast tanks and vents reinforced by 1979 to take the impact of unarmed torpedoes, with a coating that recorded where each one hit so the accuracy could be measured afterwards. Whether Otter was the Oberon equivalent or has simply inherited Porpoise's story over the years is not something the published record settles.

What is not in doubt is that she did the work. Being the target is the other half of anti-submarine warfare, and somebody has to do it: a frigate cannot practise hunting a submarine without a submarine willing to be hunted, and a torpedo crew cannot learn to aim without something to aim at. Otter was serving as a target boat into the early 1980s, and it is a strange sort of career. Every other boat in the flotilla spent thirty years learning not to be found. Otter spent a good deal of hers being found on purpose, repeatedly, by people practising to kill her.

Nearly Three Decades of Service

HMS Otter served for close to three decades before being paid off on 31 July 1991 and broken up at Pounds' yard in Portsmouth by European Metal Recycling the following April. It was reported at the time that parts of the stripped hull went on to Chile, whose navy ran two Oberons of its own and faced the same shortage of spares as everyone else once Britain stopped building them, though that has never been confirmed and is best treated as the rumour it has always been.

The buyer was a Southampton scrap firm and she fetched about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which is a modest sum for nearly three hundred feet of submarine and a reminder that a warship at the end is priced as metal rather than as history. She was not entirely melted down, though, and a surprising amount of her is still above water.

An Otter in Orkney

In 1994 her engines were sold on to a Scottish company to be reconditioned, and several of her internal compartments were bought by a private enthusiast and shipped north. They ended up on Eday, one of the smaller of the Orkney islands, with a population you could fit into a single village hall. A former submarine mechanic living on the island has spent years assembling equipment salvaged from Otter, together with fittings from other boats, into a submarine display inside the classroom of the old North School, where he lives. A visitor can walk through a control room, an engine room and a living space, and the collection even runs to a set of original heads taken from a boat that served in the Falklands.

It is not a museum in the National Historic Ships sense and there is no ticket desk. Eday is reached by inter-island ferry, and the display is seen by arrangement with its owner. But it means a fair amount of HMS Otter is still standing, above the waterline, on an island in the North Isles of Orkney, which is a considerably better afterlife than most of her class managed. Of her sisters, only HMS Ocelot survives whole, in the dockyard that built her, and HMS Otus is preserved on the German Baltic coast. The rest, HMS Oberon among them, went for scrap.