HMS Porpoise (S01): Painted Bright Red for Her Final Act

The Lead Boat of Her Class

HMS Porpoise was launched on 25 April 1956 and commissioned on 17 April 1958, the lead ship of the postwar Porpoise-class submarines that gave their name to the entire generation of British diesel-electric boats that followed, displacing 2,080 tons on the surface and armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes.

She was built by Vickers at Barrow, her keel laid on 15 June 1954, and she matters rather more than her modest career suggests. The Porpoises were the first submarines designed in Britain from scratch after the Second World War, rather than another development of the wartime boats, and they set the pattern that ran through the Oberons and on to the Upholders: quiet, deep-diving, built to sit and listen rather than to charge about. Eight were built. HMS Finwhale took the class ninety-five miles in under the Arctic pack, and HMS Walrus outlasted the lot of them.

The name came from a boat with a harder war. HMS Porpoise (N14) laid mines, ran supplies into Malta and carried commandos in the Far East before she was lost in January 1945, the last Royal Navy submarine sunk in the Second World War. Her successor spent her career in peacetime and still managed to sink a ship, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write about her.

A Career of Close Calls

Porpoise's service life was marked by a genuine run of eventful incidents.

She collided with the aircraft carrier HMS Centaur while leaving Portsmouth harbour on 18 October 1963; on 1 January 1969 she fouled the nets of a French trawler, the Belle Poule; and in 1982 the Irish trawler Sharelga capsized and sank after being towed backwards for twenty minutes while entangled with Porpoise, a sobering reminder of just how hazardous busy fishing grounds could be for a submerged submarine and the vessels working above her.

The Sinking of the Sharelga

The third of those incidents deserves a great deal more than a clause. On 18 April 1982 the Sharelga, a seventy-foot trawler out of Clogherhead in County Louth, was working for prawns about thirty miles off the Dublin coast with five men aboard. Porpoise, dived and hunting for signs of Soviet submarine activity in the Irish Sea, went through her nets. The trawler lurched astern, then began to be dragged backwards at a speed no fishing boat is built to go in that direction, and she was towed stern-first for roughly two miles over about twenty minutes before she went down. All five men jumped and were picked up by other trawlers working nearby. Nobody was killed, which was luck rather than management.

The submarine, submerged, appears not to have known what was happening above her until it was over. That is the essential horror of the thing: a boat whose entire design philosophy is to move through the sea without being noticed had just proved the point in the worst possible way, on a fishing ground where several hundred Irish boats worked for a living.

What followed was a proper diplomatic row. It took the Ministry of Defence the better part of a fortnight to admit that a British submarine had been involved at all, and by then the Irish government was pressing for submarine activity in Irish fishing grounds to stop altogether. The MoD eventually accepted responsibility and undertook to pay fair and reasonable compensation. Three years later Margaret Thatcher was still answering questions about it in the Commons, telling the House in a written answer of 8 May 1985 that no money had been paid to the Irish government at all and that compensation was a matter between the boat's owner and her department. The crew were finally paid through a Belfast court four years after the sinking, and by the accounts of those involved the men got rather less for their livelihoods than was paid for the boat.

The Sharelga was not a one-off, and that is the part worth carrying away from it. British submarines and fishing boats had been fouling each other's gear for years, and the Irish demands of 1982 went largely unmet. Eight years later, in November 1990 off Arran, the nuclear boat HMS Trenchant snagged the trawler Antares and pulled her over, and that time four men died. The accident report that followed found against the submarine, and it was only then that a formal code of practice was brought in setting the distances submarines must keep from fishing vessels. Porpoise's five men swam. The next crew were not so fortunate, and it took their deaths to produce the rules.

Reinforced for Target Duty

In 1979, Porpoise's structure was reinforced to allow her to withstand strikes from unarmed practice torpedoes, taking on the role of a live training target for the rest of the fleet, unglamorous but essential work that kept weapons crews sharp.

Specifically, it was her casing, her ballast tanks and her vents that were strengthened, so that practice torpedoes could be fired at her without any real prospect of putting her on the bottom, and the outside was coated so that each strike left a mark showing exactly where it had landed. That last detail is the clever part. A hit recorded on paper is a claim; a scuff on a ballast tank is a measurement, and the weapons people could work out from it how accurate their torpedoes and their crews actually were. It is worth noting that HMS Otter is also credited with a reinforced casing for the same purpose, a claim that is harder to pin down than this one.

A Bright Red Final Act

HMS Porpoise was decommissioned in 1982, and in 1985 was deliberately sunk as a target during torpedo trials, painted bright red for the occasion to make her clearly visible, a truly striking final image for the boat that had given her name to an entire generation of Royal Navy submarines.

The dates are worth having. She paid off in June 1982, two months after the Sharelga, went on the disposal list the following year and was towed to Cammell Laird to be converted into a weapons target properly rather than merely a reinforced one. She was sunk on 20 October 1985 in trials of the Spearfish, then the Royal Navy's next-generation heavyweight torpedo and still the weapon its submarines carry today. There is a certain logic to it: the boat that had spent her last years teaching torpedoes to hit things was finally used to prove that the newest one could. Painting her red simply meant the cameras could see what happened.

She was in company, too, which is the melancholy footnote to the whole class. The Porpoises were good enough boats to be worth shooting at, and that is very largely what became of them. Narwhal was sunk as a target off Portland in June 1980, raised three weeks later by a Swedish heavy-lift ship as a salvage exercise, and then sunk again for good in the Channel in August 1985. HMS Grampus went down in Loch Fyne in September 1980 while under tow as a sonar target and is still there, a hundred and twenty metres down, visited occasionally by divers. Of the eight boats that began the postwar British submarine line, a good few ended their careers being used to work out how best to sink one.