HMS Renown (S26): Launched by the Defence Secretary's Wife

Laid Down at Birkenhead

HMS Renown was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 25 February 1967 by Edna Healey, wife of the then Defence Secretary Denis Healey, and commissioned on 15 November 1968, the third of the Resolution-class ballistic missile submarines that formed the backbone of Britain's Polaris nuclear deterrent, measuring 425 feet overall.

The launch party is worth looking at twice. Denis Healey was Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970, and he is remembered for cancelling the CVA-01 aircraft carrier and for running the withdrawal from East of Suez, which is to say for presiding over the largest contraction the Royal Navy had seen in peacetime. His party had spent the 1964 election attacking the Polaris deal as an expensive irrelevance. His wife launched the third Polaris boat in February 1967.

The programme she was launching had come out of the Nassau Agreement of December 1962, when Harold Macmillan secured Polaris from the Americans after Skybolt was cancelled from under him. Two pairs of submarines were ordered in May 1963, one pair from Vickers at Barrow and one from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, with a fifth boat to follow. When Labour took office the following year it kept the deterrent it had criticised and cut the fleet instead: the fifth boat was cancelled in February 1965, and the Treasury had pushed for the force to come down to three before a compromise settled on four.

That number matters more than it sounds. Four boats is the minimum for keeping one at sea continuously and permanently, and the whole of Britain's deterrent has run on that margin ever since, through the Resolutions and then the Vanguards. HMS Vanguard shows what happens when the margin is squeezed. The decision to build four rather than three was taken in a Cabinet committee at the turn of 1964 and 1965, and everything that has followed has depended on it.

She took the name from the battlecruiser HMS Renown of 1916, a very different ship, fast and thin-skinned and famous, who chased the Graf Spee, traded fire with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway, and carried Churchill to Cairo. Her successor was designed to be seen by nobody at all.

A Rocky Start

Renown's early career was marked by a genuine run of mishaps. She struck a dock entrance during sea trials in February 1969, and that October collided with the merchant vessel Moyle in the Irish Sea, an incident serious enough that her commanding officer was found guilty of hazarding the submarine and relieved of command.

Hazarding is an offence about risk rather than about damage, which is why the finding can look severe next to the harm actually done. The question a court martial asks is whether a competent officer would have put the ship where she was in the conditions that obtained, and if the answer is no then the offence is complete whether or not anybody was hurt. HMS Opportune sets that out at greater length, from a collision two years earlier between two submarines in Portsmouth harbour.

It cut deeper here for an obvious reason. The commanding officer of a Polaris submarine is one of a very small number of people trusted to take the national deterrent to sea, and the standard applied to him is correspondingly unforgiving. Two collisions in a single year is a poor start for any boat, and for this boat it happened while the Royal Navy was still learning how to run submarines of a size and value it had never handled before.

She became operational that November regardless, before striking the seabed during Scottish sea trials in 1974, causing structural damage that required repair.

Carrying the Chevaline Upgrade

Renown conducted test firings of the upgraded Chevaline missile system in early 1982, becoming fully operational with the new capability later that year, part of the significant modernisation programme that extended the credibility of Britain's Polaris deterrent through the final years of the Cold War.

The Billion Pounds Nobody Was Told About

Chevaline deserves considerably more than that. It is the most expensive defence project in British history to have been kept secret from Parliament, and Renown is the boat that took it to sea.

The problem it solved was specific. From the late 1960s the Soviet Union was building an anti-ballistic missile screen around Moscow, and the entire logic of the British deterrent rested on being able to destroy Moscow. If the warheads from a single submarine could be stopped by that screen, then the threat was empty and everybody involved knew it. Polaris as bought could not be relied on to get through.

The answer was not a new missile but a new front end. Chevaline replaced the warhead section with a manoeuvring carrier that released hardened warheads together with a mass of decoys and chaff, the object being to present the defences with far more targets than they could engage and to make the real ones difficult to pick out. The idea came from a classified American programme called Antelope, made available to Britain in 1967; the British development ran under a series of names, Super Antelope among them, before settling on Chevaline.

What makes it remarkable is not the engineering. It is that the whole thing was done in secret, at a cost of around a thousand million pounds, across successive governments of both parties, without Parliament being told it existed. Ministers came and went and the project carried on. It was finally disclosed to the House of Commons in January 1980 by Francis Pym, the Conservative Defence Secretary, at which point a great many members discovered simultaneously that a billion pounds had been spent and that they had approved none of it. The Public Accounts Committee reported on it in 1982 in terms that were not kind.

Renown fired the test rounds in early 1982 and went on patrol with Chevaline in the middle of that year, the first boat to carry it operationally. Fitting the rest of the class took until 1987, by which time the decision to replace Polaris with Trident had long been taken. So a system developed over roughly fifteen years, at enormous expense and in total secrecy, was fully deployed for about nine years before the submarines carrying it were withdrawn. Whether that was money well spent is still argued about. What is not in dispute is that for the middle of 1982, at the height of a very tense period, the credibility of the entire British deterrent rested on one submarine, and she was this one.

The End of Her Service

HMS Renown was decommissioned on 24 February 1996, having spent much of 1995 forced to remain alongside at Faslane due to the age-related defects that were, by then, affecting the entire ageing Resolution class, bringing to a close nearly three decades of nuclear deterrent patrols.

The way she finished is the part that stays with you. A boat which had carried the only thing Britain possessed that could not be replaced spent much of her final year unable to leave the wall at Faslane, because a class designed in the early 1960s for a service life nobody had expected to stretch this far was simply worn out. The Resolutions had been run harder than any other submarines in the fleet, on a four-boat cycle with no slack in it, for the whole of their lives, from 1968 until the Vanguards took over, without a single break in the patrol.

HMS Resolution had begun the run in June 1968 and HMS Repulse closed it out in 1996, with HMS Revenge the fourth of them, and the handover to the Vanguards was managed without the deterrent ever once being absent from the sea. Renown lies at Rosyth now, defuelled and waiting, along with the rest of them. Her billion-pound front end went into the furnace years ago and almost nobody has heard of it, which was more or less the point.