HMS Revenge: The Submarine That Held Its Breath for Eight Weeks

The Last of the Four

HMS Revenge was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down in May 1965, launched on 15 March 1968 by Lady Law, wife of Vice Admiral Sir Horace Law, and finally completed on 4 December 1969, the last of Britain's original four Resolution class ballistic missile submarines to enter service, following Resolution, Repulse and Renown.

Her construction reportedly ran well behind schedule, with the Ministry of Defence said to have considered shifting the unfinished boat to Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow to speed things along, though this specific detail rests on a single published source rather than independent confirmation.

Once complete she carried sixteen Polaris ballistic missile tubes alongside six torpedo tubes, crewed by 143 officers and ratings split across two rotating crews known simply as Port and Starboard, a structure designed to keep a boat like her at sea as close to continuously as possible.

Into the Silent Service

Revenge sailed to Port Canaveral in Florida in May 1970 for a month long work up and missile test firing programme, successfully test firing a Polaris missile that June before returning to begin her first operational deterrent patrol that September, based at HM Naval Base Clyde, Faslane, under the 10th Submarine Squadron alongside her three sister boats.

Over the following two decades she went on to complete an eventual fifty six deterrent patrols, each one a silent, months long exercise in simply being ready, unseen and unheard, an entire career built around the paradox of a weapon whose greatest success was never having to be used.

Fifty-six patrols is worth converting into something a reader can feel. At roughly two to three months each, that is somewhere around a decade of her twenty-two-year career spent submerged, in the dark, saying nothing, in the North Atlantic, and every single one of those patrols was a success precisely because nothing happened on it.

She was one of four, and between them HMS Resolution, HMS Repulse, HMS Renown and Revenge kept a British ballistic missile submarine at sea without a single day's gap from June 1968 until HMS Vanguard and the Trident boats took over in the 1990s.

Eight Weeks of Silence

Revenge's most remarkable moment came in June 1978, on a covert deterrent patrol, when a serious steam leak erupted in her turbo generator room, described by one crew member present as a sudden roar like a jumbo jet taking off.

Why That Leak Was Worth a Gallantry Medal

It is worth understanding what he was describing, because a steam leak sounds like a plumbing problem and it is one of the most feared things aboard a nuclear submarine.

The steam in the secondary circuit is at very high pressure and several hundred degrees, and when it escapes through a small failure it emerges as a jet moving faster than sound. For the first foot or two beyond the leak it is superheated and completely transparent: there is nothing to see. It will go through skin, muscle and bone as cleanly as a blade, and a man walking towards a leak he cannot see will not know he has found it until he has lost an arm.

The drill for locating one is to advance holding a broom handle, or anything else expendable, out in front of you, and watch for the end of it being cut off. That is genuinely how it is done. The compartment is meanwhile filling with steam, the temperature is climbing towards the point where a man cannot survive in it, and the noise makes speech impossible.

Leading Mechanic James McWilliams went in and worked close to it to help isolate it. The Queen's Gallantry Medal is not awarded for competence under pressure. It is awarded for doing something that a reasonable person would refuse to do.

The standard, safest response to such a leak would have been to shut down the reactor and surface, but doing so would have blown Revenge's cover at sea and, by extension, compromised the entire principle of a continuous, undetected nuclear deterrent.

Instead, her crew improvised a way to keep the propulsion plant running at reduced power by diverting parts of the ship's domestic hot water system, then maintained strict radio silence for a further eight weeks to complete the patrol as though nothing at all had happened.

Leading Mechanic James McWilliams was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for working close to the leak itself to help isolate it, and five further members of the propulsion department received commendations for brave conduct, though the full story of what had actually happened remained classified for around forty years afterwards, a particularly striking example of quiet, largely unrecognised courage kept deliberately out of the public record for decades.

The decision to stay down deserves examining rather than admiring, because it is genuinely difficult. Shutting down the reactor and surfacing would have been the safe engineering answer, and a damaged submarine on the surface, transmitting for assistance, is a submarine whose position is known. The whole value of a deterrent patrol is that nobody knows where the boat is. Surfacing would have handed away that patrol and, at a time when the Soviet Navy was spending a great deal of effort trying to find British missile submarines, would have told them a good deal about how one behaves when something goes wrong.

So they rigged a way of keeping the plant running at reduced power by pulling steam from the domestic hot water system, and then stayed down for another eight weeks with a known defect in the propulsion plant and no possibility of asking for help or advice from anybody.

Eight weeks is the part that is hard to take in. Every man aboard knew there was a fault in the steam plant, knew what a second failure would mean, and could not talk to a single person outside the hull about any of it. They finished the patrol and came home, and then said nothing about it for roughly forty years because they were not allowed to.

Blacked at Faslane

Barely a month later, in July 1978, Revenge found herself at the centre of a rather different kind of drama when civilian workers at Faslane and the nearby Coulport weapons depot took industrial action during a public sector pay dispute, effectively blocking her preparations to sail on her next patrol.

The Defence Minister at the time, Fred Mulley, ordered service personnel to take over the affected work themselves, including the loading of Polaris missiles, closing the sites to civilian labour until the dispute passed.

Declassified American diplomatic cables from the period show Washington watching the standoff closely, concerned about Britain's ability to maintain its contribution to NATO's nuclear posture, with officials noting that Britain was committed to doing whatever was necessary to keep a submarine on deterrent patrol regardless.

It is worth placing that summer, because the timing explains the temperature of it. July 1978 is the beginning of the run-up to what became the Winter of Discontent: a Labour government holding a pay policy against public sector unions, inflation still running high, and a series of disputes that would culminate the following winter in the strikes that brought the government down.

Faslane and Coulport are large industrial sites employing a great many civilians, and the people who load a Polaris missile, service a submarine and run the base are for the most part not sailors. Stopping that work stops the deterrent, and the argument that followed is the only occasion on which a British deterrent patrol came close to being prevented by an industrial dispute rather than by anything an opponent did.

Sending servicemen in to do the work broke the deadlock and did nothing whatever for relations on the Clyde. That Washington was reading the traffic closely is entirely unsurprising: the British boats were assigned to NATO, and a gap in the patrol cycle was an alliance problem rather than a domestic one.

A Test Firing Off Cape Canaveral

On 10 June 1983, submerged around thirty miles off Cape Canaveral and commanded by Commander Ian McVittie, Revenge fired two Polaris missiles as part of a periodic verification exercise. The first, launched shortly after eleven that morning, malfunctioned during its second stage of powered flight and had to be destroyed by range safety officers, while the second, fired a little over an hour later, flew successfully.

All four Resolution class boats were progressively converted during the 1980s to carry the improved Chevaline warhead system, with Revenge's own conversion generally dated to 1988, the last of the class to be upgraded, which is later than the test firing off Cape Canaveral and does not conflict with it, for reasons worth setting out.

Chevaline was not a new missile and it was not a modification to the submarine. It was a replacement front end for the Polaris missile: the re-entry section was taken off and a British-built package substituted, carrying the warheads along with decoys and penetration aids designed to get through the anti-ballistic missile defences around Moscow.

So a boat that had not yet been converted was still carrying perfectly serviceable Polaris A3 missiles, and those missiles still had to be proved. A periodic verification firing off Cape Canaveral in June 1983 is exactly what an unconverted boat would be sent to do.

The programme ran through the class over about six years from 1982, and Revenge was the last of the four to be done, in 1988. There is no contradiction between the two dates. She fired the missiles she had.

The failure of the first missile is worth a word too, since it sits oddly in an account of a weapon nobody doubted. Test firings exist because things fail, and a second-stage malfunction destroyed by range safety is precisely the sort of thing a test programme is for. The second missile flew. Two shots, one failure, one success, and the system stayed in service for another thirteen years.

Retirement, and a Long Wait

HMS Revenge was decommissioned in May 1992, and somewhat surprisingly, given that she was the youngest hull in her class, she was the first of the four Resolution class boats to be withdrawn from service, ahead of Resolution in 1994, Renown in 1996, and finally Repulse that August, whose decommissioning formally marked the end of Britain's Polaris era.

One source has suggested her early retirement was due to a weakened hull structure, though this specific claim could not be corroborated elsewhere and should be treated as unverified rather than settled fact.

There is a less dramatic explanation available and it is worth putting alongside the hull story rather than instead of it. Which boat goes first is not decided by the age of the hull. It is decided by where each one sits in the refit cycle and how much life is left in her reactor core.

By 1992 the Trident boats were coming and the Polaris force was being wound down. A boat due a long and enormously expensive refuelling refit at the moment the class is being retired is a boat that gets paid off instead, regardless of when she was built, because nobody will spend that money on a submarine with three years of usefulness left. The youngest hull can easily be the one whose core runs out first if she has been worked harder.

That does not disprove the hull story and nothing here should be read as doing so. It does mean the early retirement of the newest boat is not, on its own, evidence that anything was wrong with her.

Revenge remains today laid up afloat at Rosyth Dockyard in Fife, one of around twenty decommissioned Royal Navy nuclear submarines still awaiting final disposal under the Ministry of Defence's long running Submarine Dismantling Project.

She has now been laid up for longer than she was in commission, which is true of all four of her class and of a good many boats besides. Revenge served for twenty-two years and has been tied up at Rosyth for thirty-four, defuelled, sealed, inspected and maintained at public expense, waiting for a programme that has to work through the oldest submarines first.

It is the genuine long tail of nuclear propulsion and it is nobody's fault in particular. A reactor compartment cannot be sold for scrap, cannot be left unattended and cannot be disposed of quickly, and Britain built these boats for decades before settling on what to do with them afterwards.

Fifty-six patrols, one steam leak that should have ended a patrol and did not, one industrial dispute that nearly stopped the deterrent, one missile that failed and one that did not, and then thirty-four years alongside. It is an oddly complete picture of what the Cold War at sea actually consisted of, and almost none of it was known at the time.

The first stage of that process, the removal of low level radioactive waste, was completed on Revenge in 2020, though the more involved second stage, removing the reactor pressure vessel itself, had not yet begun on any boat as of the most recent reporting available, meaning Revenge continues to sit quietly at her moorings, still only partway through the long, expensive process of being taken apart for good.