HMS Rorqual (S02): The Second Porpoise Class Boat and the Quiet Submarines of the Cold War

The Name

A rorqual is one of the great baleen whales, the family that includes the blue whale and the fin whale, and the name came to HMS Rorqual twice over: from the whale, and from one of the best known British submarines of the Second World War.

The first Rorqual was a minelaying submarine built at Barrow in the 1930s, one of the six big minelaying submarines of the class led by Porpoise, and the only one of them to come through the war.

She was serving on the China Station when war broke out, laid her first field of fifty mines off Brindisi within days of Italy entering the war in June 1940, and went on to earn battle honours in the Mediterranean, off Crete, on the Malta supply runs, at Sicily, in the Aegean and in the Atlantic. One of the officers who commanded her in 1942, Lieutenant Alan Anderson, went on to commission Scotsman.

The new boat inherited the old one's badge, a rorqual swimming on a blue field, and her motto, Nec temere nec timide, neither rashly nor timidly.

The Porpoise Class

The second Rorqual was laid down by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow in Furness on 15 January 1955, launched on 5 December 1956 and completed on 24 October 1958, the second boat of a new Porpoise Class led by Porpoise.

They were the first operational submarines designed for the Royal Navy after the Second World War, and they drew on everything the Navy had learned from the war and from the German Type XXI boats it had studied afterwards. They were big boats, 295 feet long and more than 2,400 tons dived, built of a new, stronger steel that let them dive much deeper than their wartime predecessors.

They carried eight torpedo tubes, six in the bow and two in the stern, with twenty-four torpedoes, and a crew of about seventy. They had no deck gun, the first British submarines since the First World War to go without one, and their air purification allowed them to stay down for far longer than the wartime boats. They were designed for 18 knots submerged and made 17.

Above all they were quiet. Great care was taken in mounting their machinery, and their propellers were designed to avoid the cavitation that gives a submarine away, and the class were found to be quieter under water than any of their NATO allies, and very much quieter than the Soviet boats they were built to hunt.

A story told in the Submarine Service has it that Rorqual's first silenced propellers "sang" so distinctly that a listening station on Long Island in New York picked her up leaving the Clyde, and that once the fault had been cured, by cutting grooves in the blades and filling them with a damping compound, she was able to come to the surface unnoticed off the Statue of Liberty.

Whatever the truth of the details, the stories say something about how highly the Porpoises were regarded.

The photograph, which was published in 1964, shows her on the surface in what looks very like a Scottish sea loch, driving past a steep wooded hillside with S02 on her fin, the bow wave breaking along her casing and the dome of her bow sonar showing clearly.

Fire, Nets and an Explosion

Her first year brought a fire on board, in 1958, and in 1963 she was caught up in a trawler's net, a hazard all submarines faced in the crowded fishing waters round Britain.

In 1966 she was on passage to Singapore, where the Royal Navy kept a submarine squadron in the Far East, when an explosion in her engine room off the coast of Mozambique killed two of her men; one of the crew remembered that it was the lubricating oil separator that had burst apart.

In 1969, whilst she was berthing at the American base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, she ran into the moored American minesweeper Endurance, punching a large hole in the minesweeper's hull without damage to herself. In 1973 she won the submarine efficiency trophy.

Her Sisters and Her End

Her sisters included Grampus, Sealion and Walrus, and the design was so successful that the Navy repeated it, with improvements, as the Oberon Class, which remained in service into the 1990s. Rorqual paid off in the 1970s and was sold in March 1977 to the shipbreakers Davies and Cann, leaving under tow for Plymouth on 5 May 1977 to be broken up.