HMS Scotsman (P243): Adopted by a Newspaper, Too Late for the War and Rebuilt for Speed Under Water

Built at Greenock, Adopted in Edinburgh

HMS Scotsman was one of the third and last group of S Class submarines, built by Scotts at Greenock on the Clyde. She was ordered on 20 December 1941, laid down on 15 April 1943, launched on 18 August 1944 and commissioned on 9 December 1944.

Her name was a fair choice for a boat from Scotts, and The Scotsman newspaper of Edinburgh adopted her, unofficially, from November 1944. Her badge was a white saltire with a thistle on a blue field.

The late S boats were tough, handy submarines with six bow torpedo tubes, one stern tube and a deck gun, and many of them went out to the war against Japan.

Her captain was Lieutenant Alan Anderson of the Royal Naval Reserve, who had already commanded the minelayer Rorqual in 1942 and held the DSC. He had then gone out in Sportsman as a spare commanding officer to gain experience, and had been badly burnt when an American aircraft bombed the submarine in error in the Mediterranean; it was a year before he was fit to command again.

The photograph shows Scotsman on completion in November 1944, running on the surface through calm water off a wooded shore, her gun trained forward, the jumping wires stretched from bow to stern over her bridge and an ensign flying from the periscope standards.

To the Far East

She spent the first months of 1945 on trials and training in the Clyde and at Scapa Flow, where she played the part of an enemy submarine for destroyers and cruisers working up, among them Tumult. On 7 April she ran aground in Loch Alsh during exercises with the 2nd Escort Group, and the damage needed a docking at Greenock that kept her at home through May.

On 11 June 1945 she sailed at last for the Far East with Spur and Turpin, by way of Gibraltar, Malta, the Suez Canal and Aden, and reached Trincomalee in Ceylon on 22 July. On 30 July she left for Subic Bay in the Philippines, where she was to join her flotilla, and on the way, on 11 August, she surfaced off the west coast of Borneo near Pontianak and sank a laden junk with gunfire.

It was her only action. When she reached Subic Bay on 17 August the war with Japan was over. After a visit to Hong Kong she came home, arriving at Rothesay on 7 December 1945.

Rebuilt for Speed

The war had shown that the submarine of the future would need to be fast under water, not just on the surface, and that the escorts hunting it would need to train against fast targets. The German Type XXI boats had shown what was possible, and in 1944 the Navy had already streamlined Seraph and given her higher-capacity battery cells to act as a fast target.

Scotsman was chosen for a much more drastic rebuild, as a trials and experimental submarine. The work was done at Chatham Dockyard between 8 April 1947 and 8 July 1948.

Her saddle tanks were replaced by ballast tanks slung under the hull, everything that broke the flow of water over her casing was cleaned away, her forward torpedo tubes came out and so did both of her main diesel engines.

In their place she was given two extra batteries and heavier electric motors from the new Amphion Class, run at about twice their usual voltage, with a single small diesel generator of the kind fitted in the U Class boats. The aim was a speed of 17 knots deep, held for forty minutes.

In her trials in 1948 she made 16.33 knots at fifty feet over the measured mile in Kilbrannan Sound, and a graph in the trials report shows her passing 17 knots at full power. The price was that she could hardly charge her own batteries, and through most of her career she needed another submarine alongside to do it for her; Tally-Ho was one of the boats detailed for the job.

Engine room and electrical ratings remembered the charging cables coming in through the hatch.

Sixteen Years in the Lochs

For the rest of her life Scotsman was a floating laboratory. Most of her time was spent running up and down the underwater sound ranges in Loch Long and Loch Goil, dived, at high and low speeds, with scientists aboard huddled over their recording equipment, testing her noise, her handling, new propellers, an underwater camera and a succession of secret pieces of equipment.

She would turn round at the end of each run without surfacing. She worked from Campbeltown with Sunderland flying boats, which dropped sonar buoys in the Irish Sea and spent the day trying to track her as she ran at speed beneath them.

A refit that ended in June 1952 gave her a modern fin in place of the odd-looking bridge structure she had been given in 1948, and later she was used as a test bed for equipment meant for the nuclear submarines, with a clear space in her fore ends where the scientists bolted their trial rigs; her crews remembered that she was the first to have a combined steering and hydroplane control column, and that she banked over in high-speed turns.

The naval historian Norman Friedman credited her with showing that a high-speed conversion of a wartime boat was practical, and with inspiring the later rebuilding of eight T Class submarines.

Her last trial was the hardest. In 1964 she was deliberately sunk in Kames Bay to test her hull at crushing depth, then raised by the Admiralty lifting craft LC10 and LC11. She was sold to the West of Scotland Shipbreaking Company, and her scrapping at Troon was recorded on 19 November 1964.

Her sisters Scythian, Seneschal and Sea Devil were also built by Scotts, and the name of the minelayer her first captain had once commanded was taken up in 1958 by a new submarine, Rorqual.