HMS Sealion (S07): A Cold War Watcher That Ended Up Teaching Inner City Teenagers

The Build: Birkenhead for the Cold War

This later HMS Sealion, carrying the pennant S07, is an entirely separate vessel from the earlier wartime S-class submarine of the same name, which was scuttled as a target off Arran in 1945.

Built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down in June 1958, launched at the end of 1959 and commissioned in July 1961, she was a diesel electric Porpoise class boat, built for exactly the kind of quiet, patient underwater surveillance work that defined so much of the Cold War at sea.

Caught Watching

In 1963, while monitoring a Soviet naval exercise, Sealion was herself detected by the ships she was observing and forced to surface, a reminder that the business of covert Cold War surveillance carried real risks of exposure on both sides.

She went on to take her place among the assembled fleet at the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead in 1977, a rather more ceremonial appearance for a boat more usually associated with quieter, less visible work.

A South Atlantic Deployment

In late 1986 and into 1987, Sealion deployed to the South Atlantic, patrolling from the Falkland Islands before visiting Chile and returning home via the Caribbean, and is reported, on her return, to have flown the Jolly Roger, the traditional flag hoisted by Royal Navy submarines to mark a successful operation.

The precise nature of what that operation involved has not been established with confidence from the sources available, and any suggestion of a specific action or kill should be treated as unverified rather than stated as settled fact.

A Second Career Teaching, Not Fighting

HMS Sealion was decommissioned in December 1987, and rather than heading straight to a shipbreaker, she was instead sold to the education charity Inter-Action, which used her for hands-on training programmes with young people in inner city Britain, arriving at Chatham in June 1988 for this rather unusual second career.

She was finally broken up in 1990, closing out the story of a submarine whose quiet Cold War watching gave way, in the end, to a remarkably different kind of public service.