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.

She was built for it in a very literal sense, and the class deserves more than a clause. The eight Porpoises were the first submarines Britain designed from a blank sheet after the Second World War, and everything before them had been a wartime hull with a new fin welded on. They were made of a new steel called UXW, they owed a good deal to the German Type XXI that had frightened everybody in 1945, and they were built around one requirement above all others: silence.

They achieved it to a degree that surprised even the people who ordered them. A Porpoise was quieter than her NATO contemporaries and very much quieter than the Soviet boats she was sent to listen to, which is the whole game. A submarine that can hear an opponent before he hears her can sit and take notes for a fortnight. A submarine he hears first is a submarine that goes home early, or does not.

The numbers behind it are less glamorous and more important. Two battery sets could be connected in series at 880 volts, giving something like forty hours submerged at four knots and a short sprint if she needed one, and the snort mast let her run her diesels at periscope depth to charge without fully surfacing. Four knots is walking pace. That is what patient means: creeping about for two days at a time to stay unheard.

The class turned out to be so nearly right that the follow-on HMS Oberon boats were essentially repeats with better steel, and between them the two designs carried the Royal Navy's conventional submarine force from 1958 to the 1990s. HMS Porpoise, HMS Finwhale and HMS Walrus were all her sisters.

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.

What Being Forced Up Actually Means

The phrase is worth unpacking, because nobody forces a submarine to surface by asking. A diesel-electric boat that has been found and is being held down is running a sum with only one answer in it. Her battery is finite, her air is finite, and every evasive manoeuvre she makes spends both faster. The ships above her have engines, fuel and as long as they like.

So the captain watches the amps and the carbon dioxide, and at some point he works out the last hour at which he can still get up under control rather than in an emergency, and he goes up. Coming up in the middle of the exercise he was sent to spy on is professionally humiliating and, in 1963, politically awkward for two governments at once.

It was also entirely survivable, and that is the point of doing it in peacetime. Nobody shot at her. The Soviet ships had made their point, Sealion had lost hers, and both sides went home having learned something they would rather have learned quietly. That exchange happened a great many times over forty years and almost none of it was reported at the time.

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.

The flag itself is worth explaining, since it is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In 1901 Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, then Controller of the Navy, told anybody who would listen that the submarine was underhand, unfair and damned un-English, and that any submarine crew captured in wartime should be hanged as pirates.

In September 1914 Lieutenant Commander Max Horton took the submarine E9 out, sank the German cruiser Hela off Heligoland, and brought his boat back into harbour flying a black pirate flag. It was a joke at the Admiralty's expense, it went round the service in about a week, and it has been the submarine flag ever since. Crews added symbols to it: a white bar for a merchant ship, red for a warship, a dagger for a special operation, a lifebelt for a rescue.

A dagger on a Jolly Roger in 1987 means a special operation was carried out and says nothing whatever about what it was, and the Ministry of Defence has never published anything about this one. It is worth saying plainly what is and is not known. She flew the flag; that is reported. Everything about what she did to earn it is inference, and some of what circulates is invention.

For a sense of what a conventional submarine was for in that part of the world, HMS Onyx is the better guide. She was the only diesel boat sent south in 1982, she worked inshore landing and recovering special forces because a nuclear boat draws too much water and cannot sit on the bottom, and what she did is on the record.

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.

Inter-Action deserves naming properly. It was a community arts and education charity founded in 1968 by Ed Berman, an American who had settled in north London, and it spent two decades building city farms, theatre projects and training schemes in places that got very little of either. Buying a decommissioned submarine is entirely in character.

The logic was not silly. A submarine is a floating engineering school: diesels, generators, switchboards, hydraulics, high-pressure air, refrigeration, pumps and several miles of pipework, all of it in one hull and all of it real. A teenager who could trace a hydraulic circuit round a boat like that would have learned more than a year of classroom work could give them.

How much of it actually happened is another matter, and honesty requires saying that it cannot be established. She arrived at Chatham on 22 June 1988 and she was sold for breaking up in 1990. Two years is not long, and what became of the programme in between does not appear in any source worth relying on. Projects of that kind founder on insurance, access, asbestos and money, usually in that order, and it would be a guess to say which one got her.

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.

Twenty-six years in commission and two more as a classroom. It is worth setting the two halves against each other, because the contrast is genuinely strange: a boat built to sit silently off a Soviet coast counting propeller revolutions, tied up in a Kentish dockyard with school parties climbing through her.

What she was actually good at was never visible and mostly still is not. The patrols that mattered produced tape recordings and typed reports that went to a building in London and were read by perhaps thirty people, and the crews came home and said they had been on exercise. Everything that reached the public was the Jubilee review, a flag, and a submarine at Chatham with a charity's name on the paperwork.