HMS Seneschal (P255): Launched as the War Ended, a Steward's Keys and a Friday the Thirteenth Collision

The Steward's Keys

HMS Seneschal was one of the last of the S Class, the biggest family of submarines the Royal Navy built to a single design, of which sixty-two were completed between the early 1930s and the end of the Second World War. She was ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 19 October 1942 and laid down on 1 September 1943, but by the time she was launched, on 23 April 1945, the war in Europe had only a fortnight to run.

A seneschal was the steward of a great household or a royal estate, the officer who kept its keys, and her badge showed just that: three gold keys hanging from a ring of chain on a blue field, approved in June 1945. She was the first ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name.

Too Late for the War

Her first captain was Lieutenant Andrew Prideaux, who had won the DSC during the war and had already commanded three submarines.

In 1942 he had taken over the new U Class boat P45, later Unrivalled, for her trials; from 1943 to 1944 he had the old training submarine L26, taking her across the Atlantic to St John's in Newfoundland; and in February 1945 he had stood in for a few days as captain of Scotsman, another Scotts boat. He was appointed to Seneschal in May 1945, whilst she was still fitting out.

The photograph was taken on 22 August 1945, as she ran on the Clyde a week after the Japanese surrender, with P255 on her conning tower, her gun facing forward, the jumping wires stretched from bow to stern and a seagull gliding over her against a grey sky. She was commissioned on 6 September 1945 and completed her trials and training in the Clyde in early October.

She had been built for the war against Japan, as her sisters Scythian and Sea Devil had been, but there was no longer any war for her to go to. Prideaux left her in December 1945; he lived until 2016, when he died on the Isle of Wight at the age of 98.

Peacetime Dangers

Like Scorcher and the other late S boats, Seneschal spent her whole career in the peacetime Navy, where the surviving S boats were used mostly for training and as targets for the ships and aircraft learning to hunt submarines. It was not a safe life.

The submarine service lost Truculent in a collision in the Thames Estuary in 1950 and Affray in the Channel in 1951, and in 1955 Sidon was wrecked by an exploding torpedo in Portland harbour. Seneschal had her own share of trouble.

On 4 June 1947 she suffered an explosion on board; the bare fact is recorded, but no account of its cause or its consequences has come to light.

Her narrowest escape came five years later. At exactly midnight on Friday 13 June 1952, south of the Isle of Wight, she was coming up to the surface when she was run down by the Danish frigate Thetis.

The frigate rode over her, smashing her periscopes and radar mast, and the blow rolled the submarine over on her side. Her captain was Lieutenant Brisley. She went down in a crash dive to the seabed. She survived, and was repaired.

Dunston on Tyne

By the end of the 1950s the new Porpoise Class boats were coming into service and the wartime submarines were going to the breakers one after another. Seneschal was broken up at Dunston on Tyne, where her end was recorded on 23 August 1960, fifteen years and a day after the photograph was taken on the Clyde.