HMS Sirdar (P226): Capsized in Dry Dock by the Great North Sea Flood

Greenock-Built

HMS Sirdar was built by Scotts of Greenock and launched on 26 March 1943, an S-class submarine of the third group, displacing 865 tons on the surface and armed with seven 21-inch torpedo tubes, a 3-inch deck gun and a 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun, crewed by 48 officers and ratings.

Hunting Japanese Shipping

Sirdar operated primarily in the Indian Ocean and the Far East during the Second World War, sinking multiple Japanese vessels in the demanding, often gruelling conditions of that theatre, work that required British S-class boats to operate at the very edge of their range and endurance.

It is worth putting names to that. Her recorded work is almost entirely gunfire: a Japanese sailing vessel sunk in the Strait of Malacca on 8 June 1944, a coaster damaged north of Sumatra three days later, vessels sunk off the west coast of Siam on 18 and 21 July, small craft and the guardboat Kaiyo Maru No. 5 destroyed north-west of Sumatra on 1 September, and one more off Surabaya in Java on Christmas Day 1944.

Almost none of that was done with torpedoes, which is the thing to notice. She had seven tubes and by 1944 there was very little in those waters worth spending a torpedo on, so the work was done on the surface with the three-inch gun: come up, close, shell a wooden coaster until it burns, go down again. HMS Thule sets out what that campaign was actually like and why the men doing it took no satisfaction in it.

The endurance point in that paragraph is real, though. An S-class boat was designed for the North Sea and the Mediterranean, which are small seas close to home. Sending one to work off Java from a base in Ceylon meant weeks of passage before the patrol even started, in a hull with no air conditioning worth the name, in water warm enough to keep the inside of the boat above a hundred degrees for the duration.

Searching for HMS Affray

In 1951, Sirdar took part in the search for HMS Affray, the submarine that vanished with all hands in the English Channel that April in one of the Royal Navy's most haunting postwar peacetime tragedies, a difficult and emotionally demanding search that ultimately located the wreck but could offer no survivors.

Playing the Part of a Dead Submarine

Sirdar's own part in that search is the strangest thing she ever did and it is worth setting out properly. She was not looking for Affray so much as pretending to be her.

Affray disappeared in the Channel in April 1951 with seventy-five aboard and nobody knew where. The search covered an enormous area of seabed, and the problem was not effort but recognition: an Asdic set of 1951 returns an echo off anything solid, and the Channel floor is littered with wrecks, rock and rubbish. Operators had almost no experience of what a submarine lying on the bottom actually sounds like, because it is not a thing anybody normally has the chance to practise on.

So Sirdar went down, settled on the bottom, and stayed there for six hours while the hunting ships worked over her with their sets and learned the difference. Six hours of a submarine and her crew lying still on the seabed, deliberately imitating a boat with seventy-five dead men in it, so that the men above could recognise the real one when they found it. It is hard to think of a colder duty.

There is a second detail that says a great deal about that spring. Sirdar and her sisters, HMS Scorcher among them, searched flying oversized white flags from their masts. The reason was simple and grim: with every ship in the Channel looking for a submarine, a submarine on the surface was liable to be reported as the missing one, and each false alarm cost hours. The flags were there to say, plainly and from a distance, that this is not the boat you are looking for.

Affray was found in June 1951 in deep water off Alderney, and she was found by HMS Reclaim, a deep diving vessel using an underwater television camera, which was close to experimental at the time. Sirdar helped make the finding possible without being anywhere near it when it happened. The Royal Navy lost three submarines in peacetime within six years in that period, HMS Truculent in 1950, Affray in 1951 and HMS Sidon in 1955, and the lessons from all three ran together into how the service does escape and rescue now.

Capsized by the Great Flood

Sirdar suffered a dramatic mishap in 1953, capsizing in dry dock at Sheerness during the catastrophic North Sea flood that struck the east coast of England and the Netherlands on the night of 31 January 1953, one of the worst natural disasters in modern British history. Remarkably, she was refloated and returned to service rather than being written off, a testament to sound original construction and a determined repair effort.

The flood deserves its own sentence, because "one of the worst natural disasters in modern British history" is a phrase that goes past too easily. On the night of 31 January 1953 a deep depression tracking round the top of Scotland pushed a surge down the funnel of the North Sea, and it arrived on a spring tide. Sea defences failed from Lincolnshire to Kent. Three hundred and seven people were killed in England, more than fifty at sea, and in the Netherlands, where the surge hit harder and the land is lower, more than eighteen hundred died in a single night.

Sheerness sits at the mouth of the Medway and took the surge full on. What happened to Sirdar is described in the records as being swamped by the flood while in dry dock and afterwards sinking. A dry dock in a flood is the worst place in a dockyard to be: the boat is sitting high on blocks with no water under her to float on, and when the sea comes over the caisson it does not lift her gently, it falls on her. Whether she went right over, as the usual telling has it, or settled and flooded where she stood, is less clearly recorded than the story suggests.

Either way, getting her back was a genuine piece of work, and the fact that a ten-year-old submarine could be pumped out, dried, stripped and returned to service after being drowned says something about how they were built. She went on to serve another twelve years.

The End of Her Service

HMS Sirdar arrived at the yards of McLellan on 31 May 1965 for breaking up, bringing to a close the career of a submarine that had survived Japanese waters, a harrowing search operation and a genuine natural disaster.

Twenty-two years is a long life for a wartime S boat, and hers has an odd shape. The war itself was the least remarkable part of it: competent, hard, unglamorous gunnery work at the far end of the world. What she is actually remembered for both happened in peacetime, and in both cases she was on the receiving end rather than the giving. She lay on the bottom imitating a tomb, and then a flood came over a dock wall and sank her where she stood.