HMS Tabard (P342): A Quarter of a Million Miles Without a War

Constructed at Greenock, Too Late for War

HMS Tabard was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, her construction beginning on 6 September 1944, launched on 21 November 1945 and commissioned on 25 June 1946 under Lieutenant James Newenham Elliott, a third-group T-class submarine completed too late to see any wartime service.

A Rescue and a Royal Escort

Tabard's peacetime career proved particularly varied. She took part in Operation Two Step training exercises in March 1949, escorted Admiral Sir Arthur Power to Saudi Arabia in January 1950, and on 18 December 1950 rescued a pilot, Roi Wilson, and his observer James Hawker after their Fairey Firefly ditched at sea, a rare moment of direct life-saving for a submarine crew.

It is worth naming what that involved, because a submarine is close to the worst rescue vessel afloat. She has a low, round, wet casing that is lethal to work from in any sea, almost no freeboard, and a handful of men who can be spared topside. Getting two airmen out of the water and down a hatch is genuinely difficult, and Roi Wilson and James Hawker owed their lives to a crew doing something they had never trained for.

The Firefly was a two-seat naval fighter of the period and ditching one was survivable if somebody reached you quickly. In December, in open sea, the margin is measured in minutes rather than hours.

In 1950 she also underwent extensive modification, with her hull lengthened by 20 feet and streamlined to improve her underwater performance.

What That Modification Actually Was

That has a name, and it was one of the more ambitious things the Royal Navy did to a warship in peacetime. Tabard was one of eight T-class boats put through what the service called the Super T conversion, and HMS Truncheon sets out why it was done: the Admiralty had examined the German Type XXI and XXIII boats after 1945, realised that a submarine ought to be designed to fight underwater rather than on the surface, and decided to rebuild what it already had.

In her case they cut the pressure hull open at the after end of the engine room and let in twenty feet of new hull. That space took an additional battery compartment and a second pair of electric motors, and the transmission was changed to diesel-electric. Everything outside that caused drag came off: the four-inch gun, the external torpedo tubes, the clutter along the casing.

She and HMS Trump then got something none of the other six received. On the earlier conversions the new fin was built around the existing conning tower; on these two the bridge itself was incorporated into the fin structure, with the periscopes, the radar, the snort and the wireless masts all housed inside it. It is why photographs of Tabard and Trump look a generation newer than the rest of the class, and very nearly modern.

Eight Years With the Australian Fleet

From 1960 to 1968, Tabard served with Australia's 4th Submarine Squadron, refitting at Cockatoo Island in 1961-62 and again in 1964-65, a long overseas posting during which she was involved in a collision with HMAS Queenborough on 8 May 1963 that damaged her fin.

In February 1964 she took part in anti-submarine exercises alongside HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Voyager, mere hours before those two Australian vessels were involved in the tragic collision that claimed 82 lives, a sobering proximity to one of Australia's worst peacetime naval disasters even though Tabard herself played no part in it.

That caution is right, and the details are worth having, because it remains the worst peacetime disaster in Australian naval history.

On the night of 10 February 1964, about twenty miles south-east of Jervis Bay, the carrier Melbourne was conducting night flying and Voyager was acting as her plane guard, the escort stationed astern to pick up any aircrew who went into the sea. It was a moonless night and both ships were showing only navigational and operational lights. Voyager was ordered to take station astern, turned across the carrier's bow, and at six minutes to nine Melbourne struck her amidships and cut her in two.

The forward section went down inside about ten minutes. Eighty-two men were killed and two hundred and thirty-two were recovered, most of them by Melbourne herself and the rest by small rescue craft sent out from HMAS Creswell.

The consequences ran for years. Two Royal Commissions were held into it, the second after evidence emerged that had not been before the first, which was extraordinary in itself and made the Voyager a political matter as well as a naval one. A great many of the survivors carried it for the rest of their lives, and the sixtieth anniversary in 2024 was still being marked by men who had been aboard.

Tabard's connection is real and entirely innocent, and worth stating precisely. She had been exercising with both ships during the daylight hours of that same day, which is what a submarine attached to that squadron was there for: to be hunted, so that surface crews could practise. The collision happened hours later during flying operations, and she was neither present nor involved. It is simply the case that the last useful thing those two ships did together before the disaster was work with a British submarine.

A Long Retirement and the End

Tabard was permanently moored as a static training submarine at HMS Dolphin from 1969 until 1974, having covered some 253,349 miles across two years in the Mediterranean and eight years in Australian waters. She was finally sold for scrap on 2 January 1974, arriving at the breakers on 14 March that year, closing out a career built entirely in peacetime yet no less eventful for it.

Two hundred and fifty-three thousand miles is worth converting. It is more than ten times round the world, done by a submarine that never fired a torpedo in anger, and it includes two spells in the Mediterranean and eight years operating out of Sydney with the Royal Navy's 4th Submarine Squadron. HMS Trump carries the story of that squadron and of the day in 1969 when the last British submarine left Australia, and HMS Thorough went out there by one route and came home by the other.

The five years as a static training boat at HMS Dolphin are the least glamorous and possibly the most useful part of her life. Trainee submariners learned the inside of a real hull by walking round her: where the valves are, what the drills feel like in a steel compartment rather than a classroom, and how astonishingly little room there is. HMS Talent finished much the same way.

She was twenty-eight years old when she went to the breakers in 1974, having been completed seven months after the war ended and having spent her entire career preparing for one that never came. That is not a wasted life. It is what most of the Cold War submarine service actually consisted of.