HMS Talent (P337): Swept From Dry Dock by a Failed Gate

Laid Down at Barrow, Renamed Late

HMS Talent was built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 13 February 1945 and commissioned on 27 July 1945 under Lieutenant Commander Richard Molyneux Favell. She had originally been intended to carry the name Tasman, but was renamed Talent in April 1945 after an earlier submarine of that name had been transferred to the Royal Netherlands Navy.

It is worth noticing what that tells you about how the Royal Navy handled names. The first Talent had gone to an allied navy, which left the name free, and rather than let a perfectly good one sit unused the Admiralty took it off the shelf and gave it to a boat already named something else. Tasman was dropped a few months before completion. Somewhere at Barrow there will have been paperwork, a builder's plate and a good deal of muttering.

A Long Voyage East, Too Late for War

Completed just as the war was ending, Talent carried out full-speed trials, gunnery exercises and torpedo discharge trials off Arrochar in August 1945 before departing Holy Loch for Gibraltar that October, sailing on via Malta, Port Said, Aden and Colombo to reach Hong Kong by December 1945, a considerable journey that stood in for the combat patrols she never got the chance to make.

She belongs to a particular group of boats that the queue keeps turning up: submarines finished within weeks of the fighting stopping, built at enormous cost and effort for a war that ended while they were still on trials. HMS Scorcher missed it by a week and HMS Sentinel was not completed until December 1945.

That passage east is worth respecting on its own terms, though. Holy Loch to Hong Kong by Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Aden and Colombo is the better part of nine thousand miles in a brand new submarine with a brand new crew, much of it on the surface in heat the boat was never designed for. Nobody was shooting, which is the only easy thing about it.

A Tragic Accident at Chatham

Talent's peacetime service included the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review, but on 15 December 1954 she suffered a properly serious accident when she was swept out of dry dock at Chatham Dockyard after the dock gate lifted unexpectedly, an accident that claimed four lives, a sobering reminder that danger did not disappear simply because the war had ended.

Half Past Three on a Foggy Afternoon

The accident deserves telling properly, and it can be, because it was serious enough to be raised in the House of Commons the very next day and again the following January.

The cause was the caisson, the great hollow steel gate that seals a dry dock against the river. Repairs were being carried out to the deck of No. 3 caisson at Chatham, and that work required shipwrights to be inside it, which in turn meant plugging its flooding holes and interfering with the water ballast in its bottom. A caisson holds itself down by being full of water. This one was not full enough, and it was therefore too buoyant.

At about half past three on the afternoon of 15 December 1954 it lifted. The Medway came into the dock in a single rush, and Talent, sitting high and dry on her blocks with a refit half-finished, was picked up bodily. The surge drove her forward into the head of the dock, and then the water reversed and swept her back out through the entrance she had come in by and clean across the river.

Four men were killed and thirty-three were injured, several of them seriously. It is worth being clear who these people were: a dry dock in mid-refit is full of dockyard workers, and this was not a naval accident so much as an industrial one that happened to involve a warship. The men working in and around that caisson had no warning at all.

The rescue was a shambles through no fault of anybody involved. It was December, it was getting dark, the tide was high and there was thick fog on the Medway. Talent herself was not found until the following day, lying high and dry on a mud bank on the far side of the river, having crossed it in the dark with nobody aboard.

The response afterwards was the sort that only follows a disaster. Every caisson at Chatham that faced the river was chained down so that it physically could not lift, and they were inspected regularly from then on to confirm they were properly ballasted. Those chains were bought with four lives.

She was reconstructed in 1955, and later underwent further streamlining and gun removal in 1956, though she also suffered damage in a diving collision near the Isle of Wight around this time.

The streamlining in 1956 was part of a much larger change of mind about what a submarine was for. Wartime boats were built to run on the surface and dive to attack, so they carried a gun, a wide flat casing to walk about on, and any amount of external clutter. After 1945 the target became the Soviet submarine, and the job became staying under and being quiet and quick down there.

So the guns came off, the casings were faired over, the bridges were rebuilt into enclosed fins and everything that caused drag or noise was removed. Talent got the modest version of that treatment. HMS Truncheon had the full one, being cut in half and lengthened. It was the same reasoning that eventually produced the postwar classes, and HMS Opossum was refitted at this same dockyard two decades later, in what turned out to be the last such job Chatham ever did on a conventional boat.

The End of Her Service

In 1960, Talent undertook a publicity tour that drew more than 33,000 visitors, before her eventual decommissioning on 19 December 1966 and scrapping at Troon, Scotland, on 1 February 1970, closing out the career of a submarine whose name changed just months before completion and whose most dramatic moment came not in battle but in her own dockyard.

The publicity tour is a good note to end on and a reminder of a time now thoroughly gone. Thirty-three thousand people queued up in 1960 to walk through a submarine, in an era when a warship visiting a port was an event and the Royal Navy was something the public expected to be able to go and look at. Six years earlier the same submarine had been front page news for a very different reason, and the crowds in 1960 will have known exactly which boat they were queuing for.

She was twenty-five years old when she went to Troon in 1970, and she had never fired a shot in anger. Her war was four months too late and her one brush with disaster came from a dockyard gate. It is not the career anybody at Barrow imagined when they laid her down, and it is a good deal more representative of naval service than the ones that get written up.