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.

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 fly.

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.

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 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.