HMS Thorough (P324): The First Royal Navy Submarine to Circle the Globe

The Build: Barrow

HMS Thorough was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 26 October 1942, launched on 30 October 1943 and commissioned on 1 March 1944 under Lieutenant Commander Jack Gethin Hopkins, a third-group T-class submarine that would go on to serve extensively in the Far East.

She belongs to the same group as most of the boats around her in this part of the war: the last and best of the T class, all-welded, good for three hundred feet, and built in numbers just in time to be sent east. What set Thorough apart came later, and it had nothing to do with how she was built.

Eight Patrols Against Japanese Shipping

Across eight war patrols in the Andaman Sea, the Malacca Strait, off Siam, Sumatra, Java and the South China Sea, Thorough built up a formidable tally, sinking twenty-seven Japanese sailing vessels, seven coasters, a small vessel, a barge, a small gunboat, a trawler and the Malaysian sailing vessel Palange, along with laying mines during several of her patrols.

Twenty-seven sailing vessels is the figure that needs reading carefully rather than admiring. These were small wooden coastal craft, sunk by gunfire and demolition charge at close range, because by 1945 that was all that moved in those waters. HMS Thule sets out what that work involved and why the men doing it found it so difficult, and the same applies here. Mining is the other half of the same job: laid quietly in a shallow channel, a mine closes a route for months without anybody having to surface at all.

In August 1945 she operated jointly with HMS Taciturn off northern Bali, sinking a further coaster and sailing vessel by gunfire.

A Genuine World First

Thorough's most historically remarkable achievement came well after the war. On 16 December 1957, she returned to HMS Dolphin at Gosport, across the harbour from Portsmouth, having completed the first circumnavigation of the globe by a Royal Navy submarine, a pioneering voyage.

Round the World, and Who Did It First

This is the thing she is remembered for and it is worth being precise about, because two different records get mixed up. Thorough came home to Gosport on 16 December 1957 having taken a submarine all the way round the world, the first time a Royal Navy submarine had done it. She made the passage the way any surface warship would, on the diesels, dived when she needed to be and on top the rest of the time.

It also came about for a mundane reason, which is worth knowing because it makes the achievement more interesting rather than less. Thorough was one of the boats sent out to the Royal Navy's submarine squadron in Sydney, the one HMS Trump finally closed down in 1969. She had been in the Antipodes before, visiting Napier in New Zealand in August 1950, and she was working off Sydney in 1956. Going out to Australia by one route and coming home by the other is how you circle the world without setting out to, and somebody at the Admiralty evidently noticed that a submarine could be sent home the long way and would become the first British boat to have gone all the way round.

The record usually quoted as the first submarine circumnavigation belongs to somebody else and is a different thing entirely. In 1960 the American nuclear submarine USS Triton went round the world without ever surfacing, covering some twenty-six thousand nautical miles submerged in sixty days and twenty-one hours under Captain Edward Beach, deliberately retracing Magellan. That is the voyage in the record books, and it was only possible because Triton was nuclear and did not need air.

Thorough got round three years earlier in a diesel boat built in 1943, which required exactly the opposite approach: fuelling stops, surfacing to charge, and a route dictated by where there was a friendly harbour. She was doing it the hard way with the technology available, and the fact that a nuclear boat later did something more remarkable does not take anything off her. It is the difference between the first person to sail round the world and the first to fly non-stop.

Along the way, on 2 August 1956, her crew rescued a survivor from the sunken vessel Birchgrove Park in Australian waters, a fitting act of seamanship during an already historic journey.

The reason she was in a position to do any of it is worth knowing, because it is a piece of naval history that has almost entirely gone. Britain kept a submarine squadron based in Australia for the best part of two decades after the war, operating out of Sydney, because the Royal Australian Navy had a large anti-submarine force and no submarines of its own to practise against. British boats were sent out, one after another, to be the target.

Thorough was one of them, and the circumnavigation was in effect the outward and homeward legs of that posting joined up. The arrangement ended when Australia bought her own Oberon class boats in the 1960s, and HMS Trump was the last British submarine to serve there.

That clause hides a bad night. The Birchgrove Park was a small collier of six hundred tons that left Newcastle, New South Wales, on 1 August 1956 with fourteen men aboard under Captain Laurence Lynch. A southerly buster caught her soon after she sailed, a violent squall that comes up that coast with very little warning, and the sea began coming aboard. Her cargo holds were covered only by tarpaulins. They filled.

At a quarter to three in the morning on 2 August she rolled over and sank, six miles off Sydney Heads, in the dark, in a rising sea. Ten of the fourteen died and only eight bodies were ever recovered. The corvette HMAS Wagga found Able Seaman Kenneth Fabian barely alive clinging to wreckage. Thorough, out of Sydney with the rest of the search, later found Second Engineer Joseph Butler, also on wreckage and also close to death. Two more men came ashore in a lifeboat further south during the day.

A submarine is close to the worst rescue vessel afloat: she has a low round casing that is lethal to come alongside in a seaway, almost no deck to work from, and a handful of men who can be spared topside. Getting an unconscious man out of the water and down a hatch in those conditions is genuinely difficult. Thorough was on the far side of the world on a voyage that was going to put her in the record books, and she stopped and spent the day looking for people, and found one alive.

The End of Her Service

HMS Thorough was finally scrapped at Dunston on Tyne on 29 June 1962, closing out the career of a submarine that had gone from sinking Japanese coasters to writing herself into the record books as the first Royal Navy submarine to sail all the way around the world.

Nineteen years, and a peculiar shape to them. She spent the war shooting up wooden coasters in the Malacca Strait, which is the least celebrated work any submarine did, and then went round the world and pulled a dying engineer out of the Tasman Sea. Her sisters went different ways: HMS Truncheon was cut in half and rebuilt to hunt Soviet boats, HMS Trump stayed in Sydney until 1969 as the last British submarine in Australia, and HMS Terrapin was wrecked by depth charges and never sailed again. Thorough simply kept going, further than any of them.