HMS Tireless (S88): Thirty Years Under the Ice
Built and Commissioned
HMS Tireless was launched in March 1984, sponsored by Sue Squires, wife of Admiral 'Tubby' Squires, and commissioned in October 1985, a Trafalgar-class fleet submarine that spent the closing years of the Cold War on anti-submarine patrols in the Atlantic before going on to a long and varied postwar career.
Meeting at the Pole
On 19 April 2004, Tireless rendezvoused with the American submarine USS Hampton beneath the Arctic ice and the two boats surfaced together at the North Pole, a striking image of Anglo-American cooperation in one of the most inhospitable environments any submarine could operate in.
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Tragedy Beneath the Ice
Tireless's Arctic work came at a genuine cost. On 21 March 2007, during research operations under the ice, an explosion aboard the submarine, apparently caused by an oxygen generator candle, killed two of her crew, Leading Weapons Engineer Paul McCann and Weapons Engineer Anthony Huntrod, a heavy loss that deserves to be remembered with full seriousness rather than glossed over as a footnote to an otherwise successful career.
She had also suffered a serious leak in her nuclear reactor's primary cooling circuit in May 2000, requiring extended repairs at Gibraltar that kept her out of service until she departed on 7 May 2001, and collided with an iceberg on 13 May 2003.
A Final Search
In one of her last significant operations, Tireless arrived in the southern Indian Ocean on 1 April 2014 to take part in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, putting her underwater listening capabilities to a very different use than the anti-submarine work she had been built for. She was formally decommissioned on 19 June 2014, and was moved in 2020 to the storage basin at Devonport dockyard informally known as the graveyard, closing out three decades of service that had taken her from the height of the Cold War to the search for a lost airliner.
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