HMS Unseen (S41): Reborn as HMCS Victoria

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Unseen was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid down on 12 August 1987, launched on 14 November 1989 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 20 July 1991, an Upholder-class diesel-electric submarine designed as a quiet and capable successor to the ageing Oberon class.

She was a considerable advance on what she replaced. An HMS Oberon needed a crew of something like seventy; an Upholder did the same job with about forty-seven, because a great deal that had been done by hand was now automated. She was single-hulled, heavily quietened, and armed with Tigerfish and later Spearfish torpedoes and Sub-Harpoon. The full account of why Britain built four of these and then got rid of them is in HMS Unicorn.

A Short Royal Navy Career

Unseen's Royal Navy service proved brief, a casualty of the sweeping post-Cold War defence reviews that judged the entire Upholder class surplus to requirements almost as soon as it had entered service. She was decommissioned on 6 April 1994 and placed in reserve that June, less than three years after her commissioning.

The design brief is worth knowing, because it changes how the disposal reads. These boats were the Type 2400, so called for their displacement, and they were drawn up in the late 1970s to SUPPLEMENT the nuclear force rather than replace any part of it. The thinking was that a small quiet diesel boat could do the shallow, close, patient work in the North Sea and the Mediterranean while the nuclear boats did the deep ocean. That reasoning was sound and nothing about it had changed by 1994. What changed was the budget.

There is a telling detail in where they lived. The class was based at HMS Dolphin in Gosport, the historic home of the submarine service, and then moved to Devonport because four boats were not enough to justify keeping the base running for them. A class small enough to make its own base uneconomic is a class with a structural problem, and it is part of why the programme was so easy to cancel.

Thirty-three months, and she was the longest-serving of the four in British hands. That is the detail that makes the episode look so odd from the outside: the Royal Navy commissioned four brand new submarines between 1990 and 1993 and had disposed of the entire class by the end of 1994. HMS Opossum paid off the same year, and with her went the last of the old conventional flotilla, so Britain emptied both ends of that capability at once.

Sold to Canada

As Britain moved to end its diesel-electric submarine operations entirely, the government offered Unseen and her three sister boats to Canada in 1993, an offer accepted in 1998 under a lease arrangement worth US$427 million, plus a further US$98 million to bring the boats up to Canadian standards.

Unseen was formally handed over to the Canadian Navy on 6 October 2000, departing for Canada three days later and arriving on 23 October.

She was the first of the four to make the crossing, which meant she was also the boat that found out what six years alongside does to a submarine. HMS Ursula and the others followed and had comparable trouble. Machinery that has not turned for years seizes, seals perish, and every system has to be proved again from scratch before anybody will certify her to dive with people inside.

Being first had one permanent consequence. Because Unseen was the first of the four to be taken in hand and recommissioned, she became the name ship of the class in Canadian service, and so the Royal Canadian Navy operates the VICTORIA class. The boats are British-built Upholders everywhere except in the Canadian order of battle, where they carry the name this submarine was given at Halifax in December 2000. It is a small thing, and it means the class is known by two different names depending on which navy you ask.

A New Name, A Long Second Career

She was commissioned into Maritime Command as HMCS Victoria at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 2 December 2000, marking her formal transition from the Royal Navy to the Royal Canadian Navy.

A Canadianization refit at Halifax, originally expected to take six months, ran until 2003, after which she made the coastal transfer to her new home port of Esquimalt, sailing on 29 June and arriving on 24 August, a name and identity under which she has continued to serve for a quarter of a century since, considerably longer than her original career under the White Ensign ever managed.

Six Months That Took Three Years

That refit is the part of the story Canadians know, and it did the programme lasting damage. The work at Halifax was scoped at six months and ran into 2003, and similar overruns hit the rest of the class. The submarines became a standing political argument in Canada, a byword for a bargain that was not one, and for years the criticism was that the country had bought four boats it could not get to sea.

Some of that was fair and some was not. A submarine laid up for the better part of a decade is not a second-hand car, and the buyer inherits every deferred problem at once. What is harder to defend is that the scoping was wrong by a factor of five, and that Canada had accepted the boats without fully establishing what state they were in.

The First Torpedo

The ending nobody expected came nearly twenty years later. In March 2012 Victoria completed her weapons certification and was declared fully operational, and on 17 July 2012, at the Pacific Missile Range Facility off Kauai during the RIMPAC exercises, she fired a live Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo at the decommissioned American stores ship Concord.

It hit. The Concord sank in under eighteen minutes, and it was the first time in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy that one of its submarines had fired a warshot torpedo at a target and sunk it. A boat that Britain had built, used for thirty-three months and written off as surplus put Canada into a club it had never been in before, twenty-one years after she was commissioned. She went on to work Operation Caribbe the following year, Canada's share of the multinational counter-narcotics effort in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean. It is work a submarine is unusually well suited to, because the traffickers are watching for aircraft and patrol vessels and have no way at all of knowing that something is sitting below periscope depth writing down what they do.

She remains in commission at Esquimalt on Vancouver Island. Set the two halves side by side and the arithmetic is stark: two years and nine months under the White Ensign, and more than twenty-five years and counting under the Maple Leaf. Whatever the Canadian programme cost, and it cost a great deal, the country has had far more out of this submarine than the navy that ordered her ever did.