HMS Urtica (P83): A War Spent Entirely in Training Waters

Built at Barrow

HMS Urtica was built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, ordered on 21 May 1942, laid down on 27 April 1943, launched on 23 March 1944 and commissioned on 20 June 1944 under Lieutenant Kenneth Henry Martin, the first of three commanding officers she had in just over a year, followed by Lieutenant Ronald Max Seaburne-May, DSC, RN, from September 1944 and Lieutenant Roger Cresswell Bucknall, RN, from February 1945, a V-class submarine that would go on to have a notably unusual wartime career for a fighting boat.

Three commanding officers in twelve months looks like instability and was nothing of the kind. By 1944 the Royal Navy was turning out newly qualified submarine captains faster than it had boats to give them, and a submarine in home waters doing training work was the obvious place to put a man who had just passed the command course and needed a command. Officers were moved through such boats deliberately, picking up experience of handling a submarine on their own authority before being given one somewhere it mattered. Urtica was, among other things, a place where captains were finished off.

What she was is set out in HMS Voracious: a stretched and strengthened version of the small U class, welded rather than riveted, good for three hundred feet instead of two hundred, and quieter than anything the Royal Navy had put to sea before. Forty-two were ordered and twenty-two finished, and not one of them was lost in the war. Her name is Latin for a nettle, which is the genus, and it is a slightly comic thing to hang on a boat that never stung anybody.

No Offensive Patrols at All

Unlike almost every other submarine of her generation, Urtica never conducted a single offensive war patrol.

Her entire operational period was spent conducting training exercises around Scottish waters, including the Clyde, Holy Loch, Campbeltown, Larne, Holyhead and Tobermory, taking part in torpedo trials, anti-submarine exercises with aircraft, and attack exercises alongside other vessels, exactly the kind of unglamorous, essential work that kept the wider submarine service sharp without ever putting Urtica herself in harm's way.

That list of places is not a random tour of the west coast. It is the map of where the Royal Navy learned anti-submarine warfare, and it ended up there by accident. The service's anti-submarine school had been HMS Osprey at Portland, on the south coast and comfortably within reach of German bombers, and after it was hit in August 1940 the whole business was moved north out of danger. The ASDIC school went to Campbeltown as HMS Nimrod, working out of the requisitioned grammar school; the escort work-up went to Tobermory; the submarines lived at Holy Loch. What resulted was a single enormous training ground stretching from the Clyde round the Mull of Kintyre to the North Channel and across to Larne, with deep water close inshore, sheltered anchorages, and the Atlantic convoy assembly points a few hours away. Urtica worked all of it.

What Tobermory Meant

One name in that list is doing far more work than the others. Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull, was the site of HMS Western Isles, and from 1940 to the end of the war it was where the Royal Navy taught ships how to kill submarines. The establishment was run from the Batavier IV, a Dutch passenger and cargo steamer built at Dundee in 1902 and requisitioned in 1940, which sat permanently at anchor in Tobermory Bay as headquarters, classroom and flagship for the whole operation.

The man in charge of it was Commodore Gilbert Stephenson, who had come out of retirement to do it and who is remembered in the Royal Navy as the Terror of Tobermory. His reputation rested on an absolute refusal to be reasonable. He would arrive aboard a newly commissioned corvette unannounced, throw his cap on the deck and tell the officer of the watch it was an unexploded bomb, then, when somebody kicked it over the side, inform him it was now a man overboard. He removed officers and ratings he judged not up to it, without much ceremony and without much appeal. He was sixty-two when he started.

The reason he could behave like that is that the stakes were absurd. From the middle of 1940 every escort vessel destined for the Atlantic or the Arctic convoys went to Tobermory first: corvettes, frigates, sloops and requisitioned trawlers, most of them crewed by men who had been civilians a few months earlier and officered by reservists. They arrived unable to fight and left able to, in about three weeks, and the difference between those two states was measured in merchant ships and drowned men.

The numbers are worth stating. In the four and a half years Stephenson ran it, the school completed 1,132 courses and worked up 911 escort ships. Vessels trained at Tobermory went on to account for ninety-one U-boats sunk, thirty-eight more probably sunk, and thirty-nine enemy aircraft. There is no more productive stretch of water in the British war at sea, and nobody was ever shot at in it.

None of that is possible without a real submarine. An escort crew can be lectured on ASDIC all day and will still be useless the first time a contact moves, because a submarine handled by someone trying not to be found does things a textbook does not. She goes deep, she turns inside the search, she sits under a layer of colder water where the sound bends away from her, and she waits for the escort to lose patience. The only way to teach that is to send ships out to look for one and let them fail until they stop failing. Urtica was one of the boats they failed against.

The End of Her Service

HMS Urtica was decommissioned in September 1945 and scrapped at Milford Haven in March 1950, closing out the career of a submarine whose record contains, by her own official history, no notable events at all, a quiet but honest footnote in a fleet otherwise dominated by dramatic patrol reports.

That phrase, no notable events, is what an official history says when a boat did exactly what she was told for fifteen months and came home every time. It is not a criticism and it is not really a description either. Somewhere in those fifteen months are several hundred dives, a great many hours dead slow at ninety feet with the batteries draining and the air going stale while a corvette blunders about overhead, and three young officers learning how to command. None of it is a notable event. All of it is the job.

She came out of commission within weeks of the Japanese surrender and then lay about for four and a half years waiting for the breakers, which is a very ordinary ending for a boat that had cost a great deal and never fired at an enemy. The fairest way to look at her is to set her beside HMS Venturer, from the same class and the same programme, who sank a German submarine while both boats were submerged and is in every history of the war at sea because of it. Venturer could do that because her people had been trained. Somebody had to be the thing they trained against, and HMS Upshot spent her war doing the same job from the same anchorages.