HMS Walrus (S08): The Last of the Porpoise Class

The Final Porpoise-Class Boat

HMS Walrus was launched on 22 September 1959 and commissioned on 10 February 1961, the last of the eight Porpoise-class diesel-electric submarines to enter Royal Navy service, displacing 2,080 tons on the surface and 2,450 tons submerged, armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes, six forward and two aft, capable of carrying up to 30 torpedoes.

Last of eight is a modest distinction, and she went on to earn a better one. Walrus was also the last Porpoise still in commission, running on until 1987 while her sisters went one by one from the middle 1970s; HMS Cachalot was finished as a front-line boat a full decade before her. What the class was, and why the first British submarines designed from scratch after the war mattered so much, is set out with HMS Porpoise, the lead boat.

She was laid down at Scotts of Greenock on 12 February 1958, which makes three Scotts-built submarines in short order: Cachalot before her and HMS Opportune a few years after. The firm had been building on the lower Clyde since 1711 and was one of the very few yards outside Barrow the Admiralty trusted with a submarine, and within a decade of finishing Walrus it had been merged out of independent existence. Three years passed between her keel being laid and her commissioning, which was normal for a conventional boat of that size and is roughly what a modern nuclear submarine now takes to fit out alone.

An Awkward Training Mishap

During training exercises with the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, a practice torpedo became accidentally lodged in Walrus's casing, a truly awkward mishap that nonetheless caused no lasting harm and served as a memorable footnote to an otherwise steady service record.

It is funnier as a picture than it was as a problem. Exercise torpedoes are fired without warheads and are meant to run under the target, surface at the end of the run and be recovered, because they cost a great deal and are used again. One that ends up jammed in a submarine's casing has to be got out, and a submarine cannot dive with several hundred pounds of loose metal wedged in her free-flooding spaces where it will shift, foul something or make a noise. So an exercise stops, a submarine goes alongside, and a diver spends an afternoon on it. The Royal Navy's exercise programmes are full of incidents like this and almost none of them are recorded, which is the only reason this one stands out.

A Long Refit and a Royal Occasion

Walrus underwent a major 18-month refit at Devonport Dockyard, recommissioning in December 1969, and went on to take part in Portsmouth Navy Days in 1970 and, in 1977, attended the Silver Jubilee Fleet Review off Spithead as part of the Submarine Flotilla, a fitting public appearance for a submarine whose future commanders would include Lieutenant Commander John Fieldhouse, who would go on to considerably higher rank.

The Officer Who Had Her First

That is the largest understatement on this submarine's record, and the timing is worth straightening out as well. Fieldhouse did not come to her later. He took command of Walrus in January 1961, a few weeks before she commissioned on 10 February, and was promoted commander at the end of that year while still in her.

John David Elliott Fieldhouse was born in 1928 and had joined the Royal Navy in 1948. He was a young officer aboard HMS Aeneas in 1951. By the time he reached Walrus he had already commanded three submarines, Subtle and Acheron in 1956 and HMS Tiptoe from 1958, and he had been sent to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich to study nuclear science and engineering, which in 1960 was a very deliberate investment in a man. In July 1964 he was given HMS Dreadnought, Britain's first nuclear submarine. Five submarine commands, ending with the most important boat in the fleet.

What followed put him somewhere very few submariners reach. He became Commander-in-Chief Fleet in April 1981, and when Argentina took the Falkland Islands the following April he was appointed Commander of Task Force 317, with responsibility for Operation Corporate. He ran the whole campaign from Northwood: the carriers, the amphibious force, the air battle over San Carlos and, not least, the submarines.

That last point is what ties him back to Walrus. The orders that sent HMS Spartan south inside forty-eight hours, that held three boats off the Argentine coast for a month without letting them fire, that put HMS Onyx on a five-week passage in a diesel boat, and that eventually released HMS Conqueror to sink the General Belgrano, all came down a chain of command that ended with a man who had spent the 1950s and 1960s doing exactly what those crews were doing. He knew precisely what he was asking of them, which is not always true of the people giving submarines their orders.

He became First Sea Lord in December 1982 and used the position to argue the government into paying for replacements for the ships lost in the South Atlantic, then Chief of the Defence Staff, the professional head of all three services, and finally Admiral of the Fleet and a peer. He died in 1992, at sixty-four. Walrus was his fourth command and he had her for about a year, which is roughly how long anybody had anything in that trade, and there is nothing in her record from 1961 to say that anything remarkable happened while he was aboard. That is rather the point of the story.

A Sale That Never Quite Happened

HMS Walrus was sold in 1987 to the Seaforth Group, with plans to refit her for resale to Egypt, a scheme that ultimately came to nothing, and she was instead broken up at Grimsby in 1991, closing out the career of the last submarine of her class.

The Egyptian scheme was not fanciful and it was not unusual either. A twenty-six-year-old diesel submarine is useless to a navy going all-nuclear and genuinely valuable to one that is not, and through the 1980s a steady traffic of second-hand British boats went to smaller navies. What killed this one was almost certainly arithmetic. Refitting a submarine that has already been laid up costs a great deal, the buyer has to want it at the end, and a boat sitting in a yard while a deal is negotiated is deteriorating the whole time. Four years passed between the sale and the scrapping, which is what a slowly collapsing arrangement looks like.

She had been in commission for twenty-six years and she outlasted the entire class she belonged to. The men who took her to sea in 1961 included a commander who would end up running the Falklands campaign, and the boat herself finished on a Humber mudflat waiting on a contract that never closed. Both halves of that are ordinary. Submarines are remembered through the people who served in them far more than through anything they did, which is usually classified anyway.