Having completed his fortnight’s stint with the engineering department, Conley was sent to assist one of the officers in the air department. Without aircraft embarked there was little to do, and it soon became evident that in this situation many of the more than one hundred officers in the ship were seriously underemployed. This was due to an excessive specialisation; many of the roles could have been delegated to a senior rate such as boats officer or ‘double bottoms’ engineer, the specialist whose prime task was to look after these voids and tanks on the very bottom of the ship. During this participation in the daily work of the air department, Conley was given the unlikely task of hand-drawing graphs copied from a manual, in order to provide easy interpretation of the maximum landing weights of the newly introduced Buccaneer S2 variant against a range of relative wind speeds and angles of wind over the flight deck. He could not conceive then, or long afterwards, the Commander Air, situated in the ‘Flyco’ position on the wing of the bridge, clutching one of his scruffy drawings whilst asking the captain to alter the carrier’s course to enable a safe landing.
Part of Conley’s air training focused upon the stand-off attack techniques practised by the Blackburn Buccaneer strike bomber. These involved a very low and fast level approach at an altitude of less than 100ft. The Buccaneer would attack at around 600mph and then abruptly begin a steep climb, releasing its bomb at a range of about seven miles from its target, before immediately tightly turning onto a reciprocal course. The bomb’s release velocity would then propel it until over the target. It was neither discussed nor admitted at the time, but this skilled and highly demanding form of attack was designed for use with a nuclear bomb and was an intrinsic element of the British aircraft carrier’s Cold War capability of delivering tactical nuclear strikes against enemy targets at sea or ashore. The 25-kiloton atomic bombs which Eagle had on onboard were codenamed ‘Red Beard’ and required final assembly before being loaded onto the aircraft.
In their exploration of the bowels of the ship on one occasion, Conley and another midshipman, having ignored security signage, were chased out of a magazine wherein they had encountered specialists undergoing training in the bomb assembly procedures. At the time there was a strong rumour doing the rounds that a test version of one of these weapons (containing no fissile material) had been loaded onto a Sea Vixen at sea for transfer to a shore base. However, on taking off, the aircraft could not get its undercarriage up, and as a consequence had insufficient range to reach its destination. Since a Sea Vixen carrying this particular weapon could not land back safely on the carrier, there was no option but to jettison the device in deep water in the Southwest Approaches to the English Channel.
By this time Eagle had made her way into the English Channel, where she underwent machinery trials, working up to a speed of over 30 knots with all eight boilers on line and generating 150,000 shaft horsepower (shp). Vast quantities of boiler oil were consumed in the process. From time to time the ship would anchor and shore leave be granted to off-duty men. The Eagle spent one such weekend off Weymouth and Conley was assigned to act as coxswain of one of the large ship’s boats. During his day of duty his boat had been used as a backup and all the trips to Weymouth harbour, over a mile away, had been for relatively few passengers. However, when it became apparent that there were still many of the ship’s company ashore after the last scheduled trip had departed Weymouth — by which time it was assumed that the pubs would all have been shut — Conley and his crew were dispatched to do a final trip to collect the handful of men believed to be still ashore. The maximum number of passengers allowed in the 60ft launches was 100 but, as he approached the jetty, Conley realised that the assembled number far exceeded this. As he ran the boat alongside, it proved impossible to stop the sailors from boarding, most of them being the worse for drink.
As Conley headed the overladen boat seawards, he could feel her sluggish response to the sea as her bow dug into the waves and shipped spray. He was, therefore, greatly relieved to turn in under the lee of the carrier. However, his troubles were far from over and he could see, at the head of the gangway, an array of duty staff and regulators to deal with those among his human lading who were all but incapacitated. Failing to compensate for the additional weight of his excessive number of passengers, by reversing his engine too late the boat hit the landing platform with a loud noise of splintering timber and tortured steel guardrails. About 150 inebriated voices roared in appreciation of the hilarity of this miscalculation, leaving the duty officer high above to glower down in disapproving anger.
There remained one final task for the four short-term midshipmen to complete and that was to devise shutdown routes for crew members closing hatches, watertight doors and ventilation flaps in the different damage control configurations which might have to be ordered. It struck Conley as surprising that these routes had not been established long before the Eagle had begun her sea trials. It was even more of a surprise that the task, which was the responsibility of the senior shipwright officer, should be given to four trainee officers whose familiarity with the ship’s complex internal compartmentalisation relied, up to this point, upon their own talent for exploration.
For over a week they gave it their best shot, each of them clambering round the many compartments of their respective quarter of the ship trying to develop fast, efficient routes which avoided those men assigned to the task of closing off and isolating compartments then being unable to return to their watch-keeping station. Later they learned that, when tried, their selected routes had led to ‘utter chaos’, but by that time they had left Eagle, on their way to their respective ships.
In September 1964 Conley arrived at Chatham Dockyard with two other midshipmen, one of whom had come with him from Eagle. Here they joined the destroyer Cambrian as she completed a refit. Like Wizard she was the result of the war emergency building programme, a destroyer of the CA class completed in 1944. Having spent fourteen years in reserve after the end of the Second World War, she was, with six of her sister ships, taken in hand for extensive modernisation and by January 1963 had been recommissioned. Fitted with a radar-controlled gunnery system to direct her three single, open 4.5in mountings, two forward and one aft, her superstructure had been modified to take the short-range Sea Cat system, though this was never installed and for close air defence Cambrian relied upon three vintage 40mm Bofors guns.
HMS Cambrian was of the classic destroyer profile, with an elegantly raked funnel and a raised forecastle approximately one-third of her length, and a low ‘iron deck’ that occupied the remaining two-thirds. The condition of her long, slender hull had been barely adequate after the long idle years in reserve had taken their toll. Corrosion had in several places proved so severe that whole plates had had to be replaced during her refit. A large amount of her internal space was taken up by the propulsion machinery required to generate the 30,000shp needed to drive her at over 30 knots. Her two boilers each consumed over 7 tons of furnace fuel oil per hour when steaming at maximum power (80 per cent of the energy generated going up the funnel) and her 500 tons of fuel gave her a maximum economical range of only just over 3,000 miles. Therefore she required frequent replenishments from oilers or larger warships which had spare fuel capacity. Entry into the machinery spaces was directly from the open after deck. The boiler rooms had an air-lock entry system which enabled powerful intake fans to keep these compartments pressurised, thereby improving boiler efficiency. But this crude arrangement risked a dangerous flame blow-back from the open furnace burners if the over pressure was inadvertently collapsed.