Shortly after visiting Londonderry, the commanding officer, extremely popular, was due to be relieved and prior to his departure, having finished a week of ‘Perisher’ work in the Clyde, the ship’s company resolved to take him on a farewell run ashore into Campbeltown. Needless to say, it was an occasion of great revelry, which finished with a very noisy parade down the jetty with a chaired CO wearing a Viking helmet with replica Norse sword as baton, conducting a rendition of the submarine’s song which had the repetitive chorus, ‘Odin send the wind and waves to make it safe for snorting.’
The next day Odin proceeded to sea, dived and was then sat on the seabed for the morning, allowing her crew to recover from the excesses of the previous evening. Such was life in a typical diesel-engined submarines of the Royal Navy during the decade of the so-called swinging 1960s.
After her task in the Clyde, Odin was ordered to Chatham Dockyard where several weeks were spent undertaking repairs to her engines. This was necessary because the greater than normal high revolution running of her type of engines had proved detrimental.
Sub Lieutenant Conley’s period as a trainee was coming to an end. Biggs had been impressed and Conley had grown into the niche the Navy had offered him; it was time to move on. The next hurdle was the successful passing of an examination, the submarine qualification. Given the importance the Royal Navy apparently attached to imbuing its young submarine officers with technical knowledge at the outset, this was a hurdle that in his case was not so much jumped, as kicked aside. Conley took the written part of the qualification in an office ashore in the dockyard, under the invigilation of a coxswain loaned from another submarine refitting alongside. Half way through Conley’s papers, this helpful chief petty officer left the room and returned with two steaming cups of coffee. Sitting down beside the candidate he obligingly ran through the questions Conley could not answer, contacting his mates by telephone where he could not answer a specific question. As Conley afterwards drily commented, ‘At least I was spared the embarrassment of coming top of my training class in the examinations.’ This collaboration proved successful and he duly received instructions to transfer to Sealion as navigating officer. Whilst this was a promotion and opened new prospects for him, it was not such good news and he would have preferred to remain in Odin.
Like his old boat, Sealion belonged to the Third Submarine Squadron. She had been completed at Cammell Laird’s Birkenhead yard in 1961, the penultimate example of the ‘P’ class. However, she had a poor reputation; her commanding officer was a heavy, aggressive drinker in harbour and a bully at sea, a situation not helped by her first lieutenant being a very weak character, incapable of handling his superior.
Conley’s worst fears were proved when he joined Sealion in what seemed like a forgotten floating dock in a remote corner of Portsmouth Dockyard, where she was undergoing repairs to both of her propeller shafts. She was filthy dirty, with crew morale palpably at rock bottom. The stench of her wing bilges, which contained remnants of packed food from past patrols mixed with oily water, was added to the usual pungent aroma of diesel oil. There was long-standing dirt and grime everywhere and much of the deck and bulkhead paintwork and finish had been damaged and not made good. She ought not to have been much different in her internal appearance from Odin, which was only a year younger, so the overall effect on her new navigator — or ‘Pilot’ as he would be called — was profoundly depressing.
There were, Conley discovered, some mitigating factors. Sealion was the last conventional British submarine to conduct intelligence-gathering patrols in the Barents Sea. During her first commission on one patrol she gathered data from Soviet nuclear bomb tests on Nova Zemlya and on another, whilst gathering information on missile firings, had been counter-detected. She was then harassed for many hours by a group of Soviet destroyers who, despite the interaction happening in international waters, during the prosecution dropped many warning charges on her in an attempt to force her to surface. Sealion, however, made it safely into Norwegian territorial waters. These northern patrols involved a long snort to and from the patrol areas with wear and tear upon both machinery and crew. She had finished these patrols about a year before but was mechanically worn out and many of her men were also in an exhausted frame of mind. In particular, those responsible for maintaining her weapon systems were a poor lot. If their equipment became defective, they often could not fix it: the best men were being drawn away and transferred to support the highly prioritised Polaris programme. Consequently, clapped-out boats like Sealion had to struggle with substandard technicians. This unhappy situation was worsened by a very defective character being in command.
As navigator, Conley inherited equipment which was adequate for coastal work, but was not up to the mark for operating in the deep ocean. The long range LORAN-C radio-navigation system was defective, taking months to get repaired, and the echo-sounder was incapable of taking the deep sea soundings for navigating using seabed contour charts. This left Conley with the periscope sextant. This was a very complex piece of equipment fitted with an artificial horizon which would enable him to take observations of the sun, but would prove totally unsuitable for star sights. ‘In fact,’ he recalled, ‘I never came across anyone who successfully used this equipment to get an accurate star fix. The fallback position was to use dead reckoning with all its inaccuracies, owing to the unknowns of deep ocean currents or the boat undertaking an “action surface”,’ enabling him to take star sights at morning or evening twilight using a conventional sextant. ‘This evolution strongly risked the ire of the commanding officer if my astronomical measurements did not result in an acceptably accurate navigational fix.’
In due course, with two new stern shafts fitted, Sealion proceeded down harbour and secured in Haslar Creek, alongside the Portsmouth submarine base at HMS Dolphin. Here she loaded torpedoes and stores prior to going to sea, and here Conley observed his new commander at close quarters. As duty officer on the final evening alongside, he had just finished dinner when the sentry on the casing reported that the commanding officer was coming aboard with some friends, one of whom had brought his dog. Conley then had to carry a very heavy Labrador into the submarine through the accommodation hatch and down a vertical ladder. At the end of an evening of excessive boozing, he had to reverse the process. Owing to the weight and nervousness of the Labrador, this proved more difficult than extricating the lady mayor in Newcastle.
Conley’s ordeal was not yet over, for to his despair, having said goodbye to his chums, the captain returned onboard, sat in the wardroom where Conley was obliged to keep him company, and drank whisky until 0600. He then staggered ashore and off to bed in his shore quarters. As the off-duty crew came aboard at 0800 the duty officer welcomed them with bleary eyes. The commanding officer returned onboard just before noon and resumed drinking at a reception set up in the control room for the First Submarine Squadron officers to thank them for their support and assistance during Sealion’s sojourn in Portsmouth. The guests departed at about 1400 and the ship’s company went to harbour stations for leaving; Sealion slipped her berth at 1500. It was not to be expected that matters would go smoothly.