Conley was designated as sonar officer and ‘third hand’, the most senior seaman officer after the captain and first lieutenant. However, on joining he was disappointed to discover that, despite the costly modernisation, there had been no updating of the sonar suite which remained essentially 1950s technology. Indeed, its long-range sonar was much less capable than that fitted in Sealion.
Shortly after he joined, the commanding officer addressed the entire ship’s company and announced the introduction of the ‘military salary’, which put armed forces pay on a comparable basis of remuneration to broadly similar civilian occupations. It meant a substantial pay rise for most. However, for Conley and his bachelor peers the best part of the deal was that in the future they would be paid the same as married men, and the archaic practice of paying marriage allowance would be ended. A few months later what was called a ‘delicate text’ signal was received, announcing the end of the ‘tot’— the daily rum ration. The Royal Navy was moving on. Today it is inconceivable to consider that Polaris missile technicians would carry on their work on nuclear-tipped missiles after having consumed a large slug of alcohol at lunchtime.
Recommissioned in February 1970, Oberon headed north to the Clyde for two months of trials and work-up. Unlike Sealion she was immaculate in cleanliness and appearance and with an experienced and competent sixty-five-strong crew, all bode well for her forthcoming deployment.
The trials and work-up mostly progressed in a highly satisfactory manner, although the two stern tubes, which could only discharge the useless Mark 20 anti-submarine torpedoes, never achieved a successful proving firing. These two tubes were subsequently only used for stowage of beer and the two embarked stern warshot torpedoes were carried out to the Far East and back again, effectively performing no role other than ballast. The quietness of the ‘O’ class was emphatically demonstrated during static noise trials in Loch Fyne with the boat suspended in a dived condition between four buoys above acoustic sensors on the seabed: the trials had to be put on hold on several occasions whilst noisy ducks feeding on weed on the buoy wires, causing more noise than the submarine, were chased away.
The commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Terry Woods, was very keen to ensure that his officers were competent to navigate close inshore in a covert manner without the use of radar. Consequently, during the work-up he made certain that they all experienced the pressure of night watches submerged in shallow water close to navigational hazards. At night, keeping constant watch on the periscope whilst snorting among merchantmen and fishing vessels was good training for the congested waters off Singapore and Malaya.
During a break in the work-up Oberon berthed in Campbeltown for two days. Conley was surprised to see his brother on the pier as they secured alongside. The latter explained he had just attended their grandmother’s funeral and burial. This was the grandmother who, on the night of Sealion’s depth excursion and near-catastrophic accident, had had the premonition that her grandson had drowned at sea. By extraordinary coincidence the old lady was being laid to rest with the submarine as a backdrop a mere half a mile away as it passed Campbeltown cemetery.
Oberon sailed for the Far East in June 1970. To enable the passage to be conducted at a reasonable speed, and to avoid undue strain on the engines, the majority of the 12,000-mile route via South Africa was completed on the surface and, as most of the boat’s tracks were well away from the shipping lanes, the bridge watchkeepers spent many a night under brilliant starlit skies without seeing another vessel, with the only sounds the subdued rumble of the diesel engines and the noise of the sea breaking on the bows. In starting to plan the passage the commanding officer had aired the option of conducting the entire passage to the Far East dived and thereby achieving a first for a diesel submarine and breaking several endurance records (the nuclear British hunter-killer Valiant had completed an entirely submerged transit from Singapore to the United Kingdom in 1967 in twenty-seven days). However, he was soon dissuaded from such a wild notion. As apart from morale factors and the crew forgoing a number of very attractive port visits, the sixty-plus days of snorting with its much increased seawater pressure on the engines would put a real stress on them and other equipment.
Having called at Gibraltar, Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and the lonely and isolated outpost of St Helena, Oberon docked at Simonstown naval base near Cape Town in mid July during a sleet squall — not quite the South African weather the crew had envisaged. However, they were soon immersed in the remarkable hospitality offered by the local population which had a great affinity for the Royal Navy. This affection had been cemented during both world wars when Simonstown had served as an important Royal Navy base.
The apartheid regime of Prime Minister Verwoerd’s National Party had for several years been subject to embargo, and the denial of British arms equipment made it difficult for the South African Navy to source spares for their predominantly British-built ships. Indeed, an unwillingness on the part of the British government in the 1960s to supply the South African Navy with ‘O’-class submarines had led them to purchase three French Daphné-class boats in lieu. All named after Afrikaner nurses who worked in British Boer War concentration camps, the first of these, the newly commissioned Maria Van Riebeeck, was in Simonstown when Oberon arrived.
Conley and some of his fellow officers were invited to look round this first South African submarine and were immediately struck by how less robust in design it was in comparison to their own boat. Comparatively small, with a less-safe snort induction system and non-enclosed battery tanks, they sensed the Maria Van Riebeeck officers, most of who were not experienced in submarines, were uneasy about operating their boats in the notoriously large and violent seas off the exposed South African coast, which has few sheltered harbours or safe anchorages. No doubt the loss a few months earlier of a second French boat of this class, with its entire crew, was fresh in their minds.
After a few days’ maintenance Oberon was off to sea for anti-submarine exercises with the South African Navy. The opposition consisted of their Clyde-built frigates President Pretorius and President Kruger. Towards the end of the exercises, Conley was transferred by helicopter for two days’ experience onboard the Pretorius. He found many ways in which the ambience in the ship was like the Royal Navy two decades earlier. Even the wardroom china bore the obsolescent Admiralty crest. However, manned by white conscripts doing their national service, these ships did not spend much time at sea, and Conley noted that these men were demonstrably nowhere near as professional as their British counterparts. This observation proved prescient, as several years later the Kruger was to sink with heavy loss of life after collision with the replenishment tanker Tafelberg.
Leaving Simonstown, Oberon headed north towards Mombasa, meeting up with the frigate HMS Lincoln, on her forlorn and futile station off the port of Beira in Mozambique. The Beira Patrol was a blockade intended to choke off oil supplies to the white supremacist regime of Prime Minister Ian Smith in Rhodesia which had repudiated its colonial status by a unilateral declaration of independence. Sanctioned by the United Nations, the blockade lasted from 1966 to 1975 and involved a total of seventy-six Royal Navy ships, but it proved very ineffectual as fuel was trucked through South Africa and other contiguous countries. As a result of the combined effects of guerrilla warfare led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and international pressure, the Smith regime conceded to the introduction of universal franchise in 1980 and subsequently Mugabe’s long and often violent and repressive tenure as president of Zimbabwe began. The Beira Patrol and the many years Royal Navy ships spent on this thankless and lonely task have long since been forgotten.