Despite its supplanting by the United States Navy as the world’s most powerful navy, the Royal Navy of the early 1960s remained a substantial force, with over two hundred and fifty warships and submarines, manned by more than 100,000 officers and ratings, supported by an equivalent number of civil servants and dockyard employees. In the twenty years following the end of the Second World War, Britain also possessed the world’s biggest merchant fleet and a large deep-water fishing fleet. British shipbuilding continued to enjoy boom times, constructing a large proportion of the world’s merchant shipping and directly employing a workforce of over 150,000. Everywhere there were symbols of Britain’s maritime status: busy ports reached up rivers to penetrate centres of cities whose streets contained the offices of shipping companies, their windows filled with models of their latest vessels. Maritime influence was enshrined in such trivia as the nautical names of leading cigarette brands and the names of pubs; even the newfangled airlines adopted nautical terms and styles.
Naval recruiting posters, displayed at railway stations and on buses, portrayed a highly attractive life at sea in tropical climes. As if to cement this perception in the British psyche, the audience at the last night of the summer festival of promenade concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London listened to a medley of orchestrated sea songs before participating in the culmination, a communal singing of Rule Britannia. Meanwhile, politicians murdered metaphors derived from seafaring, from ‘the ship of state’ to ‘steady hands on the helm’, a propensity that endured long after Britannia had ceased to rule very much, least of all the waves, a circumstance that was to overtake Conley and his fellow cadets within a decade of their obtaining their commissions.
In 1963 there was a very positive sense of opportunity, challenge and widening horizons in the Royal Navy. At its core was a force of five strike carriers armed with Buccaneer low-level bomber aircraft and Sea Vixen fighters which, together with radar-equipped airborne early warning Gannets, provided the Fleet with air cover. Plans were in place to build a new aircraft carrier of about 60,000 tons displacement, while to protect these heavy units and to provide trade protection to merchant ships in convoy in time of war, there was a force of ninety frigates and destroyers.
The submarine force of over forty ‘boats’ was being overhauled with the introduction of twenty one ‘O’- and ‘P’-class diesel submarines. Significantly, the navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the prototype HMS Dreadnought, had been commissioned. Of even more importance, following the Nassau Agreement of 1962, the construction of five Polaris-armed nuclear-powered submarines had been started. These vessels, known to their crews as ‘boats’ but to NATO and the high command as ‘SSBNs’, would carry the British nuclear deterrent to sea undetected beneath the dark waters of the North Atlantic. Furthermore, to defend them by both acting as a distant support to their patrols and reconnoitring enemy countermeasure forces, a class of five nuclear-powered but torpedo-armed strike submarines was planned. Formally known as ‘SSNs’, the first two of these ‘hunter-killer’ submarines, HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite, were already under construction.
To maintain the security of inshore waters, the Royal Navy possessed about one hundred minesweepers, and an amphibious force capable of deploying a full brigade of Royal Marine commandos by means of helicopters was spearheaded by two commando carriers. To support these men-of-war at sea, over forty tankers, supply and ammunition ships were provided by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Ashore in Great Britain there were four Royal Dockyards: at Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham and Rosyth, with another at Gibraltar and a sixth at Sembawang, on the island of Singapore. Besides these shore establishments there were eight naval air stations and a number of naval bases scattered throughout the remnants of the empire including Bermuda, Malta, Hong Kong and Aden. For those officers and senior rates so inclined, these overseas locations offered the prospect of far-distant foreign postings. Well-appointed residences, generous allowances and, for the more senior, a retinue of domestic staff, added to their attraction.
It was not unusual for ships to undertake foreign service commissions of up to eighteen months’ duration, operating from such exotic stations. Although officers could afford to fly out their families when their ships were alongside during extended maintenance periods, this was not the case for most of the crew, who would not see their kith and kin until their ship returned to the United Kingdom. The naval rating of the early 1960s required a robust outlook and a resignation to a disrupted, if not dysfunctional, family life. In such circumstances the character of a seaman’s wife was of paramount importance in holding a family together during a husband’s absence.
Such societal demands were increasingly old-fashioned as mainstream British society evolved during the permissive decade of ‘the sixties’. If the situation of a seaman’s wife was anachronistic, there were parallels in her husband’s warship, where the inevitable entrenched perceptions of recent conflict reflected upon the overarching ethos within the naval service. Just as the ‘Big Gun Club’ of gunnery officers had predominated in the pre-war Royal Navy, aviators were pre-eminent in the Royal Navy in the early 1960s.
This naval aviation cadre had seen the post-war introduction of jet aircraft, often operating from carriers which were really too small and unsuited to this role. Coupled to aircraft with sometimes unreliable engines this was a highly dangerous occupation; even in peacetime 892 Squadron of Sea Vixen fighters embarked in HMS Hermes suffered a fatality rate of almost one in eight during a two-year commission. Although never actually used in aerial combat, of the 155 Sea Vixen aircraft entered into service, over sixty crashed and more than half of these accidents involved fatalities.
A particular hazard was a ‘cold shot’ when the steam catapult launching an aircraft from the bows of the carrier failed, tossing it into the sea ahead of the carrier. This then required its crew to exercise very great courage and incredible coolness, remaining in their sinking aircraft until the carrier’s propellers had passed overhead and then ejecting safely to the surface to await rescue. Such stories were the stuff of legend and, remarkably, there was to be no shortage of volunteers for pilot training. However, the same could not be said for the ‘observers’ who undertook the navigation and weapon-system control in the navy’s two-man jet-propelled strike aircraft and fighters. Many of them were pressed men who had entered the service with no inclination to volunteer for flying. Naturally, being positioned in a cramped space underneath the cockpit of a Sea Vixen fighter known as the ‘coal-hole’ did not appeal to many of Conley’s Dartmouth peers, since the fatality rate for Sea Vixen observers was even higher than that of the pilots.
In the early 1960s the Royal Navy’s core strategy was geared to maintaining two strike carriers east of Suez. The tasks occupying the Royal Navy east of Suez smacked somewhat of the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ of the previous century, though it was usually in support of the civil power, rather than forcing British interests upon the citizenry of other countries. Among a number of influential interventions, in 1959 a British carrier-led task force successfully repelled the threat of Iraq invading the then British protectorate of Kuwait.