The over — arching aim of the first two terms at Dartmouth was to instil basic naval knowledge and discipline, while developing character and leadership skills through adventure training or boat — work aboard one of the college’s many boats. An apparent infinity of detail about the workings of the Royal Navy was instilled into the neophytes. However, a considerable amount of the instruction was of total irrelevance to their future careers such as, for example, a lecture upon the means of dealing with the anchor system on a long-scrapped battleship such as HMS Nelson. The cadets were also introduced to the more common weapon systems such as the antisubmarine mortar, all of which would be re-taught several times during the following years, just in case they had failed to hoist in the details on this first occasion.
Despite these intellectual shortcomings, as a quintessentially British institution the college offered a very wide range of sports, with recreational facilities second to none. Notably, the college possessed a very long-established beagle pack and fondly remembered hounds had their graves scattered throughout the college grounds. Other activities included flying in Tiger Moth biplanes from Roborough airfield, near Plymouth, horse riding and — besides boat-work in the college pulling boats and sailing dinghies — more extensive coastal cruises aboard one of the college’s 36ft yachts. Before joining one of the warships attached to the Dartmouth Training Squadron, Conley spent a very enjoyable week aboard one of these, sailing round the south coast of Ireland. The yacht was skippered by Conley’s divisional officer and his performance onboard the yacht was, he considered, a turning point from a rather poor start in his time at Dartmouth, as he felt that he had at last achieved the full confidence of this officer, Lieutenant Commander Chris Schofield. He was to be killed when the Avro Shackleton aircraft in which he was flying as an observer crashed into the English Channel.
Notwithstanding its deficiencies, or perhaps because of them, Britannia Royal Naval College successfully instilled the ethos, spirit and heritage of the Royal Navy, producing an elite, each of whom had an immense sense of pride in being part of a long-established armed service of the British Crown. The corridors of the college were arrayed with group photographs of previous cadet entries, and the knowledge that many of those faces staring out from the pictures had subsequently died serving their country endowed the impressionable young cadets with a profound sense of respect for what the college had achieved in the past. However, this pride was not to discourage Conley from being critical of the Royal Navy; on the contrary, his high regard for the institution was to create a desire to improve it, an aspiration formed within the hallowed precincts of the college.
The one fundamental issue Dartmouth failed to address, or even emphasise, was the requirement for reliable, effective weapon systems to enable British warships to be capable when in harm’s way. Instead it bred an ethos of making-do, whatever the odds. After all, it seemed that, despite all its inadequacies, during the Second World War the Royal Navy had nevertheless emerged victorious. In this bland assumption, the often unnecessary loss of both warships and numerous merchant ships with their crews and cargoes was ignored. Such avoidable losses were in part a consequence of the failure to make historical discourse and operational analysis central to the development of the young and aspiring naval officer. Although Conley had yet to grasp fully the extent of all this, it was clear to him that the lacklustre college teaching left much to be desired.
In April 1964, along with fifty or so other cadets, Conley joined his first ship, HMS Wizard, an emergency-class destroyer completed in 1944, which had been converted ten years later to an anti-submarine frigate. The conversion had consisted of removing the ship’s main armament and building up the superstructure with aluminium to keep the topweight down. The most up-to-date sonar had been fitted, supported by two triple-barrelled anti-submarine Squid mortars. The Wizard’s gunnery armament had been reduced to a high-angle twin 4in turret, facing aft, controlled by an obsolescent radar-driven gun director which would have been near useless in action. As a unit of the Dartmouth training squadron, Wizard had also been fitted with an additional open bridge above the enclosed one, abaft of which was a classroom which replaced a twin Bofors anti-aircraft gun mounting. Whilst her anti-submarine armament would have proved competent to deal with the conventional diesel-engined submarine of the day, like most former small warships of her era, Wizard lacked endurance and was incapable of crossing the North Atlantic without refuelling.
Conley and his classmates joined her in Devonport dockyard as she was completing a maintenance period. Here he first encountered the legendary ‘dockyard matey’, along with the many archaic and inefficient practices then commonplace in both private and state shipbuilding and ship repair facilities at the time. These very serious problems ensured that such places, run largely on assumptions of superiority which seamlessly begat complacency, were guaranteed a rapid demise as world competition exposed their actual chronic inferiority. Union demarcation was rife, leading to a bewildering number of different tradesmen assigned to simple tasks, resulting in great loss of working time and the high unit cost of each item on a ship’s repair specification. Working hours were arcane, men clocking on at 0700, almost immediately breaking off for breakfast at 0800. Although this was only supposed to last half an hour, in effect little work was done before 0900 when the first dockyard mateys boarded a ship under repair. Management was in general very incompetent, individual managers rarely appearing on board the ships whose repair they were supervising, preferring to closet themselves in their warm and comfortable offices and allowing their foremen to run the show.
The average worker was relatively poorly paid and depended upon overtime to secure a reasonable income. This encouraged a management— worker relationship which, at best, could be described as abrasive, and at worst, hostile. However, perhaps the most shocking aspect of the dockyard matey was his attitude. Few felt any sense of loyalty to the Royal Navy, and many had little pride in their work. Too often too many arrived at their workplace intending to do the minimum possible during the course of the day, and it came as little surprise that under such conditions Devonport dockyard needed a workforce in the order of 16,000.
After the shock of this industrialised aspect of the Royal Navy’s supporting infrastructure, Wizard herself proved to be an unhappy ship. Despite her recent winter training cruise having been to some delightful ports in the Caribbean, and in spite of imminent visits to Scandinavian ports, crew morale was depressed. Being new-entry cadets and therefore of low status on board, it did not take Conley and his colleagues long to smoke out the reason why the ratings were unhappy. They perceived themselves to be held in low esteem by their officers, while many of the senior leading hands and petty officers, no doubt similarly demotivated, failed to provide them with any leadership.
As for the officers, there was over-emphasis upon the cleanliness and appearance of the ship, which appeared to be the executive officer’s only priority. One soon grasped that the life of many sailors revolved around very mundane and repetitive cleaning. Those recruiting posters depicting seamen manning guns or missile systems had clearly portrayed a very false picture of life at sea on a British man-of-war in the 1960s.
The cadets had first-hand experience of this, living and working as junior sailors, cleaning, storing and keeping watches accordingly. One of the most unpopular tasks was that of maintaining the unpainted aluminium upper deck, a job accomplished on one’s knees and entailing the erasing of any marks with wire wool and soapy water. This was then finished by the application of Brasso and a vigorous polishing until the deck gleamed like silver. Apart from this being a damp, uncomfortable task, it was rather nugatory; at sea, a dollop of spray or deposit of funnel soot would quickly stain the bare metal.