Polar Voyages

by Gray, Gordon

  ‘What the hell are you doing officer of the watch? You have messed up the attack on the submarine!’ The CO had appeared behind me in a wild rage having rushed up from the ops room one deck below. ‘Sir, can you tell me what that single red light is? I asked him. ‘What light? The light was now out on the port beam but still there. I pointed it out to him. He looked at it, said nothing then dashed off below to the ops room to try and find out what it was.

  In a couple of minutes it became clear what it was. HMS Tiger had a very high flight deck, about twice as high as other warships. One of her Sea King helicopters had started to switch on its engines as I steadied onto a collision course with her. Apparently, when Sea King helicopters start to switch on their engines the first thing that comes on in the start sequence is their navigation lights. This happens before the normal yellow strobe lights. We therefore had been steaming at 24 knots directly towards a ship about four times bigger than us and apparently no one in our ops room knew she was even there. If the helo had not started up at that moment we would probably have hit Tiger full on. I always had an impression that the submarine was actually hiding underneath Tiger hence our attack course directly at Tiger! However, I was not impressed by the CO’s reaction as my sole responsibility as OOW was ship’s safety. For doing my job I got a bollocking as his game of chasing a submarine had been spoiled.

  Unfortunately, later, during the same series of exercises, two South African Hawker Hunter jets collided in mid-air while flying together in thick cloud over the sea and we had to search for wreckage and the bodies of the two dead pilots for two days until they were found.

  We finally made it back to Plymouth and half the ship’s company were sent off on early Christmas leave. I volunteered to stay on board until Christmas Eve and take the later leave period. I got back home at about five o’clock on Christmas Eve and Doreen was there to meet me on the station. We hugged for several seconds. I had last seen her nearly ten months ago at Brize Norton and I can still remember how good that hug felt.

  North Again

  It was a cold, still, clear January night off the north Cape of Norway. We were steaming north at a gentle 12 knots and I was on watch on the bridge for the middle watch (midnight to 4 a.m.). We have been sent north on Arctic fishery protection duty. I was working on the chart table when I was suddenly aware that there was a bright light coming into the bridge from outside. I turned round to find that the night had turned into day. The northern sky had a bright, milky white curtain spread across it with an arm of light stretching up into the heavens. This spread, slowly at first, then more quickly until it formed a giant arch, like a very bright Milky Way, up across the sky and over our heads and beyond. It flickered and grew, then slowly shrunk and faded. Then, a few minutes later it started again, this time more strongly with green washes of colour in the milky whites and in a wider arc with definite shapes and folds. I hurried out onto the bridge wing with the duty rating and we stood open-mouthed staring up at the skies. It looked as if the Viking gods were gently shaking successive rows of giant, sheer silk curtains of shimmering light as they drifted across the sky. We could see the stars through these curtains and the trawlers that were around us all lay illuminated by the bright Aurora light. As the lights danced so they changed colour, the milky whites had now given way totally to pale greens, then to stronger, brighter greens and then to bright emerald greens as the bottoms of the shot silk curtains rippled and shimmered over our heads in a cosmic breeze. Sometimes, showers of colour seemed to fall from the curtains as if shaken loose while the lights continued to move and dance. We felt dwarfed by the magnitude and magnificence of this spectacle as it enveloped us totally. It continued to ebb and flow over many minutes. As it reached its peak, soft pinks and deep reds fused into the edges of the greens and whites and the lights stretched almost completely across the whole dome of the sky. Only the southern and eastern skies were unaffected. As suddenly as it came it began to fade and shrink back to the northern skies, back to pale greens, then to milky whites then just a white glow in the north. It went completely and darkness returned. I do not know how long it lasted but well over twenty minutes. Later in the watch smaller displays revealed themselves but by four o’clock it was all over. It was the most fantastic display of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) that I have ever seen.

  Perisher

  In the spring we were sent to the Clyde to take part in the ‘Perisher Course’. This is the final course for submarine officers to qualify for command of a submarine. All of the candidates, or students, are experienced submarine officers and have been selected to come on the course. It is referred to as ‘The Perisher’ because if the officer fails he will ‘perish’ as a submariner. If at any point the examiner, or ‘teacher’ as he is known, decides that a candidate does not have what it takes to be a submarine CO he is put ashore that night and is never appointed to submarines again. The teacher is always a senior and experienced submarine CO who is always very well respected by the ‘students’. The final two weeks of the course consists of the candidates taking turns at various manoeuvres and attacks while the surface ships do what is requested by the teacher to provide a good examination. As the course progresses these become more involved with two and finally three frigates acting as targets. For the submariner these are fraught times. They are listening to sonar reports, looking through the periscope when they have to so they can look at the frigates to calculate the rates of bearing change, the courses and speeds of the different frigates and then trying to get the submarine into a torpedo firing position and at the same time not getting hit themselves. It requires, cool, mental agility and at least three stopwatches to be able to do all the mental calculations in a career threatening practical exam situation with the examiner standing right behind you. By the end of the course the frigate officer of the watch has instructions from his CO that when he sees a periscope ahead, he is to charge it at top speed. This is great fun if you are the OOW of the frigate. It is not so much fun if you are the submariner candidate and have not seen the frigate coming. On a number of occasions I stood on the bridge steering for the periscope and willing it to go down as I lost sight of it under the bows of the ship. We never did hit one, though a few must have been very near misses. We were assured that ‘teacher’ always had things under control and could always ‘Flood Q’ if he had to. Q was the biggest ballast tank in the submarine that when flooded, it filled so fast that the submarine went down like a lift. Every evening, after the exercises were complete, the submarine would go into Arran and one or more failed submariners would be put ashore.

  I am afraid to say that on those runs we often went far too close to some of the local fishing boats, which were trying to earn an honest living. We must have scared them half to death as a 3,000-ton frigate rocketed past a 50-ton fishing boat about 50 feet away at 28 knots.

  After our time in the Clyde we went into Liverpool for an official visit. I was the quarterdeck officer at this stage and responsible for managing the crew working at the very stern of the ship as we docked. As we approached the lock entrance, a tug was positioning itself at the stern and waiting for a line to be thrown to it. For some reason the lads were not at their best and three heaving lines all fell well short of the tug. All the time the ship was moving slowly towards the Lock entrance. ‘Come on lads, concentrate and get the throw right’, I shouted. Another two lines fell short, then one landed on the tug but bounced off. I was getting exasperated but there was little I could do. Throwing a heaving line needs to be done properly and cannot be hurried so hounding the lads was counterproductive. The ship’s PA from the bridge then burst into life and the first lieutenant’s voice boomed out over the deck. ‘Quarterdeck Officer! How much longer are you going be getting a line on the tug?’

  In my frustration at the lads, and at the stupid question that had just been asked, I picked up the microphone and replied in as calm a voice as I could muster ‘One minute, seventeen seconds, Sir’. There was silence, apart from th
e lads on the quarterdeck giggling. Ian, the WEO, who was on the bridge at the time said the place fell apart with laughter, even the captain smiled! The first lieutenant never mentioned it again. Well, it was a stupid question.

  After such exciting games, my naval career drew to an end as I had done my time as a short service officer. The Navy had offered me a full-time career, but they could not offer me any Arctic fishery protection ships, or a job as a specialist Torpedo and Anti-Submarine Officer (TASO) a subject in which I had become quite interested. I tried to see if I stood any chance of serving in the ice patrol ship, HMS Endurance. My appointer informed me he could not put a short service officer forward to serve in HMS Endurance as, ideally, I needed to be a career officer, probably a specialist hydrographer and a preferably a ‘high flyer’ as well. I was certainly not a hydrographer and I had the feeling that ‘high flyer’ was not a term that the Navy applied to me; so that solved that problem.

  The Navy could however, offer me a career that entailed another twelve years of continuous sea jobs in the ops room as a warfare/operations officer before I could expect a job ashore. I did not really fancy that for twelve years so I decided to move on, said thank you very much and a little sadly, left the RN. While the Navy was not to be my career I am still extremely proud of the RN and my short time serving in it. The naval training and discipline undoubtedly did me some good and stood me in good stead for my future. The experiences and responsibility I had, even as a junior officer, were beyond the comprehension of many of my school pals who had gone on to university. When you join the Navy you become suspicious of the intensity of the training and the dogmatic manner in which it is carried out. There is a tendency to see it as brain washing. While you are in the Navy you do not see, or really appreciate, the benefits and the quality of the training you have had. Not just technical and academic training but the need for honesty, integrity, self discipline, self pride in your appearance and team work. When you are living and working day and night in very close proximity with your shipmates, you have to get on with people and ensure you do not antagonise them. In the close environment of a warship any personal failings such as dishonesty or laziness are very soon found out. Giving ‘Service’ for others quickly becomes second nature and runs deep in the naval blood. It was only when I left the Navy and witnessed the attitudes and lack of professionalism of some people in the civilian and commercial worlds that I realised how lucky I had been to have had the training and experience I had in the Navy. Again, there is a Navy truism for it – ‘Once Navy, Always Navy’.

  CHAPTER 5

  Wardroom to Fish Dock

  ‘You will never get a job ashore. All you’re qualified to do is stand on the bridge’. Such was the encouragement from Kevin, the bumptious Deputy Weapons Electrical Officer (DWEO) on Rhyl. ‘Maybe, but we will see’. I said in bravado, but quietly thinking ‘Well, he has a point!’

  A few weeks later, in a large wood-panelled office overlooking the Hull Fish Dock, Mr Hellyer looked over his specs at me and said ‘Well, the job is yours if you want it. Just let me know in a few days.’ For about six months before the end of my time in the Royal Navy I had been looking for a job outside the Service and, at the same time, Doreen and I were planning to get married. For work I had targeted the fishing industry due to my previous interest in it and love of trawlers. One of the companies that I wrote to was Hellyer Bros of Hull who had taken me to sea as a sixteen-year-old on the Lord Lovat. Hellyer Bros were now part of a huge trawling company called British Untied Trawlers (BUT), which was the biggest trawling company in Europe at the time. Graham Hellyer was the managing Director and offered me the job of Electronics Manager for BUT at a meeting in his office during my Easter leave period. It was Graham himself who had agreed to let me sail in the Lord Lovat those years before. He was a tall, slim gentleman, fairly quiet and probably shy, unless angered. He drove a beautiful, old, grey Bentley, always seemed to wear soft green tweed suits and I always found him to be polite and interested in what I had to say, a complete gentleman. But then I was never in the same position as one of his skippers after a poor trip.

  Doreen and I got married in her local church in Stirlingshire and set up home in Beverley, a wonderful Yorkshire market town a few miles north of Hull.

  So here I was working on ‘fish dock.’ I had gone from life in an RN wardroom to ‘Ull Fish Dock’. This really was ‘From the Sublime to the Cor’ Blimey’. At the time, the trawling industry was going through an electronics revolution; new types of echo sounders, sonars, net monitors and fish finders were coming into the industry, as well as new radio technology such as single side-band radios and new navigation systems such as Loran C and even satellite navigation were appearing; so the trawler companies needed to be able to keep up to speed on these issues so they fitted the right and best equipment to their ships. The plan was that this was to be my role.

  Hellyer Bros was now part of British United Trawlers, or BUT, and Graham Hellyer was its MD. He was a legend in Hull. His grandfather had started the company, Hellyers Bros, in the south-west of England with his brother in the nineteenth century and the family had moved up to Hull when the North Sea herring were discovered in the ‘Silver Pits.’ After his father retired, Graham and his brother Mark ran the business, continuing to expand and grow the fleet and to send trawlers to the Arctic and return with a profit. They ruled with rods of iron. Hellyers’, by the early 1960s, had become the biggest trawler company in Hull and probably the country at that time. Any skipper was only ever as good as his last trip and a couple of bad trips could see him out of a ship and a job for a long time.

  The formation of BUT created the biggest deep-sea trawling company in Europe. It now included many of the old trawling companies that had grown up independently over the years. The BUT group operated trawlers out of five UK ports, Hull, Grimsby, Fleetwood, Aberdeen and Granton. In total, BUT owned and operated over 130 side trawlers (freshers) and a fleet of about fourteen of the latest and most sophisticated factory freezer stern trawlers (freezers) in the world, each of about 1,000 to 1,500 tons.

  The Job

  In spite of the fine title of electronic manager and an office overlooking the dock, as the new boy on the dock I still had to learn the ropes and I started each day at seven o’clock on the fish market. The catches from the ships that had docked the day before were all laid out overnight and sorted by fish type and date of catching ready for the market. The market was a wet and noisy place; water from melting ice was always running everywhere, the rattling aluminium kits of fish being slid across the wet concrete market, the yelling of fish merchants making their bids and the constant calls of salesman running the auction. The filleters, who worked for the fish merchants, were setting up their stands to start their day’s work of standing out in all weathers, filleting ice cold fish in ice cold water. Added to all this was all the other apparent chaos of people milling round the fish on an often cold, wet and windy market.

  For all matters concerning the fresh fish side trawlers and the morning side trawler inspections at the market, I reported to Fresh Fish Trawler Manager George Hartley, who had been on the fish dock since he left school. George had a wealth of knowledge and was very highly respected. He was a small bull of a man with a shiny, bald head. He was always smartly dressed and mostly a cheery soul. He was very firm and very fair, always asked the right questions, (especially when you did not want him to) and was someone you would not want to cross. He reported directly to Graham Hellyer, or Mr Graham, as he was known to everyone on the dock.

  Every morning I got into my overalls and boots and went aboard all the company trawlers that had landed and checked that all the fishing gear had been properly stowed away, that the ropes, wires and bobbins were all properly stowed, etc. These checks also included making sure that the insides of the cod-liver boilers had been thoroughly cleaned. I also checked the accommodation, the galley, the bathrooms, messes, etc., to ensure that they were all clean and tidy and ready for the next tr
ip, which would probably sail the following night. I always went up to the bridge and radio room to read any notes left for me and the radio repair companies by the RO. I then reported back to George that all was well, or not. In general, however, the ships were always clean, safe and tidy.

  What made these early morning starts more pleasurable was that after the market had finished (normally by about half past eight or nine o’clock) those of us from the office that had been on the market changed out of our market overalls and into our office suits, then sat down to a proper Yorkshire breakfast of eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade and tea in the directors’ dining room, which overlooked the Humber and often, a warming sunrise coming up over the river. Breakfast in the directors’ dining room was a welcome time to recoup after the fun of the market and before the day’s real work began and to catch up on dockside gossip.

  By about eleven o’ clock ‘the Trip was in’. This meant that the office had worked out the total sales from the catches and deducted the running costs of the ships for the trip and then calculated the pay for each crewman on board. So, by eleven, the MD knew exactly how much money each trip had made. It was a very neat commercial exercise.

  Ship to Shore Communications

  When I joined BUT the system used for the daily radio position reports from the fleet was under severe scrutiny following the loss of the BUT freezer trawler Gaul in early 1974. She had disappeared with all hands in the Barents Sea in atrocious weather. There was astonishment in Hull that a new ship equipped with the latest communications systems could just disappear. The Official board of Trade Enquiry into the loss of the Gaul opened in Hull on the same day that I started work for the Company. Late that same afternoon Graham Hellyer returned from the inquiry and called me down to his office. It had emerged at the Inquiry that it was over forty-eight hours after the ship was last seen before anyone in the Hull office realised that something was wrong.