Experimental

Considering that British submarine construction and Royal Navy interest in submarines had begun only 13 years before, the Admiralty must have been very bold indeed to decide, with war clouds on the horizon, that the time had come for expanding the submarine fleet and trying experimental types.

Until 1913 the construction market had been monopolised by Vickers at Barrow and Chatham Dockyard, but when it came to considering experimental designs, the Admiralty asked Scots of Greenock to build three boats of Scott-Laurenti design.

Armstrong-Whitworth to build four of the Armstrong-Laubeuf type, Vickers to build four of their "special double hulled design" and a large, ocean going diesel driven submarine. Finally they gave orders for three of their own double-hulled design to Chatham, John Thornycroft, and J Samuel White.

Now that the term submersible is in fairly common use it is interesting that in 1913, a distinction was made between Submarines and Submersibles.

Submarines were single hulled vessels designed with minimum underwater resistance. Submersibles were double hulled, the inner pressure hull being enclosed in an outer shell, designed for high surface speed. These two forms tended to merge in later classes of submarine so the distinction vanished.

Scotts' S class (265 tons) were the Royal Navy's first double-hulled vessels. They were of an Italian type (hence the Laurenti).

Armstrongs class were 340 tonners of a French type (hence the Laubeuf). They were found to be more suitable for the Mediterranean so were sold to Italy in 1916.

Vickers and that is the company we are interested in came up with the diesel driven V. 14 knotters of 364 tons.

The Admiralty, not to be outdone by Barrow came up with their own ideas of double hulls and produced the drawings for the F class (353 tons and 14½ knots).

The Vs were actually known as the Vickers Special Type and all survived the war to be sold in the 1920's.

Armstrong's W class went to Italy with the Scott Laurentia boats in 1916. The Admiralty F survived the war and were sold but the search for bigger and better boats went on.

Vickers at Barrow produced the designs for the Nautilus, a boat of 1,270 tons surface displacement having a crew of 42.

Twin diesels of 3,700 b.h.p. and twin propellers gave a surface speed of 17 knots. Electric motors of 1,000 h.p. produced an underwater speed of 10 knots.

One gun and six torpedo tubes - two 21-inch and four 18-inch completed the armament and while Nautilus was completed at Barrow in 1917, she did not become operational, but served as a floating test bed. In 1918 she was relegated to the role of battery charging vessel.

Nautilus was a bold experiment - with an increase in surface displacement and a change from the saddle tank type of construction to a double-hull. She was a twin shaft vessel with two Vickers diesel engines, each of 1850 hp, two main motors of 500 bhp and 352 Exide cells in two battery tanks.

About the same time Scotts had come up with a design for the Swordfish, the Royal Navy's first steam driven submarine.

In size and speed she closely resembled the Vickers' boats and she was the first British submarine to have a funnel. So unfamiliar was her appearance that she was fired on by British ships. In 1918 she was converted to a surface patrol vessel.

Really the E-class were regarded as the best British submarine of their day but the development went on through the G-class of 700 tons into two very popular designs, the H-class of 1915-1918 and the L-class which followed later. The L-class were enlarged Es and a continuation of the standard British type.

Finally came the R-class, of which Barrow built two in 1918, and these were the first submarines specially built to hunt U-boats. They were much faster under water than on the surface - 15 knots compared with 9½.

The Ls and the Hs took the Royal Navy into the years between the wars and the uncertainties of Naval Treaties and disarmament. The Royal Navy had had all sorts of ideas about identifying submarines.

At first they went in for large numbers painted on the hulls or conning towers. In the early days, for instance, A.12 simply had a large 12 on the conning tower and A.12 on the hull.

E.4 was 85, and, just to confuse things, the As in their earlier days had Roman numerals so that A.13 was XIII. All this changed about 1913-14.

Then, between the two world wars, the policy changed again and while an O class was due, the Os became the Osiris, Oswald, Otus and so forth.

The Ps got names too, and probably the most famous of Barrow's P boats was the Poseidon, which was sunk in the South China Sea. A local man - a Chief Petty Officer, survived and his survival was a spectacular story for escape drill and the escape apparatus.

A new high speed, ocean-going type was built at Barrow in the 1930s and there must be Barrovians who remember these large boats, the Thames, Severn and Clyde. They were fast on the surface, 21¾ knots and 'had a surface displacement of 1,805 tons a war casualty presumed mined of Norway. Severn and Clyde survived.

The minelaying submarines Porpoise, Rorqual and Narwhal were other pre-1939 contributions to the Fleet and Malta had particular reason to be grateful to some at least of these boats which ran supplies to the island from Gibraltar when Malta was under siege.

When war loomed again the T class was well in hand and everyone remembers the Thetis, built by Cammell Laird and lost in Liverpool Bay. Barrow was intensely interested in that disaster because Barrow men were involved.

Stern view of Porpoise, showing rear minelaying doors

Sir Leonard Redshaw certainly remembered it and drew on the lessons it had taught shipbuilders and submariners when Vickers Oceanics had their Pisces III on the bottom of the Atlantic a few years ago. The Thetis was raised to serve in the war as HMS Thunderbolt.

The era of experimentation had passed by the time the I939-45 war broke out. The Royal Navy went to war with the T-class for long distance patrolling; the S-class, for coastal work.

From shortly before the outbreak of war a policy of standardisation was introduced and so it was that submarine builders were committed to the T-class, the S-class and the U-class.

Only when the Pacific War made new demands on endurance did we get the A boats, but only one was completed and commissioned before V-J day.

After the As - Andrew, Amphion, Astute, etc became what is probably the most successful diesel-electric design of all, the Oberon and after them, the nuclear powered vessels the TRUE submarines.

Built to hunt the German U-Boats