AFFRAY IN THE CHANNEL
Andrew Roberts pays belated tribute
to the man who found a submarine which disappeared 40 years ago
FORTY years ago, at 4.30 p.m. on Mon- day 16 April 1951, the 'A' class submarine, HMS Affray left Portsmouth for a Practice War Patrol exercise. In addition to her usual crew of 55, she had on board 20 junior lieutenants who were destined to form the nucleus of Britain's submarine command. At 8.56 p.m she signalled from the Isle of Wight that she intended to dive and proceed westwards up the Channel. She never resurfaced.
When no signal was received by 9 a.m. the next morning, the Commander-in- Chief in Portsmouth immediately ordered `Operation Subsmash'. All available naval and merchant ships, coastal command air- craft and naval helicopters set out to search for the missing boat. In all 44 ships and seven submarines, including contingents from the American, Belgian and French navies, took part. The operation was called off after 46 hours and a squadron of four frigates and three minesweepers took over. But after five weeks of searching an area 95 miles long by 14 wide, Affray could still not be located.
The Cold War was nearing freezing in April 1951 — the North Koreans had taken Seoul in January and Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow that June — so it was not surprising that the Government feared sabotage. One secret Admiralty report explained to James Callaghan, the junior Admiralty minister and himself an ex-able seaman, how 'a submarine containing 20 officers of the submarine course would be a worthwhile target'.
The failure to locate the wreck soon became a source of embarrassment to both the navy and Government. The navy which prided itself on being the world's finest had lost a submarine in the English Channel and seemed to be incapable of retrieving it. Politically the affair could not have come at a worse time for the Attlee Government, with a Bevanite revolt over defence spend- ing splitting Labour that very week and an election due later that year. Questions were asked in Parliament and the Sunday Pictorial lost no time in running a series of `Letters from a Doomed Submarine'. These quoted the Affray's engine room artificer, David Bennington — who had perished in the disaster — telling his family after an earlier exercise, 'It really is a terrible boat. When I get home I'll try to describe the scares and pandemonium that reign at times. . . I think the boat is about finished.'
Various Admiralty papers are still closed under the 75-year rule, meaning the full story cannot be told until 2027, but it now seems clear that a disgraceful act of injus- tice then took place. The commander of the search, Captain Roy Foster-Brown, had been told by the Commander-in-Chief in Portsmouth that he had only one more week before the Admiralty admitted de- feat and called off the search. 'I became desperate,' Foster-Brown admits, and he decided to ignore the negative findings of the Asdic devices that had hitherto been used in the search to show the outlines of ships on the seabed. Instead he was deter- mined to reconstruct from first principles the last hours of the voyage of Affray.
Having spent three years in submarine training, Foster-Brown was convinced that the accident must have occurred at dawn when Affray might have come up to periscope depth for her captain to fix his position by land sighting. Reckoning on a diving time of eight hours and a speed of four knots, he deduced that this would have taken the submarine near the Cas- quets lighthouse off the Channel Islands. He further surmised that the Affray's captain may have attempted to use that landmark to ascertain his position when the accident happened. His navigation officer, James Diggle, recalls how after some time spent alone in his cabin, 'The captain returned with an "X" on the chart and said, "Tomorrow we shall search the Hurd Deep and we will find Affray".' The Hurd Deep is a 200-foot deep ravine running south-west of the Channel Islands and Foster-Brown was convinced that the Asdic beams had gone over the top of the cleft of the Deep. Within an hour of searching the Deep with `Type 162' (a sophisticated form of under- water radar) a submarine shape emerged. Foster-Brown requested television cam- eras to be lowered, and the word 'Affray' was read on the conning tower.
The Admiralty's Board of Enquiry looked into a number of explanations for the sinking. Collision, explosion and fire were all considered. After divers examined the wreck, it was finally concluded that the snort, a long tube which allowed the submarine to recharge its batteries while submerged, had snapped off without reason or warning. Water would then have poured in at the rate of a ton a second, 'so quickly as to upset the trim of the sub- marine that she took an acute angle by the stern and sank before any rectifying mea- sures could be taken'. The Board then heard some chilling testimony from survi- vors of wartime submarine disasters about how the crew probably met their deaths. The report recommended a change in the design of snorts, which was immediately undertaken.
Although the captain of the diving vessel received a well-deserved OBE in the 1952 New Year's Honours List, Foster-Brown's report was never even acknowledged. Two years later he discovered the reason when as Director of Signals Division he ordered up the file on Affray. There he discovered that the Director of Training and Anti- Submarine Warfare, who was in Foster- Brown's batch for promotion to admiral, had claimed the credit for pinpointing the Hurd Deep for himself. This man had neither been on board ship during the search for Affray, nor had he given any advice at all on the submarine's where- abouts.
Foster-Brown complained to the Admir- alty. But they, presumably by then con- sidering the matter closed, chose to believe the former Director of Training. Since then, except for a mealy-mouthed and non-committal letter from the First Sea Lord on his 80th birthday seven years ago, Captain (today Rear-Admiral) Foster- Brown has never received any official credit for the superb navigational skill and seamanship he exhibited in discovering the final resting-place of HMS Affray.
Andrew Roberts has recently written The Holy Fox: A Life of Lord Halifax (Weiden- feld & Nicolson £25).
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