And then there was….Oman!

 

The Tanker War, Straits of Hormuz 1984 – 1988

In January 1984, I was employed by the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces (SAF) as a Contract Officer in the Sultan of Oman’s Navy (SON). Foreign contractors were extensively employed by SAF at that time who worked, in uniform, alongside loan officers from mainly UK and Pakistan training Omani military personnel.

My first appointment was as the Training Officer on board SNV Al Mabrukah, a ship converted from the previous Sultan’s Royal Yacht into an officer’s sea training ship and commanded by Davis Willis, my old training officer when I was a Midshipman in HMS Glamorgan.  Al Mabrukah was converted at Brooke Marine, Lowestoft, and our first task was to re -commission her and sail her back to Oman. Once in Oman, we were based at Muscat, as we were too big to be based at the then naval base just outside Sultan Qaboos’s Muscat palace. From late 1984 to early 1986 Al Mabrukah embarked on a series of training voyages with up to eight officers under training, taking them into the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Mombasa and Bahrain.

These training voyages were taking place against the background of the Iran/Iraq War, which started in September 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran. By 1984, the increasingly bloody conflict had extended to Iraqi attacks on Iran-bound shipping and oil installations in the Persian Gulf, leading to the Iranians retaliating by closing the Straits of Hormuz to all maritime traffic, thereby bringing American intervention: The United States had threatened several times to intervene if the Strait of Hormuz were closed. As such, the Iranians limited their retaliatory attacks to Iraqi shipping, leaving the strait open to general passage. This, in turn, brought Oman into the task of policing mercantile and military passage through the Straits as the separation lanes fell within Omani territorial waters of the Musandam Peninsular (see map below). SON started to operate patrols from their base at Jazirat al Ghanam (Goat Island) up and down the separation lanes to ensure that shipping followed the route correctly and to deter attacks.

The main units Oman used for patrolling the straits were its Brooke Marine and Vosper Thorneycroft – built fast attack craft, ranging from 25m gunboats to 75m Exocet armed craft. Occasionally larger ships such as Al Mabrukah were sent on patrol and my first experience of this was in March 1986. By this time there were regular attacks on merchant shipping by both sides, but in particular the Iranians had developed the technique of mass attack in the straits using Swedish Built ‘Boghammar’ speedboats armed with rocket launchers, RPGs and heavy machine guns. These speedboats were operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who would launch surprise attacks against tankers and cause substantial damage. Iran also used aircraft and helicopters to launch Maverick missiles and unguided rockets at tankers.

The Straits of Hormuz

Patrols would typically last five days and four nights, we would transit out from Goat Island north east to the entrance to the west bound separation lane, and then turn into the eastbound lane at the far end.

Entrance to the Separation Lane, Straits of Hormuz

 We would identify all traffic and report hourly back to base. The base control room would tell us what was approaching and also vector us off to investigate any suspicious traffic. One feature I remember during those patrols was the almost constant presence of smugglers running small craft and Dhows between Iran and Oman/UAE with complete impunity. In addition international VHF channel 16 was completely clogged up with oil rig operator chatter. If we wanted to talk to a vessel we had to pick our moment and then shift them to another channel. By mid-1986, I had left Al Mabrukah and joined SNV (now RNOV) Nasr Al Bahr as Executive Officer. Nasr Al Bahr was a Logistics Landing ship capable of carrying eight main battle tanks and 200 troops and had a roll on, roll off arrangement with doors/ramps at the bow and stern. We were also sent to the straits on patrol, very often with a troop of Special Forces onboard. By this time, the USA, Britain, France and USSR had organised their shipping into convoys to transit the straits and their warships escorted them through. In addition, the Iranians threatened to mine the straits and the UK sent out a mine countermeasures taskforce to be based in Bahrain. The attacks on oil tankers continued into 1987. Both Iran and Iraq carried frequent attacks during the first four months of the year. Iran was effectively waging a naval guerrilla war with its Revolutionary Guard navy speedboats, while Iraq attacked with its aircraft. In 1987 I took over command and we carried out frequent patrols, but intercepting targets was difficult because Nasr AL Bahr’s top speed was only 15 knots. Instead, we developed the tactic of loitering in the westbound lane and then positioning ourselves between the tankers and the approaching Iranian speedboats, with our Coxswain (who was from Musandam and spoke fluent Farsi) cajoling and coaxing them away on the VHF. It mostly worked as we were a big ship and well-armed with 40mm guns, sometimes they needed a few shots to turn them around, and one time they shot back and we took on one of the boats, captured it and took it back to Goat Island.

SNV Nasr Al Bahr (foreground)

Damaged Ship, 1988

Captured Iranian ‘Boghammar’, 1988

The Iran/Iraq war continued until July 1988, by which time I had left Nasr Al Bahr and was appointed Staff Officer Operations at the navy’s new naval Base at Wudam, some 80 kilometres north of Muscat. Lloyds of London estimated that the Tanker War damaged 546 commercial vessels and killed about 430 civilian sailors. The largest portion of the attacks was directed by Iraq against vessels in Iranian waters, with the Iraqis launching three times as many attacks as the Iranians. In addition to trying to prevent attacks on shipping SON also made sure that foreign warships transited the straits with weapons stowed and directing radar off. As well as speedboat attacks I also witnessed, from the roof of the Goat Island base operations room, the sinking of the British built Iranian warship Sahand by the US and the bombing of Bandar Abbas by the Iraqi Air Force. 

The Sultan of Oman’s Navy – now the Royal Navy of Oman – continues to patrol the Straits of Hormuz to this day.

I left SON on 24^th January 1990 and returned to England where I re-joined the RNR.

Seaslugs and Custard

As I said in my introduction, these post aren’t in strict chronological order: This is an account of  part of my time as a Midshipman in the fleet.

In September 1972 I joined HMS Glamorgan as one of four Midshipmen to start the second phase of officer training. I had graduated from Britannia Royal naval College, Dartmouth the month previously.

HMS Glamorgan, 1972

Glamorgan was a batch 2 County Class Destroyer, one of eight guided missile destroyers built between 1959 and 1970. The counties were the first RN ships to have guided missiles as their main armament and were very modern looking. By the time I joined Glamorgan, her main armament, the Seaslug missile, was almost obsolete and the RN was trying to find a secondary use for them as the ships themselves could not practically be modified to carry any other weapon.

In September 1972, Glamorgan had just returned from the Far East via Cape Horn and the South Atlantic, and was not in good shape – dirty and lousy with cockroaches. The crew were in the process of changing and the Officers, in the main a bit distant and stuffy. Luckily for us, the Captain, Tom Baird, insisted that he only had four Midshipmen on board at any one time, and that meant we had two twin berth cabins for all of our time on board, pretty luxurious in those days. After a maintenance period in Devonport (Glamorgan was the only one of the eight counties to be based there – all the others were based in Portsmouth) which included a good clean up,  four fumigation operations and an almost complete crew change, we sailed for a brief shakedown at Portland and then deployed to the Mediterranean.

In the Med we linked up with the US Sixth Fleet for exercises and I was able to spend some time on board USS John F Kennedy to witness carrier operations for the first time. After visiting Gibraltar, Athens, and Tunis we went to Malta – which had only recently allowed the British back in – for a maintenance period. Our training officer (David Willis, the Navigating Officer, who I would meet again in another life) was persuaded by the TAS (Torpedo Anti-Submarine) Officer that it would be character building for the Midshipmen to sail the ship’s 3 in 1 Whaler around the island, camping en route. In was upon our return from this jaunt that I learned that my Father had died suddenly of a massive heart attack, aged just 45.  Under the rules at the time, as the second child I was not entitled to compassionate leave, but again Captain Baird (who was ordinarily a very hard taskmaster) insisted that I was flown home for my dad’s funeral and so I did, returning to Malta ten days later. We returned to Devonport in December for Christmas leave, after which the fun really started.

As I said previously, the Seaslug medium range anti-aircraft missile was almost obsolete by 1972, having been designed in the late 1940’s. Although Glamorgan carried the Mk.2 supersonic version of the missile, the fact was that its intended target – high flying propeller driven Tu-95 Soviet ‘Bear’ bombers carrying nuclear stand-off air to surface missiles – were no longer the main threat to the fleet. It was sea skimming surface to surface missiles launched from Soviet units that could be anything from a destroyer to a fast attack craft or even a submarine that posed the biggest threat to the fleet and we had no real counter to them, as Glamorgan herself was to discover tragically ten years later. The only weapons available was the ship’s 4.5 inch guns, since the Sea Cat missile was too short range, was visually aimed and too slow to react. So the idea was to adapt Seaslug into an anti-ship role to take out the launch vehicle before it fired, or to intercept the missile once fired in mid-flight. That was the idea, anyway.

 Seaslug GWS.2

Seaslug was big, over 6m long, and heavy – 2,384kg. That’s nearly 2 tons in old money. Glamorgan carried 24 missiles in a magazine that stretched on 4 – deck from below the bridge to the launcher on the stern. Some of the missiles were ready to go; some were partially assembled in the forward part of the magazine. Because of their size (and the originally designed liquid propellant) they were stowed horizontally on a railway type system. Basically the entire ship was built around the storage, handling and launching arrangements for the beast and there was precious little room for anything else.

The missile had four wrap-around booster motors which separated after launch. After separation the main motor ignited to power the missile to the target. The booster motors were positioned at the front of the missile, but this unusual arrangement gave acceleration, and, with the motor nozzles angled outwards at 45°, the missile entered a gentle roll at launch, evening out differences in the thrusts of the boosters. This meant that large stabilising fins as used on contemporary missiles in service with the Royal Air Force (Bristol Bloodhound) and the British Army (English Electric Thunderbird) were not required. Once the boosters were clear the control surfaces became active.

Guidance was by radar beam-riding, the beam provided by the Type 901 fire-control radar, which was the large searchlight looking unit on the hangar roof. There were 3 flight modes:

• LOSBR (Line Of Sight, Beam Riding), in which the missile flew up a beam that tracked the target. This was the as – designed anti – aircraft mode. We called it a Lobster Shot.

 

• CASWTD (Constant Angle of Sight With Terminal Dive), with the missile climbing at a low angle and then diving onto a low-altitude target. We called it a Custard Shot.

 

• MICAWBER (Missile In Constant Altitude While BEam Riding), similar to CASWTD, but with a terminal low-level glide phase so that the Mark 2 variant could be used against ships. This mode suffered from problems associated with the surface of the water reflecting the guidance beam. Funnily enough we called it a Micawber Shot.

Upon the conclusion of Christmas leave, we were informed that Glamorgan was to be the proving ship to test the effectiveness of the Seaslug against low flying and surface targets. These were to be conducted at the Aberporth missile range, off the west coast of Wales. Seaslug had become quite notorious amongst the locals as during one trial firing earlier, the missile slipped out of the beam and crashed into a field, killing two cows. Because (maybe) of this, our first shot, a high altitude LOBSTER shot, was primarily to test the command destruct mode built into the Mk.2 missile, which was successful. We did one more LOBSTER shot to make sure everything was working, then we got down to testing the ’alternative’ modes.

As anyone who has ever been involved with any sort of trials – and in particular trials involving aircraft and missiles – will tell you, there is a lot of hanging around for the right conditions, clear range, target failures, etc., etc. We got our fair share and let’s face it the weather off Wales in January and February is not going to be the best. So we tended to spend a fair bit of our time anchored off Aberystwyth which didn’t really (in those days) have much going for it, especially when we discovered that the pubs were closed all day on Sundays! Such was the crew’s dismay that for one weekend we sailed down to Milford Haven, where the pubs were open, for the sake of morale. During their year at sea, Midshipmen are attached to different departments in the ship on a round-robin basis, for the trials I was attached to the WE (Weapons Electrical) department, so I was close to the action as it happened.

First up were the CUSTARD shots. The target for these shots was a Jindivic drone, launched and controlled from Aberporth. It became immediately apparent that there were problems here: the Jindivic was designed as a medium to high level target, but we wanted it to fly at low level. Plus, to make the shot work involved acquiring and tracking the target on the ships MRS3 gunnery radar – because the 901 radar couldn’t do it below 5,000 feet – translating that data to the missile fire control, firing the missile into a fixed angle 901 beam and then predicting the target’s course speed and height before diving the missile on to a point where the target should then be. Simples.

CUSTARD!

To our astonishment, it worked. Sort of. The thing was, the Jindivic never got below 1,000 feet – we tried lower but it ditched into the sea – we couldn’t have the target flying towards us for range safety reasons, and we were command detonating at the calculated impact point, the rationale being that because the missile was so big, and had an expanding rod warhead, all that supersonic metal only really needed to get near to have a chance. So yes, we got near, in fact we made one target trip its gyros and parachute into the sea, but I’d hate to rely on it for defence for real. Especially against a real sea skimmer – OK against a smoky old SS-N-2 Styx that you can see coming from miles away, maybe, but then I’d be tempted to lock on with MRS3 and use guns to shoot it down. Exocet? No chance.

Next up, MICAWBER. Right, then. The target for these shots was a warship hulk – I think an old ‘Battle’ class destroyer. The plan was to run a course 90 degrees to the target at maximum MRS3 surface range, about 12 miles, just on the horizon. Acquiring the target was no problem: it’s what MRS3 is supposed to do and then, in theory it was a case of transmitting the data to the missile control computer, firing the missile up into a low (half a degree) beam angle and then bringing the beam down to a height where the control fins could be locked down and the missile slammed into the target. It was a bit like naval gunfire support but with a missile. I watched each shot through the visual gun sights on top of the bridge.

It didn’t work. Not once.

Basically the guidance beam got lost in the sea clutter and the missile either: self-destructed (remember that ‘feature’ of the Mk.2?) fell short, or fell long. And this was against a target that was only moving relative to our surface speed. In desperation we fired a couple of shots stopped in the water but it was no good.

Tom Baird signaled to the Admiralty: ‘Bloody thing’s useless as an anti-ship weapon’ or words to that effect and we returned to Devonport.

I left HMS Glamorgan after my Midshipman’s Board in September 1973.

 

 

 

 

Postscript:

Ten years after the trials, Seaslug – way, way, past the point of obsolescence, was used in anger, during the Falklands conflict.  In San Carlos Water, HMS Antrim fired two Seaslugs at the attacking aircraft before the 901 radar had locked on. They both missed but were so spectacular that the attacking Argentine aircraft pulled up in alarm and went home. To them it must have looked like ten missiles coming at them as the boosters detached! HMS Glamorgan fired a CUSTARD shot at the Argentinian radar at Port Stanley and a further three at ‘land targets’ before she was hit by an Exocet; she then dumped another two that were immediately below the damage.

 

What Was I Thinking?…

I joined the Royal Navy on September 15^th 1971. Three days later, marching up and down BRNC Dartmouth parade ground at 6:30am under floodlights in the pouring rain, I really did wonder ‘what was I thinking?’

Well, let’s see. I grew up and went to school in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire with a brief 3 year stay in St. Neots, which was then in Huntingdonshire. Both hardly near the sea, in fact the only time I saw the sea was when we went down to Cornwall for holidays, or on the cross channel ferry to France. Bletchley, as we now know, was the main codebreaking centre during  WW2 – something that was still secret when I was at school, and I daily walked past Bletchley Park (by then a Post Office Telecommunications training centre) blithely ignorant of what had gone on in there.

Bletchley Park

I did have some naval/military connections. My Grandfather, Charlie, was one of those men who was born in 1900, and he joined the Navy as a boy stoker in 1915 serving, amongst other ships, in HMS Warspite – post Jutland – when he was 17. He stayed in for a full career, serving in MTBs during WW2 and eventually retiring as a Chief Stoker in 1955. My dad’s brother, Bob also served in the RN in the 1950’s and left as a Leading Hand after 12 years to go on to have a long career in the Fire Brigade, and my Uncle Tom was a Warrant Officer in the Army.  I don’t remember ever having a serious conversation with any relative about joining the military – in fact I kept it a bit of a secret at first.

By the autumn of 1970 I’d had enough of school. I was at Bletchley Grammar School, and having done my GCE ‘O’Levels the year before, I elected to stay on to the Sixth Form and sit two science GCE ‘A’ Levels. This was to the surprise and, frankly, dismay of my family, all of whom had left school at 15 and gone out to work. I think I was expected to take my ‘O’Levels and then leave and get an apprenticeship or something that brought in a wage so I could contribute to the family income. Anyway, by early 1970 I’d got a job packing paper rounds for a local newsagent – a job that involved getting up at 4am, working to 7:30 then going to school. By lunchtime I was nodding off in class, and frankly not taking much in. One morning, I saw an advertisement for RN Artificers (engineers) in one of the papers, and on a whim I cut out the coupon and sent it in. Two weeks later I had a reply and a rail warrant to Watford for a preliminary interview at the RN recruitment office. I called the office, agreed a date and time and jumped on a train, having said not a word to my parents or friends.

When I walked into the Watford recruiting office, my first impression was how smart it all was. Posters depicting modern naval life were on the walls and the staff were friendly and welcoming as I sat down to wait. I was called into a side room by a Chief Petty Officer – I only knew that because he told me – who then asked me to tell him about myself, my interest, hobbies, why the Navy, pretty standard stuff. He then outlined what Artificers did in the Navy, how long the training took, career prospects, and by that time it was clear to me that this wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to be an engineer down in the bowels of the ship like my Grandfather; I wanted the sun on my back, to fire guns and missiles, to see where I was going. I wanted to be a sailor. Maybe. Actually as the interview went on, I didn’t know what I wanted and said this to the Chief. The Chief got up and said “OK, no problem, let me talk to my boss”, and left the room. Sometime later, he returned and said “The boss wants a word” and led me down the corridor to meet The Boss.

The Boss, it turned out, was an SD Engineering Lieutenant Submariner. SD stands for Special Duties which means he was promoted from the ranks, in his case from PO Artificer (SM). We chatted and finally he said, “Look, I see here that you’ve got 8 GCE’s – that more than qualifies you to apply for a short service commission”. An officer… I’d never thought of that, so I asked him to tell me more. At the end of it, a short service commission in the Royal Navy sounded just the ticket. The boss advised me to apply for the May 1971 Admiralty Interview Board (AIB), and that I could also apply as aircrew if I so wished because whether or not I was selected for flying training, I could probably still do the AIB. I learned much later that the RAF was switching to all graduate aircrew recruiting, and the RN, desperately short of junior and middle ranking non-career specialist officers, were hoovering up potential talent by only requiring ‘O’ Levels for short service seamen and aircrew. Those that failed the aptitude tests at RAF Biggin Hill were, at the discretion of the liaison officer at Biggin, offered an AIB for seaman specialist.   The newly planned aircraft carrier, CVA-01, and all but one of its escorts had been cancelled four years earlier; the future for the Fleet Air Arm seemed to be rotary wing only, with a smaller surface fleet concentrating on Anti-Submarine Warfare in NATO waters. Long term career prospects were becoming limited and let’s face it you don’t need a degree to fly a chopper or stand on a bridge. So I went home, told my parents what had happened, filled out the application for a short service commission, went back to school and waited.

Before I go any further, let me describe who I was back in 1971. Basically, I was a typical, white, lower middle class, 18 year old long haired bell bottom and grandad shirt wearing product of the ‘60s. I wore John Lennon sunglasses and rode a Lambretta scooter. I mourned the Beatles break – up, was into Cream, Rod Stewart and The Faces, T-Rex and The Stones. Laugh In, Monty Python and the Two Ronnies were on the telly, John Peel and Kenny Everett on the radio. The Kennedys had been assassinated; Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, the Vietnam War dragged on with Nixon in the White House, Ted Heath in No. 10.  I played a lot of sport, rugby for both the school and town, swam a lot and was (so I thought) pretty fit. I couldn’t drive a car, had only been to sea on a ferry and had flown in a plane – a BEA Trident – once. So obviously I opted to join the Royal Navy as a helicopter pilot. Go figure.

Just after Christmas, I received a large pack of documents to read, sign and send back. There was also a guide as to what to expect at the AIB, travel directions to RAF Biggin Hill and the necessary warrants. There was also a recommended reading list, instructions on what to take with me and a guide to the fitness levels required for entry. Interestingly there was also that spring a BBC documentary on BRNC that gave me a good, if rather sanitised, insight on what I may be in for. So one Tuesday morning in May 1971 I set off, not for Portsmouth but to RAF Biggin Hill in Kent for flying aptitude tests prior to the AIB.

RAF Biggin Hill

As anyone will tell you, even today, the Royal Air Force is run by officious, bitter, short-arsed corporals who wish they were flying fighter jets and angry that they don’t. They are particularly angry with potential officer recruits, whom they regard as jumped – up public and grammar school boys trying to fast track themselves to the top. Their attitude was clearly “If you want those wings matey boy, first you’ve got to get past me”. The flying aptitude tests took a day, so as I had arrived the night before, I dumped my bag in my room and found the ‘Candidates Bar’. The next morning I turned up at the test centre with a mild hangover and no idea what was going to happen next. What happened next is that a corporal called out names to go into groups of six or so. When he had finished there were about five of us left standing. The corporal looked across the room and said “Oh yes, you lot. You’re Fleet Air Arm. Go over there and wait”. My dislike of all thing Crab started right there.

Crabs

Eventually, a tall, blonde haired Lieutenant in number 5 uniform (eight button jacket – no woolie pullies in the RN until 1973) with pilot’s wings on his left sleeve turned up. He grinned and said loud enough for the RAF types to hear, “All those for the Senior Service follow me”. We swaggered out, natch. The tests started with a film on the theory of flight, followed by a series of paper tests with diagrams of instruments, views of aircraft in flight which you were supposed to translate into stick and rudder inputs and there were mental arithmetic tests, mostly speed/time/ distance problems, number sequence recall tests and some verbal tests. The one thing I vividly remember was something we’d now call a crude video game. Basically you sat in a chair with a green video screen in front of you, and a joystick and rudder pedals that you could move with your hands and feet. On the video screen was an illuminated circle about 15 cm in diameter with a dot inside it that responded to the stick and rudder. All you had to do, said the corporal, was to keep the dot inside the circle. When the test started the dot began to move out of the circle which required me to move the stick and rudder to correct the drift. Every time the dot got out of the circle it was recorded on a counter on Corporal Crab’s desk. Any kid doing this test today would probably fail because he’d be falling about laughing, but in those days there were no video games, and I found the test extremely challenging, just as I can’t do shoot ‘em up video games now. My hand/eye co-ordination is not good enough, something I should have known, and something that would bite me again,  as I was rubbish at golf, cricket and tennis and still am.

After the tests, we walked across the base to the RN offices and awaited the verdict. I was called in to the RN liaison officer’s office and sat down. This is where I learned that the RN always gets straight to the point. The liaison officer, a passed over (i.e. didn’t make Commander) Lieutenant Commander with Observer’s wings, looked at me, looked down at the results page, looked up and said, “ Well Fenton, you’ve failed. Quite badly on the hand/eye and aircraft attitude, and these results indicate that flying’s just not for you.” I wasn’t surprised. You either have good hand/eye co-ordination or you don’t. Evidently, I don’t. “However” he said, “You did OK on the maths and Lt. Blondie was quite impressed with your verbal tests and your general attitude, so we are offering you a place on the AIB as a short service seaman officer candidate. We need your answer now, transport leaves for Portsmouth in an hour”.

I said yes, fine.

AIB

I arrived at the AIB – which is part of HMS Sultan in Gosport – at about 7pm that day. On the train down, Lt. Blondie took the three of us (two had gone home) into the bar area, and over a can gave us some insight as to what was next and some tips on getting through the process. One of the things he emphasised was to talk to the staff – particularly the Leading Hands and the Able Seamen who rigged the practical tests. Nobody wanted anyone to fail, he explained, and the board were looking for attitude as well as aptitude. The Navy wasn’t bothered with who you are now, but who you have the potential to become. I was struck by the contrast between this informal, friendly approach and the cold, mechanical approach from the RAF corporals. When I got there I signed in and was shown round the AIB and where my room was.  Then there was a briefing by an officer and a senior rating, supper and we were told that the rest of the evening was ours. Taking Lt. Blondie’s advice, me and a couple of others went to the Cocked Hat pub across the road where we found a couple of the ABs who worked at the Board, bought them a pint and had a chat. They told us not to be nervous, be bold in the practical tests but not stupid, don’t bully anyone and don’t act like a prick. They also told us what test had been rigged for us on day 2. Very useful. I later learned that they reported back to the Senior Rating and It Was Noted.

The Cocked Hat

I’m not going to go into the minutiae of what happens on an AIB as all anyone needs to know is on countless message boards and it really hasn’t changed much over the years.  What we got was a briefing after breakfast and then straight in – Day 1, Verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests, numeracy tests, special awareness tests, general knowledge tests and then a 45 minute essay from a list of topics. Then lunch. After lunch we were briefed on the Practical Leadership Test, which most people have heard of. It involves working as a team to get an object or person over a barrier within a set time without touching the floor. Then there was a gym session and a run (I believe it’s a bleep test these days) and finish. The first half morning of day 2 was the PLT, which as a former Boy Scout I really enjoyed, and then there was a slightly weird chat with a shrink, a really complicated team planning exercise, and finally the interview with the Board. The Board I sat in front of in my Burtons suit consisted of the President, a Rear-Admiral, his deputy, a Captain, two Commanders, one playing Mr. Nice Guy, the other playing Mr. Nasty, Claude Littner – style, the shrink, a WRNS officer and a public school headmaster. It took about 30 minutes and again I rather enjoyed it, as anyone who knows me knows I love talking about myself. I remember Mr. Nasty at one point asking me ‘why the Navy?’ to which I replied ‘because I like what I see so far’ to smiles all round. At the end, I picked up my bag, collected a travel warrant and went home. I understand that nowadays candidates are now told the outcome of the board before they go home, but we were told we would be informed by letter in about three weeks. There were twelve of us that day; I remember going out of the door with a cheery “See you at Dartmouth!” more in sheer bravado than in any confidence.

As we new entries gathered on the Quarterdeck at Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth on the 15^th September 1971, I looked around to see if I could recognise any of the other candidates from the AIB. None of them were there: I was the only one that got in.

Turns out, getting into the Navy was harder that I thought. Staying in, I soon discovered, was going to be a whole lot harder.

 

Introduction

 

My Naval career spanned from September 1971 to July 1994. It wasn’t, however all spent in the Royal Navy; that section was from 1971 to 1981, I then had a year’s break sitting in frustration watching my mates do what I had trained to do in the Falklands before joining Solent Division RNR as a seagoing officer serving on weekends and longer periods minesweeping in HMS Alfriston, the Ton Class minesweeper permanently attached to the unit.

In January 1984 I joined the Sultan of Oman’s Navy as a ‘contract officer’ with a joint training/operational role initially on a two year contract, which as it turns out stretched to six years before I returned home in 1990. I then re-joined the RNR until its role was changed in 1994 and I finally stopped seagoing for good.

What follows is not a memoir. I never was much of a diarist, or letter writer for that matter; my RN career was mostly Cold War exercises, patrols, work-ups and ‘show the flag’ visits, but until the last four months of my RN service I was always in seagoing appointments, serving in nine ships – one twice. The RNR was fun, a bit quaint in fact, and Oman was a bit of an adventure.

So what this is – assuming I can remember any of it – is a series of snapshots into a life at sea and under arms before the Berlin Wall came down and the world really did go crazy.

(Picture: Jellicoe Division, BRNC Dartmouth 1972)