Carrying on from part one, this all looks rather refined. I suspect that this wasn’t for the junior members of crew on-board the submarine….
Here’s a photo of a sink. Never let it be said that this blog doesn’t have riveting and fascinating content.
It is genuinely impressive how everything on board this submarine was designed to use as little space as possible. In the days before IT and computers to help with the design, putting this whole thing together must have been a monumental challenge. Combining torpedoes for military use as well as sinks to try and make conditions vaguely comfortable for those on the submarine must have required some ingenuity.
One thing not mentioned by the museum is that when this submarine was decommissioned and sent back to Chatham to go on display, much of the interior was stripped out. Some of the submarines were still in operation around the world and the last thing anyone wanted was for the Soviets to have a little day out at the museum and promptly see how everything fitted together. Much has been restored back to how it might have looked, but many of the fittings aren’t original and elements such as the TV and video player in a previous photo were sourced from elsewhere.
The sound room where operators would monitor the sonar equipment if they could find space to sit down.
There were a lot of these dials everywhere and I’m sure that they all displayed important information about what was happening in the submarine. One slight problem of the limited space of the tour is that the guide was at the front and anyone further back wasn’t going to hear anything that she might be saying. The one exception to this is when she stopped in an area to ensure that we all knew to have a look through the periscope.
Always handy to have a map as it’s not easy to just have a little look out of the window.
There’s certainly a lot going on here and it was mentioned that submarines aren’t so much driven as balanced, with everything having to be at the right depth, angle and buoyancy. This is something that my friend Liam would manage well, I’d probably be quite good at checking the food stocks were in order.
The engineers on board who understood all of this really would have deserved their pay.
Every valve and dial likely has a consequence, I was quite engaged with just how much of this there was on board.
The communications room and this is somewhere that I might have been able to manage in.
The luxury toilet facilities on board.
Now this is exciting, the heart of the submarine’s operations, the kitchen. Being the chef here must have been challenging, there were around seventy men to feed on board the submarine and there’s not a huge amount of space here to do that.
An example menu.
I had to Google this, “snorting” is the process by which a submarine operates its diesel engines whilst they are submerged.
There seemed like hundreds of metres of wires snaking around the submarine.
A more spacious crew room, although that’s all a bit relative. I imagine it’s something that everyone got used to, with tours lasting for around eight weeks on average, but I’m sure that there must have been a fair few flare-ups between slightly annoyed submariners.
At least they’re not stacked three high down this end of the submarine.
And that was the end of the tour and it all lasted for around twenty minutes. The tours must be constant as another group was entering the submarine at the far end just as we were departing. The guide said that the history of the submarine’s tours was still covered by the Official Secrets Act and so it wasn’t known where Ocelot went around the world, although it’s fairly certain that it was used heavily in the Cold War. As for whether it was used in the Falklands War, there’s no official answer.
It was all very interesting and the dry dock arrangement here shows the scale and size of the submarine. I did ask the guide about how hot it would have been on board and she said that it was often uncomfortably warm even with the air circulation systems that were in place. There was someone on the tour who used to serve on the submarine, but he was at the back of the group and so if he was offering little pearls of knowledge, I didn’t hear them.
Although there were three more submarines made for the Canadian Navy, this was the end for the Royal Navy at Chatham. Investment was made to allow for the construction and repair of nuclear submarines, but no more were built here. It was announced in 1981 that the site would close in 1984 and although the Falklands War meant the dockyard was used again, it was still closed as expected.