Submarine Service 125th Anniversary

John Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2026 Westminster Hall

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the 125th anniversary of the submarine service.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger.

Where were we on 12 April this year? It was a Sunday, so perhaps we were spending time with our families, out in the open air or at church. It was a long time ago—seven months. Remarkably, there are around 140 people aboard HMS Vengeance, one of our Vanguard-class SSBN nuclear missile submarines, who know exactly where they were on that date. They were leaving Faslane on the Clyde for who knows where and, incredibly, they are still out there somewhere, setting the record for the longest patrol ever undertaken by a Royal Navy submarine. They are the silent service: the men and, increasingly, women who wear the dolphins of the submarine branch of the Royal Navy. They are a breed apart, affectionately known as the “Fish Heads”, for it takes something special to live and be ready to fight in a tiny metal tube deep beneath the waves.

I have a particular admiration for them as, despite my father enjoying a long and illustrious career in the deep sea as a marine engineer, I get seasick in a bath. Lacking a keel, submarines—boats, as the Navy infuriatingly insists on calling them—are not the best on the surface in choppy waters, and I have gone green just watching them rolling like pigs, coming and going from Faslane on a blowy day in the Clyde. It came as a delight the day that I went aboard HMS Vengeance at HM Naval Base Clyde to find that the boat was out of the water and up on bricks, so to speak, for maintenance.

It is 125 years since the Navy operated HMS Holland 1, our first submarine, which was named for builder John Philip Holland and was laid down, as our submarines are today, in Barrow-in-Furness. So much has changed in that time. Our modern boats are nuclear-powered and, in the case of the Vanguard class that provides today’s continuous at-sea deterrent, nuclear-armed. It was the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated speaking softly while carrying a big stick. Truly, Trident is our big stick—a missile with a range in excess of 2,000 miles when nothing on the planet is more than 2,000 miles from the sea.

In many ways, however, little has changed. Submarine design is such that the ship’s complement must fit in around her essential machinery. There is little enough room for basics and none for luxury. When it comes to attack submarines, nothing has changed: 125 years ago, we had just one submarine, and how many do we have today? Well, just the one Astute class at sea: HMS Agamemnon. She is on the Clyde for sea trial, still months off being ready to patrol, while the remainder of the class is tied up alongside for reasons unknown. Perhaps the Minister, mindful as ever of national security, might be able to shed some light on why that is.

Talking of light, we must remember that the submariners’ world is a windowless, skyless one, where time and date mean little. The menu is on a strict daily rotation. That is the only means by which the sailors can tell what day it is. A roast means it is Sunday, curry means Wednesday, Friday is fish and Saturday is steak. Food is of huge importance not just for sustenance but for morale. Indeed, given that the boats make their own oxygen and fresh water, and have effectively a limitless nuclear fuel supply, food storage is the limit on patrol duration. That means that the boat’s freezers must be packed with exquisite care. Woe betide anyone who buries the entire supply of “snorkers”, or sausages, behind all the “babies’ heads”, as steak and kidney pudding is known—the shiny pastry is said to resemble a newborn’s pate. “Nutty”—chocolate and sweets in the parlance—is pivotal too, and it is said that aboard interminable Vanguard patrols it is all that keeps body and soul together.

Contact with the outside world is, unsurprisingly, limited, and only two people aboard—the commander and the navigator—will know where the boat actually is. Modern insulation design means that the old trick of holding a hand against the pressure hull—warm meant you were in the Med, cold in the Arctic—is now an old wives’ tale.

Let us think about that massive patrol for a second: months under fake light, breathing artificial air, drinking tea made with ersatz Millac milk and water distilled from seawater. In these days of a hyperconnected youth well used to the internet, submariners get a 120-word-maximum message via the Familygram system once a week: word comes in and nothing goes out, and family are warned not to send bad news. They deal with all that while sitting still somewhere in the depths of the ocean as the Russians listen out for them, and while being at readiness to fire. How long it takes to come to readiness is classified, but we know that a boat will be asked multiple times on patrol to come to readiness to unleash Armageddon.

We ask a great deal of our submariners now, and we have always done. We should take a moment to reflect on all those still on eternal patrol in the ocean’s depths, for submariner casualties are grim. In the second world war alone, we lost more than 3,160 submariners aboard 74 boats.

I will highlight just one: Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Wanklyn, one of our most successful submariners, who had strong connections with the exquisite Knockinaam Lodge hotel outside Portpatrick in my Dumfries and Galloway constituency. He and his crew aboard HMS Upholder sank 16 enemy vessels, taking 128,350 tonnes of enemy shipping to the bottom. Highly unusually, they sank three Italian submarines. But it was in action off Sicily in 1941 that he made his name. With its Asdic system—the world’s first working sonar—inoperable, Upholder slipped through heavy rings of Regia Marina defences to torpedo the transatlantic cruise liner Conte Rosso, which was ironically Clyde-built but used as an axis troop ship. It earned Wanklyn the Victoria Cross, our highest gallantry award. However, the following year, Upholder and its 30-year-old skipper went missing somewhere off Tripoli. The wreck has never been found; her fate is still shrouded in mystery.

My constituency defers to no one in terms of how many German U-boats we sank. Operation Deadlight in 1945 saw many of the 156 surrendered U-boats towed from Loch Ryan, off my home town of Stranraer, and scuttled or sunk in gunnery training in the North channel. We are also the final resting place of UB-85, a German submarine of the great war, sunk as it sat on the surface off Galloway in 1918. The captured skipper later said that he could not submerge because of damage inflicted by a strange sea creature that had attacked and was driven off only by small arms fire. Fact or fiction, it is a stark reminder that worse things do happen at sea, and that those who today willingly put themselves in harm’s way in the depths of the ocean are worthy of our gratitude and respect.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentioned HMS Vengeance. I am sure that, like all of us, he has seen the report in The Sun newspaper of two days ago that says that HMS Vengeance has now been at sea for 210 days, which marks the longest deterrent patrol in western naval history. Does he agree that that is a supremely impressive feat of naval achievement, in that those people have been at sea for so long to keep this nation safe?

[John Cooper]

My right hon. Friend makes a fantastic point. It is quite incredible—absolutely jaw-dropping—that those people are out there in incredibly difficult circumstances for so long, beyond what could reasonably be expected. Again, I hope that the Minister can touch on this: it seems that something has gone wrong. The length of patrols is increasing, and this one has reached a record level. It is remarkable.

I mentioned the sea creature, but today’s oceanic terrors are slightly different: ultra-quiet Russian submarines, autonomous uncrewed robot submersibles, and mines triggered by nothing more than the unique sound signature of our boats. Whether operating under the Arctic ice, in the shallow waters of the Med, east of Suez, in the old battlegrounds of the western approaches, in the bitter waters off the Kola peninsula or in the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, today’s submariners still play high-stakes cat and mouse with Crazy Ivan, a worthy opponent. Are we supporting them fully when the infamously aggressive all-or-nothing Perisher course for submarine commanders, run in the narrow waters of the Kilbrannan sound in Scotland, has ground to a standstill for a lack of Astute boats? A century and a quarter of silent service must not be torpedoed by defence spending cutbacks. The men and women who earned their dolphins fear no enemy bar the accountants of Whitehall.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Cooper]

I will be as brief as I can. As a former journalist, I have to say that it is right that we scrutinise the military; it is not a political football. We have not really heard what is wrong with Astute-class submarines. To paraphrase Admiral Beatty at the battle of Jutland, something appears to be wrong with our bloody ships.

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have taken part in the debate. It has been a tremendous opportunity to pay tribute to the stoicism and bravery of submariners throughout the ages, which has sadly and too often been tinged with tragedy, as we have heard. We can all go home tonight and sleep safely in our beds knowing that they are out there somewhere, watching over us.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the 125th anniversary of the submarine service.