Tragedy of the Thetis

Jul 26 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Harry McLeish who worked at Cammell Laird shipyard in 1939 when the submarine Thetis set sail _320

Seventy years ago, a shipyard apprentice watched the launch of the Thetis. A year later she dived, and 99 men died. Now that apprentice lives with his memories.  David Charters reports

THE sun rose like a yolk in the blue sky of high summer and the hens laid breakfast in their wooden garage by the Corporation house, where the young apprentice woke at 5.30 as usual.

This was good. He liked a boiled egg, before catching the tram to the railway station. There, he would take the train to work. It ran under the river to the station, a little way up the hill from the big gates into the shipyard, which had brought glory and prosperity to the old town, though the wages of the men remained meagre.

Some of them tinkled the bells on their bikes, but most walked, while a few bosses drove in.

This was an important day for the yard. A submarine was to be launched there. Technical details were hush- hush because she was being built for the Royal Navy amid fears of another war, with those chaps Hitler and Mussolini chucking their weight around.

Anyway, a big crowd saw Mrs AJ Power smash the Champagne bottle against the bows of the £350,000 sub, which she named Thetis, after the mythological Greek sea- nymph and mother of Achilles.

Mrs Power’s husband was commander of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, also built at Cammell Laird of Birkenhead, then completing her sea trials.

There was so much talk of war then.

But June passed into history, as days do, though Harry McLeish, apprentice fitter, would never forget it.

He had only been at the yard since February, yet he sensed these were momentous times. He would be there again on June 1, 1939. By then, the Thetis had been completed in the yard’s fitting-out basin and was about to leave Birkenhead for her sea trials.

The catastrophe which followed has been the subject of books, numerous articles, documentaries and dramas, as well as the official inquiry.

On board the Thetis were 103 men – 99 of whom died after she dived into 180ft of water in Liverpool Bay, some 15 miles off Llandudno.

The dead comprised 68 Royal Navy personnel, 24 Cammell Laird workers, four observers from other yards, a Mersey pilot and the two caterers, who had provided lunch on board.

An attempt by widows to gain compensation for the loss of their husbands was doomed by the Admiralty’s decision not to allow details of the Thetis’s blueprint to be released because of national security. But it is generally accepted that, in preparing the vessel for her dive, it had been decided to open a torpedo tube’s rear-door. A small blockage prevented them knowing that the outer-door was already open. An instant, high- pressure torrent entered the Group 1 T-class submarine, which was 275ft long with a beam of 26ft, weighing 1,560 tons submerged.

Other problems included a failure to close the bulkhead door to the torpedo room and inadequate escape systems.

It had been our worst submarine disaster. Huge crowds gathered around the yard in the immediate aftermath of the disaster awaiting the news, which led to harrowing scenes of mass grief.

The dead were not collected from the Thetis until September 3, the day war broke out.