Subsmash by Alan Gallop

Author:Alan Gallop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Subsmash: The Mysterious Disappearance of HM Submarine Affray
ISBN: 9780752472966
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb was still on Reclaim during the early days of May – and most of her crew wished he was elsewhere. Crabb was disparaging of his fellow divers and their reliance on heavy diving suits that slowed them down. He considered himself superior as a ‘frogman,’ someone who dived using a lightweight rubber wetsuit, face mask, flippers, air tubes giving him the ability to swim underwater with ease and speed.

Seventeen other divers on Reclaim were suspicious of Crabb’s methods because they had yet to see him in action. Until then, they had to go over the side in their heavy gear, taking three to five minutes to sink to the bottom, holding onto their 4½in thick guide rope and staying on the bottom for half an hour or less if tides were strong. It took five minutes for a diver to return to the surface, but he then had to stay in Reclaim’s decompression chamber for a further half hour.

Underwater conditions were difficult and hazardous. On the seabed, silt and mud was often so thick that even strong lights were unable to pierce the gloom. Startled fish would often peer through the diver’s glass visor and have to be repeatedly waved away – an exhausting job in itself. A diver’s only equipment was a knife to help him out of trouble. Wrecks had to be investigated by divers feeling their way around, often leading them into danger, making the extra 4d a day they earned a small price for situations they often encountered.

Crabb was on board Reclaim in the event of Affray being found in shallow waters. That was his speciality and he was probably the best and fastest diver in the country when it came to swimming down to depths of no more than 20 fathoms – or 120ft. But the search for Affray, so far, had been in waters much deeper than those that Crabb was used to. So the civilian diver spent his days on Reclaim sleeping late, staying dry, enjoying leisurely breakfasts and lunches while deep-sea divers worked around the clock investigating every possible wreck which demanded examination.

Crabb later admitted: ‘I’m afraid there was a certain amount of backchat between myself and the other divers.’ But he also accepted that the world’s diving record – to a depth of 535ft – had been made from the decks of Reclaim ‘and here was I coming aboard with a pair of swimfins (flippers) and a few bottles of air’.

Reclaim’s crew were glad when Crabb left the ship and hoped to have seen the last of him. It was not to be. Instead of going home, Crabb made his way to the Thameside town of Teddington and headquarters of the Admiralty’s top secret Research Laboratory, home of the Royal Naval Scientific Services, where he had arranged to meet a staff scientic officer called Walter Rosse Stamp.

For some time at Teddington, Stamp had been investigating the performance of state-of-the-art television, something very few people had in their homes in 1951.

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