I was in Sydney recently and paid a visit to the excellent Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour. One of the permanent exhibits is the ex-Royal Australian Navy destroyer, HMAS Vampire. Whilst wandering around the ship, and especially in this gun turret, I was reminded of a similar visit to a Royal Navy ship in 1976 (clearly remembered, as it was the hottest British summer on record) when, as a young teenager, my father was trying to convince me that a career in the Navy would be a wise choice. In the equivalent turret on that trip, my father pushed one of these shells along the track, only for it to disappear into the loading mechanism with a lot of clunking and whirring. As a young kid I was convinced the gun was now loaded with high explosive and only a button press separated downtown Portsmouth from total obliteration. In fear of being discovered for our brazenly war-like act, we toured the rest of the narrow, claustrophobic, unwelcoming steel ship and I became unwaveringly convinced that a life in HM’s ships was absolutely not for me.
If that life would have been bad enough, next door to HMAS Vampire was an even worse proposition – HMAS Onslow – an Oberon Class Submarine.
This is the one and only route through the submarine and we are looking at the engine room. Tucked into nooks and crannies throughout the vessel are kitchens, washrooms, bunk beds, the occasional individual cabin (if you were ever senior enough), communications and operations rooms. I’m sure never to be forgotten by her 68-strong crew was also the fact that all of these ‘amenities’ were of course hemmed in by torpedoes at both ends of the hull. This could be your home at sea for months at a time with up to 6 weeks solid spent underwater. How did they ever sell the idea to anyone?
So there we are, 2 jobs that are performed in claustrophobic, steel clad surroundings, in close proximity to high explosive and with the likelihood that people might try to kill you; both jobs that I would have absolutely hated doing. And what did I elect to do instead? Well, I dressed up in highly constrictive clothes with a helmet and mask on my face, strapped myself tightly onto a seat containing a couple of pounds of high explosive under my backside, wedged myself into a tight steel cockpit and blasted off at high speed into the sky where there was a high likelihood that someone (friendly, unfriendly, or self) would try to kill you.
Teenage logic, eh? Go figure!