Newton, gravity and beer

Many years ago I spent some time serving in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy where I was employed as an engineer on nuclear submarines. All ex-servicemen have tales to tell about their experiences, some of them funny, some of them serious, some of them down right scandalous, and I am no different. So for your entertainment I hereby present one of my many Salty Sea Stories.


Towards the end of my apprenticeship I was sent to the submarine school at HMS Dolphin in Hampshire to learn all that I needed to know about submarine life, in particular how to avoid doing anything that might sink the bugger (and how to get out if I did).

As a trainee of only 19 summers I had other duties to fulfil, including taking my turn at 'guarding' an old diesel submarine that was used as part museum and part training facility. It was my unfortunate lot that I was assigned to this particular duty over the New Year period of 1978/79 and, along with a few equally pissed off colleagues, was sent into the bowels of this near antique submarine to baby sit it for a few days.

Needless to say we were not happy at being excluded from the New Year festivities and as a result found it necessary to make our own entertainment. Now I know what you thinking, all matelots together and all that, but you would be wrong. Instead we decided to experiment with the capabilities of our temporary home to see what might still be functional after nearly 40 years of hard naval usage.

Obviously a fairly steady supply of beer and spirits helped enormously in bringing out the more inquisitive and playful sides of our characters and it wasn't long before some one suggested seeing how high into the air we could fire a variety of innocent items using a thing called the after SSE.

What’s that? I here you ask. Well, the after SSE was so called first because it is at the after (arse) end of the boat and secondly because SSE stands for Submerged Signal Ejector which is nothing more than a gun barrel turned end on and welded into the submarine with a water tight door at either end. In fact there were two of these devices on the boat but the one up front only worked when submerged because it was powered by water. By contrast the one at the after end of the boat was powered by compressed air at 400 pounds to the square inch. In proper use these devices are used to launch a variety of signal rockets, grenades and smoke canisters but with a barrel diameter of over 4 inches you can get all sorts of things inside.

We started off with some fairly innocuous items, a can of Brasso to about a hundred feet (OK but small) a sleeping colleagues shoes to about 40 feet high (pretty rubbish but really, really funny when you are drunk). Probably the most impressive was the full Christmas pudding which when it exited the submarine at around 150mph exploded into a thousand sticky pieces most of which blew downwind and landed on the shiny warship on the other side of the jetty (watching their crew cleaning it off the following day was also very funny because they couldn’t work out what it was or where it had come from).

All of this was, to our drunken minds, enormously entertaining and as those of us on the upper deck, around 20 or so bodies by now, grew more raucous and demanding of fun, the guys down below where struggling to find ever more assorted ammunition to launch heavenwards.

To this day, and certainly not at the time, no one who was there has ever admitted to having the idea that led to what happened next; or indeed has ever admitted to being either the loader or the trigger man.

The upper water tight door on the SSE slowly opened in readiness for the next sky shot. A quiet fell upon the assembled souls as we waited for the count down to start and in the sudden silence, the quiet before the storm, a sound could be heard. A piteous, high pitched, mournful wail such as might be heard as a soul is stolen down into the eternal pit of hell.

As realisation struck, one of the guys shouted NOOOOO as he ran towards the hatch to try and stop the launch. But too late.

With the by now familiar deep, breathy, PHUT!!, the SSE fired, and from the barrel an object emerged that emitted an unearthly and blood curdling scream as it accelerated high into the night.

As it reached the top of its arc it changed shape. Legs and tail deployed and it became recognisable as ……a cat.

The poor moggy’s vain attempt to make like a parachute availed it nothing other than to ensure its legs were roughly beneath it as it started its plunge to earth. We watched, mouths agape, as gravity exerted its inevitable hold and the feline started earthwards.

A strong light suddenly dazzled us. The noise had attracted the attention of the Ministry of Defence Harbour Police in their speed boat and with searchlight on, they had come to investigate. It was as they nosed slowly towards us that several things happened in very quick succession.

First - the cat approached the last few feet of its return to earth, or in this case, the roof of the cabin on the police boat, at something close to terminal velocity and with a dull, heavy thud hit the roof of the boat very, very, hard.

Then – the helmsman perhaps thought he was under attack and dived onto the floor of the boat, which immediately veered left and crashed hard into the side of the submarine where the force of the impact made one, of the two, policemen in the boat fall over the side and into the water.

The cat - sprang up and launched itself, all teeth and claws, at the throat of the one remaining policeman who grasped it around its neck, ripped it from his bleeding face and hurled it over board.

Those of us on deck fell about laughing like you wouldn’t believe.

Over the following few minutes’ things started to calm down. The wet police man climbed back on board his boat, the savaged policeman was dabbing at the scratches on his face with a hanky, the helmsman got the boat back under control and brought it to a stop. And the cat?

Well the cat was last seen dementedly paddling for the far side of the harbour and as gods my witness it was going so fast it left a wake.


Footnote:

As Newton explained ‘To every action there is an equal and opposite re-action’. In our case the Navy used its own version of this principle, so for our one evening of entertainment we received 14 days of punishment. We all spent the next 2 weeks running here, there and everywhere around the base doing all of the shitiest jobs imaginable.

Was it worth it?..........................you bet it was.