H.M.S. Illustrious Read online

  Monday 9th May 1983

  We sailed from Newcastle as we had intended to arrive, in Procedure Alpha, the decks and flight deck ringed with the ship’s company in best bib and tucker. In this case, it was best bib and tucker under foul-weather gear, as the rain came again as soon as we prepared to slip and proceed, but I suppose it’s the thought that really counts. I didn’t go up, as I am still more than a touch fluey (if that word actually exists), and I thought that exposing myself to the rain and cold would be moderately stupid.

  Once out of the Tyne (we cleared the river entrance at about 1400), we went to Flying Stations to accept two Sea Harriers from 899 Squadron on board, one of them flown by Charles Cantan, who I had met on Invincible last year. I was also selected (?) from a host of applicants to conduct two of the Captain’s VIP guests round the relevant Air Department bits of the ship immediately prior to the Harriers arriving. Actually, I rather enjoy that kind of thing, and especially in this case, as one of the two men was a Fleet Air Arm pilot (809 Squadron, in fact), from way back, and it was interesting to hear him talk of the contrasts between the way we operate the ship and things in his day. I duly delivered them to Flyco in time to watch the Harrier recovery, which certainly seemed to impress them, as it invariably impresses anyone who hasn’t seen it before.

  Once the Harrier pilots had put their steeds to bed, we had the usual Air Department briefing to give, in which I usually brief simply the air traffic side of things, but in this case, as Lieutenant Commander (Flying), John Lamb, was stuck up in Flyco, and Dick Brunwin, the AC1 (Aircraft Controller 1) was in the Operations Room, I had to do their bits as well, which made things a wee bit more interesting for me.

  The good news of the afternoon was that the Captain likes my draft ROP (Report of Proceedings), and the bad news was that I will very soon have to write the ship’s contribution to Flight Deck magazine, which will mean even more burning of the midnight oil, I suppose.

  I went up to Flyco to control the circuit for a couple of hours in the evening, to relieve John Lamb so that he could go away and eat. The more time I spend up there the better I like it, which I suppose is just as well, really, as in the future there will only be he and I able to work up there, and if we start flying with normal exercise intensity, I can look forward to six to ten hours a day up there (in addition, of course, to working watch and watch about with Paul Harvey in the Operations Room, recovering the Sea Harriers – he and I are the only people able to do that job – and running the Air Office. If I get any spare time, I’ll try to sleep, I think).

  Tuesday 10th May 1983

  Another busy day, both for me and the ship. One of the odd duties which comes my way at intervals is that of organising a training or visits programme for people who are on the ship as visitors from outside the Navy, or for OUTs (Officers Under Training). This morning I spent all my time with three Midshipmen who recently joined the ship, and who will be with us until the beginning of next year or thereabouts. I had drafted their training programme, but started it with a relatively detailed description of the Air Department and the way it works, followed by a tour of the various compartments and spaces that they will be spending some time in over the next few days. I think that an introduction of that kind can only help.

  The ship was busy too, with a full flying programme both for the organic aircraft and various fixed-wing aircraft sent out to us to assist in our various radar tracking exercises. One interesting snippet was that we are now the proud possessors of several pounds of fresh fish, following a radio message from a trawler in the area that she was running pretty low on fuel. We delivered a couple of drums of diesel fuel to her by our Wessex 5 helicopter, and in return they filled a cargo net with fish for us. Guess what’s on the menu for dinner?

  I went up into Flyco immediately after lunch to relieve John Lamb, and while there I was fascinated to watch the making of a film on the flight deck. We have a team from one of the naval film-making organisations on board at the moment, and they are knocking together a sort of ‘Boy’s Own’ story about a Harrier pilot who is shot down over the Falklands, and then rescued by his best friend in a Sea King Mark 4, assisted by a bunch of Marines. All a bit tacky, really, but I suppose it does give us a certain amount of innocent amusement, and it will probably be a very successful recruiting film in due course.

  Today’s little episode was just a shot of the Harrier ‘pilot’ climbing into his aircraft and getting strapped in (the ‘pilot’ is an actor, of course), and a rather longer sequence showing the Marines arriving on the flight deck via the after aircraft lift, and then getting into the Sea King, followed by the aircraft rapidly heading towards the horizon. As he disappeared I asked him if he wanted pigeons (direction to steer and range) to Port Stanley, which amused the pilot, if not Commander (Air).

  The film crew have a habit of shooting little bits of film at odd intervals, and it is quite common to get stopped halfway down a ladder somewhere by a whole mare’s nest of wires and cables while they film the Harrier pilot having a pee or something. The ‘pilot’ of the Sea King has a slight problem, too, as he is apparently very short-sighted, wearing glasses with lenses like the bottoms of beer bottles, so quite how he is going to find the right aircraft on deck when they do that bit I don’t know. Perhaps they’ll run a sort of handrail out to it for him. It’s a good job he won’t actually have to fly the thing as well, or we would probably have had to mark the controls in braille…

  The evening film was National Lampoon’s Animal House, a comedy about an American college, and which I had seen years ago, when I must confess to being profoundly unimpressed. I don’t know whether I’ve changed, or whether I just saw the film at a bad time, but tonight I thought it was absolutely hysterical, and well worth watching. Great fun.

  Wednesday 11th May 1983

  The day kicked off with a dental appointment, which I will freely confess is not invariably the best beginning to any day, but fortunately all I need is a scale and polish and a tidy-up of a filling. I then had a brace of Crabs to conduct round the ship – we are off Edinburgh, more or less, and have been since shortly after leaving Newcastle, working with strike aircraft from RAF bases in the area, and the two Fighter Controllers were ostensibly visiting the ship for liaison purposes. This, in the best traditions of the British armed forces, was inevitably translated as being borne for drinking duties only. Tomorrow there are two more to be hosted, so I will no doubt be propping the bar up again. Fortunately, as they are mess guests, I don’t have to buy the booze for them.

  I relieved John Lamb in Flyco a couple of times, and also visited the Operations Room to do a couple of CCAs (Carrier Controlled Approaches) – the first since March – just to prove that I still could. There was supposed to be night flying, which I was confidently expecting to get lumbered with, but fortunately the aircraft went duff, so I was able to watch the evening film – Fistful of Dollars, which I have seen literally dozens of times so far, but still enjoy.

  Thursday 12th May 1982

  It seems that we rather underestimated the number of visitors to the ship over our weekend in Newcastle. The latest figure suggests that upwards of 30,000 people toured the ship over the twelve hours that we were open to visitors on the Saturday and Sunday. That’s 2,500 an hour, on average. Or, to put it rather more into perspective, every hour, slightly more than four times the entire ship’s company (excluding the Air Group) went round the vessel. Quite staggering.

  The mixture as before for today; we are still sailing round the same bit of sea, and the only things that seem to change are the seagulls and the weather (and the latter not a great deal). I did a short stint in Flyco at lunchtime, and almost got to launch my very first Harrier (John Lamb prefers to do the fixed wing aircraft himself, which is why I only get to go up to Flyco when the boring old helicopters are flying), but the take-off was scrubbed at the last minute, as the weather turned rather nasty and the pilot was very inexperienced.

  The evening film was a rather nasty li
ttle number called It’s Alive, and which is well worth a miss if you get the chance. The plot, such as it was, was that a woman gave birth to a creature all teeth and claws which then proceeded to kill everyone in sight before getting terminated itself. The best actor in the film was a cat, and that didn’t seem all that familiar with the script. Mind you, after sitting through most of it, I can quite see why it didn’t want to get too familiar…

  Friday 13th May 1983

  After an initial burst of enthusiasm first thing in the morning, this turned into a fairly quiet day, all things considered. The initial energy was principally devoted to getting rid of most of our aircraft, and after the successful launches we are now left with only 845 NAS (Wessex 5) and 846 (Sea King Mk 4), the AEW Sea Kings of 824 ‘D’ and the Sea Harriers of 899 having departed for home. We will now be stuck with just these two squadrons until we leave Plymouth next week and embark 820 ASW Squadron (with Prince Andrew) and 801 Sea Harriers for Exercise Ocean Safari.

  And, talking of Prince Andrew, which we sort of were, the Captain went on the box last night to give us a chat about him and how we had to behave – normally, of course – and also to acquaint us with some rather more interesting and important news about our pay rise. Basically, as a Lieutenant on the maximum rate, my salary has gone up by a little over £1,000, which is better than a poke in the eye with the well-known sharp stick, representing a percentage pay rise of a bit over 9 per cent – better than any of us had been expecting: forecasts had run at the 3 per cent to 4 per cent level.

  If Maggie thinks she can buy my vote by giving me a pay rise like that, I have to say that she is absolutely right. Actually, it’s just as well that the announcement has been made now, as if it hadn’t happened before Parliament broke up (or should that be dissolved?) we would have had to wait until about July before getting the cash.

  As an interesting little diversion, we had a pre-wetting trial this evening (the idea is to get all the upper deck surfaces awash with water, so that nuclear fall-out or chemical or biological contaminants will be unable to adhere), the principal result of which was a considerable amount of water on 2 deck (though fortunately not in my cabin), where there should have been no water at all. And then, while the great mopping-up operation was under way, we had smoke observed near one of the weapon storage areas in the hangar, which produced a certain amount of brow-mopping and general nervousness until it was discovered to be errant exhaust fumes from one of our Gemini (powerboat) engines which had been sucked into the ventilation system and then regurgitated. Quite exciting while it lasted, though.

  The evening movie was Lemon Popsicle, a badly-dubbed Italian teenage love story, with a fairly sad ending, when the trusting, faithful boy finally discovers that the girl he has idolised has in fact all the normal human frailties, and has been bonking her way round most of the available males – all of them, in fact, except him. Not a terribly exciting film, in fact, but what made it really worth watching was that it was very funny indeed in places, and had a superb music soundtrack, with all the hits from the middle to late fifties. Great stuff, and there were a few of us in the back row, as it were, who remembered the tracks, and who considerably annoyed the rest of the viewing audience by humming or singing along with the songs. Must be my age showing…

  Saturday 14th May 1983

  HMS Illustrious entered Scapa Flow just after 0700 this morning, in bright sunshine, and came to anchor a little way off the jetty at about 0800. We spent the whole day there, the weather alternately good and not so good, running a boat service ashore, ferrying various guests of the Captain to and from the ship. Rumour has it that he owns most of the Orkneys which aren’t the property of other private individuals or people whose titles start with ‘HRH’, and he certainly knows a lot of Islanders. After the morning, I knew a good few as well, because I had volunteered to act as a guide for one of the several groups on board.

  Charming, if slightly taciturn people – the Captain briefed us beforehand, saying that while the Islanders might well not say very much, and might well seem rather unimpressed with the whole thing, they would nevertheless be talking about their visit for years to come. I think he was probably right, as with the group I had, they waxed very lyrical indeed about the ship, and I actually had to take them down to the NAAFI shop to buy some souvenirs of the vessel – the eight I had spent about £50 in all, which is, I suppose, one measure of their enthusiasm for the ship and our visit here, as I believe that Orkney Islanders (I often can’t spell Orkadians) are reputed to be very attached indeed to their money.

  We stayed at anchor in Scapa Flow for most of the day, in very changeable weather – alternately rain and sunshine – before finally getting under way at about 1650. Throughout the night the ship made ground to the west towards Cape Wrath, before turning south into the North Minch channel en route to the Isle of Man, our destination for Sunday afternoon. I treated myself to the evening film in the Wardroom (chances of such pleasures in the future might not be all that frequent), which was that all-time classic horror/comedy An American Werewolf In London, with positively sizzling special effects. A superb film, and despite having seen it several times before, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

  Sunday 15th May 1983

  The day dawned fairly foggy, as the ship headed south through the Western Isles amid magnificent scenery. It was a pity that visibility was not rather greater, as that part of Scotland is most impressive. As it was, all we could really see were the outlines of islands showing through the mist, though there were the occasional breaks when the land could be seen more clearly. Some of our OUTs (Officers Under Training) had been tasked with providing an intermittent commentary on the places of note as we passed them, and some of the information they had dredged up was most interesting.

  Also interesting were the very powerful currents that we observed off the Firth of Lorn and the Sound of Jura, where whirlpools were quite clearly to be seen, and which could have spelled a lot of trouble for a small vessel (though we, of course, were unaffected).

  Despite the fact that today was theoretically a Sunday, we worked a fairly full day – I was in the Air Office all morning typing letters for the powers that be, and after a hasty lunch I attended a briefing on a host of revised air traffic procedures which have recently been introduced (on the 1th of May, in fact), and then spent the entire afternoon in Flyco, first of all just in case we needed to launch the Wessex 5 in a SAR role during our scheduled RAS (Replenishment At Sea) with a tanker, and then to control a SOOTAX (Senior Officer Taxi helicopter) which was taking a group of VIPs back to the Isle of Man – they had flown out to the ship in the same aircraft during the late morning.

  This turned out to be a very protracted exercise, as the aircraft sat on the ground at Ronaldsway, waiting for a group of passengers who were not programmed to arrive, if you see what I mean – a bit of a breakdown in communications somewhere. It was interesting to see the way wheels started rotating at high speed when we heard nothing from the aircraft, though we were certain that he had landed successfully, and was therefore in no obvious danger – at worst we assumed that he had some sort of an engine problem on the ground at the airport.

  Anyway, he finally got airborne and landed on deck very shortly before the ship came to anchor off Douglas, on the east coast of the Isle of Man, where the ship spent the evening. As we approached, it became clear that, as usual, there was a lot of interest in the ship, as several small pleasure craft came out to meet us and to escort us into the harbour, and through binoculars we could see that the vantage points near the harbour were thronged with people and parked cars. It looks as if the Isle of Man might be a good place for the ship to visit for rather longer in the future…

  The evening film was The Sword and the Sorcerer, which was sort of a bit above average. The plot was fairly obvious, though with rather too many loose ends for my liking, and it had quite good special effects. The acting, though, was definitely a touch on the ham side.

  Monday 16th May 1
983

  The first day of a potentially rather boring week here at Aberporth, as the ship is engaged in a series of Sea Dart missile firings. The boring bit is that each run has to be organised absolutely precisely, and if at any stage any single factor alters out of limits, we have to abort the run, and start all over again. With the wealth of things which can go wrong, it may well take us five or six goes to get each firing over with.

  Today was typical, and the weather stopped us doing anything more than any tracking runs, and unless there is a reasonable clearance in the weather, tomorrow will be much the mixture as before. If we don’t get any firing runs in, though, we may well head out into the Atlantic for high seas firings. We shall see.

  We anchored off Fishguard this evening, where we will be staying every night until we depart the area for Plymouth (unless we do go out into the Atlantic). I have never been to this particular bit of Wales before, and I must confess that the scenery is quite spectacular, being rather like the north coast of Cornwall, though without the tin mines. I wouldn’t mind coming here again some time to have a bit of a wander round the coast.

  Tuesday 17th May 1983

  The mixture, as they say, as before. The ship up-anchored and pottered off to the firing location, where we steamed up and down while the experts ashore tried to sort out their various (and frequent) problems with the telemetry side of the house. The difficulty is that in order for the tracking cameras and other bits of electronic jiggery-pokery to function, the launch position has to be absolutely precise, as has the track of the target aircraft – they are talking about plus or minus half a degree in the firing bearing, and a ship’s position accurate to a hundred yards or so, which is why, after steaming round in small circles all day, we only managed a single firing.