Jim Roberts on Saving Lives at Sea

One of the other memorable ones was the grounding of HMS ‘Alliance’ on Bembridge Ledge which is one of the Naval submarines and she’d been out on an exercise south of the Island together with another sister submarine and they were coming back, I believe if I remember rightly, one Friday evening.

Their exercise had overrun and the word was at the time that they were having a race back, to get back, because of a ‘mess dinner’ or something. But anyway, what basically happened was that the ‘Alliance’ tried to cut a corner on Bembridge Ledge and actually ended up on the Ledge itself and there was always a interest into the start of that casualty as far as the Coastguards were concerned because on that particular day one of the younger full-time Coastguards was actually the Duty Man at Bembridge and he received a telephone call from what was Gilkicker signal station.

Gilkicker is on the Mainland coast in the Lee-on-Solent area; they were one of the radio stations for the Navy at that time and the phone call came through for the guy at Bembridge and said,

“Can you go and have a look round, we’ve got a strange report here, it seems we’ve got a submarine in trouble in Whitecliff Bay.”

So, the particular Coastguard at the time went up to the Coastguard tower, had a look off, and he was only there a couple of seconds, had a look in Whitecliff Bay and ‘I can’t see anything there’ and thought ‘hang on a minute what are these lights straight off me?’ And he had a look through the glasses, and it was dark, he said, “Bloomin ‘eck, it’s not the Whitecliff Bay, it’s right off the station there.”

At the time, he actually picked up the phone and called the Station Officer who was indoors and said, “Mr Gear I’ve got a submarine aground on the Ledge, can you come up to the lookout?” The reply he got back was, “Don’t be so bloody stupid Frank” and the phone went dead.

So, he thought for a minute, rang back, he said, “I’m not joking” he said, “there is a submarine on the ledge. Oh, bloody hell.”

That’s just how it all happened to start, but you know, it’s always an interesting little story, that, of how the incident started.

Later, in that evening, the wind got up, as quite often it does, and it got up to a good force eight gale and of course it started to get a bit uncomfortable.

So, by the morning, the Navy had started to amass one or two rescue vessels and some of their heavy haulage vessels and of course it was too rough to do anything. So, there was concern for the sailors onboard so two things happened. One was that they decided there were going to get a line aboard the submarine, and by a line a rocket line.  But, the distance between the shore and the submarine was that great that the rescue equipment we had at Bembridge wasn’t long enough to reach.

However, there was two other sets on the Island, one at Ventnor and one at Needles; which were called ‘A’ Sets at the time and they could fire a rocket well over half a mile. And, a set of equipment from Ventnor was brought to Bembridge and the rocket was set up on the beach and fired over the submarine and they got the line on board.

I always remember that because at the time they weren’t going to affect a rescue but they had a line on board should they need to. So they decided to … they needed somewhere to secure the inner end of the rocket line and that was accomplished because the District Officer turned round to me and said “Right Jim”, he said “Get the other end of this rocket line” he said, “I want you to go up over the cliff.” He said “Go up to the Coastguard Station” he said “and we’ll tie the rocket line onto the Coastguard station.”

So, my part of that exercise was actually to take the inboard end of the line, tie it onto the Coastguard Station.

We actually ended up, not that we would have held it, but we had the line holding the submarine on the … tied to the Coastguard station.

What actually then happened was that a little later in the morning the…it was decided, although the Bembridge Lifeboat and that were all standing by, it was decided to use the section rescue helicopters to actually come along and lift about half the crew off, which they did and landed on the beach and the part that I played in that was I was the Coastguard Officer on the beach taking radio equipment out to the submarine so we could talk to it and helping to bring the sailors ashore.