Stephen McGinty - The World's Deepest Submarine Rescue | Modern Wisdom Podcast 351

Stephen McGinty is an author, journalist and documentary producer. In 1973, two British men, Roger Chapman & Roger Mallinson were 1500ft below the surface laying trans-Atlantic telephone cables in the Pisces III submarine. What happened next is one of the longest, most dangerous, complex and daring rescues ever attempted as America, Canada, Ireland and Britain marshalled their forces in the air and beneath the sea to save the two men, all while their oxygen, food and power was rapidly running out. Sponsors: Get £70+ of free upgrades on amazing design work from 99designs by Vistaprint at https://99designs.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Dive - https://amzn.to/3wUBnIt Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #submarinerescue #piscesiii #underwater - 00:00 Intro 00:23 World’s Deepest Submarine Rescue 05:05 Why Did They Need Rescuing? 13:13 How Long Does a Rescue Take? 17:18 Rescue Process for Pisces 3 37:55 Physiological State of the Divers 46:55 How Far Away From a Bad Ending? 49:38 What Did the Team Do After? 51:02 Meeting the Team 56:09 Where to Find Stephen - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Try and imagine that you're in a phone box next to the Empire State Building and then the Atlantic Ocean sweeps in, then all the lights go out, then you start bleeding oxygen. Then you know that rescue is at least two days away and what you've got to do is preserve your oxygen as long as you can.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Stephen McGinty, welcome to the show.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  We are talking about the world's deepest submarine rescue today.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. It's the subject of my new book, The Dive, which is the untold story of the world's deepest submarine rescue. And yeah, it's an incredible story from a kind of, from the analog age of 1973. It's, yeah, the, I mean, the, the background to it is effectively that, just to get people kind of in the mood. It's really from the time when, in 1973, when new phone lines were laid down and there was what's known as the Cantat cable was laid between Canada and the United Kingdom. And this was, this was high technology. You know, this was a cable that allowed

• 1:07Speaker 00

  1,750 phone calls to be made from the entirety of America and Canada to the UK at any one time. So this was the days when it would be like three pounds fifty a minute to make a phone call transatlantic. But this was the cable, in fact, this new cable was three times what previous cables had done. And, and what, what was happening at the time was that the cable had been laid. But these miniature submarines, this PIs 3, was being sent down to do a simple but very important job, which was to find the cable and to dig a little ditch so that the cable would then settle into the ditch and then be covered over by sand and silt.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  The idea being that while it was on the surface, I mean, this was 150 miles off the coast of Cork, so it was, it was in the Atlantic Ocean. But it was still in an area where people were fishing and the fear was that. Nets would go down or trawlers and effectively the cable could be hauled back up. And as I said in the book, Murphy's Law does apply within 150 miles of Ireland. And the fear was that they could, they obviously needed to tackle that. So on the day back in August 1973, there was two men in this small piousy's three mini submersible. There was Roger Chapman and there was Roger Mallinson.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Roger Chapman was ex Royal Navy, he was an ex nuclear submariner. Who'd been, who'd effectively had to leave the services because his eyesight wasn't as good as it should have been. And he moved into the, into the private sector. And at the time, what was interesting about it was it was the company that ran the submarines was Vickers Oceanics. And now Vickers, as anyone from Byron Furness and anyone who knows about the great nautical history of Britain will know. Vickers was the titan of shipbuilders and particularly military and naval ships. From the First World War, Second World War and into the Cold War. So what they did was that they would obviously make these massive ships, but they decided that.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  It was 1973, there had been the boom in the North Sea oil industry. And they decided miniature submarines were going to be an effective gadget effectively that the industry would have been needed. And this little miniature submarine had been invented by these incredible Canadians. There was a guy called Al Trice. And Al Trice back in the 19, early 1960s was from Vancouver. And he was one of the pioneers of, of, he was a great salvage diver. Those were the days where you wore hard hats, you went down with kind of heavy steel boots. And he pioneered some of the deepest dives, I mean, they were doing bounce dives in those days. So that basically meant that you would, you would go down as many, as deep as maybe 350 feet. But you could be down there for literally two or three minutes.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  And then you would take these long, slow ascents to the surface to avoid the bends. Al Trice said, look. This isn't, there has to be a practical device, there has to be, let's develop a submarine that's small, that's commercial. The French had developed the bathoscope, which had gone down, right down to the Canamaranara trench effectively, but he wanted to develop effectively a commercial submarine. And these guys, who could come into the story later on, effectively what they did was they developed, they spent their money, they pioneered and created the Piesys craft. And what was interesting about Piesys miniature submarine was that they tested it in Vancouver on a day that the US Navy were testing anti-submarine missiles.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  And what I find fascinating about Piesys, the Piesys craft was that it managed, on its test dive, it managed to evade a missile that had been sent out, whose principal job was effectively to track down submarines. And there's something about it that says that this thing was maybe indestructible, but also lucky.

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  So talk us through the craft. What's Piesys III? How big is it inside? What does it have?

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Well, the way I, the way I kind of, when I told people about this book, was effectively to try and imagine that you are, you and your friend are in a large phone box. That's the way to think of it. And the way that I can have sold it to people was, imagine that you're in a small, you're in a phone box, and the phone box is sitting slap bang next to the Empire State Building, and then you watch as the Atlantic Ocean rolls in to a height 10 storeys above the top of the Empire State Building. So that's the kind of, I mean, the size of it was pretty compact, so five or six feet in diameter. But, you know, enough to move around, but you know, you got, you got, you got pretty close.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  All right, so set the scene. We're on the day of this occurring. What's Roger and Roger doing? And why, how do they get down there?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Well, what they do is, they, so on the surface was at the kind of the mothership, which is effectively a converted, a large converted trolley called the Vicker Voyager. So that was on the surface, and that was, that was operating 24 hours a day. The Piesys submarine was on deck, and they, round about 1 o'clock in the morning, they... Climbed into the submarine, um it was winched over the edge, it was then dropped down into the water, then it was towed out to a certain point. And and what was interesting at the time was that what they would do is they would attach um like a like a a buoy to uh the the surface.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  And then they would attach a rope to the submarine and then the submarine would would descend um right down to the bottom, so fifteen sixteen hundred feet to the bottom. And then they would on the surface, they would follow this buoy um as it went along. So that was, if you think about Jaws, that's effectively what it was like when they when they fired the the barrels into the into the Great White, that's effectively what they were doing with the submarine. Um so they go down to the bottom, they spend eight or nine hours on the on the bottom. Um digging this little trench and watching the cable drop in. And they had a tape recorder down there and Roger, when he was down there, Roger Mallinson liked to listen to. Now, this was nineteen seventy three.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  So this was the year of um Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. There was all sorts of great albums released in nineteen seventy three. Roger Mallinson liked to listen to to Mozart and Bach's um um organ music. He always insisted that the sound, it this this, because of the sphere, the sound inside the submarine was was fantastic. And that's what he used to listen to. He was kind of, he is an eccentric character, Roger, a great man. And so the two of them were down there and then after about eight or nine hours, they they um rose to the surface. Um and then what happened was a a big fluke. They get to the surface.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  And then the the the team that come out on on a kind of little um craft and they tow it, they begin to tow it back in. What happens is a a rope is uh that that's used to tow them, it knots over the back of this the submarine. Um and then the rope knots round a bolt on the aft sphere, which is the which is at the the back of the submarine. And unfortunately, that's not covered and the bolt is tightened and the pressure inside the the aft sphere, it basically flips open. So suddenly they're on the surface and the the aft sphere, which is the back of the the submarine, but which is not connected, although it's although it's part of the submarine.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  There's no um that there's, it it's solid effectively between that and the actual compartment where the men are. But what happens is a tonne of water suddenly floods into the back of the the atmosphere. So the submarine is incredibly overweighted and immediately begins to to tip butt first and begins to sink down. Now, the key point here is that before this happened, they disconnected the buoy. Um, so the the the the boy that told them where the submarine was had been disconnected.

• 9:10Chris Williamson?

  The position mark is no longer there.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So the submarine falls, first first of all, it drops to one hundred and sixty feet, which is where the the the end of the tow rope is. So the tow rope catches it, but they know there's no way the tow rope can withstand the weight. So Roger and um Mallinson and Roger Chapman are desperate trying to to to drop to to drop a a kind of heavy weight that's attached to the submarine to try and lighten the load to buy themselves a bit more time. Let's talk of a of a diver trying to get down to to to attach a rope to it. But then what happens is, just as they've managed to get this weight off, there's a massive crack and the the weight drops, but also the rope snaps and suddenly they're plummeting um right down to the bottom. And Roger talked about how the the the water being driving through the engines would sound

• 9:57Speaker 00

  like a sticker dive bomber. So they're plummeting down, um Roger, they're trying to sort of um get everything out of the way because they know they're going to crash land on the bottom. Um Roger tells them to start, Roger Mallinson remembers that it's it's just in case they they bite their tongue off with the impact, they stuff rags in their mouth. Um, and then they finally hit the bottom.

• 10:21Chris Williamson?

  What sort of speeds are they going when they do that?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Well, it's about, I mean, it's a question. It was it it initially they thought it would be like, you know, twenty, thirty miles an hour, but I'm not sure it was as it was as it was as fast as that. Um, but it was certainly enough that they were they were fearful that it could it could crack open. But what happens is they smash down onto the onto the bottom and suddenly they're in pitch darkness. Um, and initially they were waiting thinking, so they knew they were on the bottom. Um, they knew they were deeper than any other submarine had been rescued. Um, and the the first thing they were fearful of was, A, was the cracks in the submarine. Um, so they checked there's no cracks in the submarine. The next thing they're fearful of is that although they know they have they have oxygen supply down there.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  The key problem in a submarine is effectively not the oxygen you're breathing in, but the carbon dioxide that you're breathing out. So they know that they have a scrubber, which is effectively like a little electric motor, which scrubs out the oxygen, it sucks the oxygen in, scrubs it, takes out the carbon dioxide, and then they bleed in oxygen back into the chamber, so it maintains a safe atmosphere effectively. But they can only do that if the batteries are working. And also they're fearful that if there's a problem with one of the fuses or the cables on the battery, that it could ignite. And obviously there had been the fire on board one of the Apollo missions just a few years previous to that, but that's a major concern that they could trigger a fire.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  That they could have, one of the wires could have been broken during the fall or something like that.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly, and it could trigger a fire and then, you know, they're gone.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Weren't they only a small distance from some huge ledge in the seafloor that would have dropped them down to some insane depth?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Well, that was the concern, they thought they were maybe within a half mile or a mile of that, but they didn't know how far they drifted. Because that was the key point, was that there was a kind of, the current was quite strong and they were drifting as they fell. So yeah, the concern was when they were falling, they were looking at the depth going up one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five, and they didn't know that, they knew that their deepest, they were at seventeen hundred feet. When they were operating, and they thought had they gone deeper than that, then they would have been in, I mean, I think it would have dropped down to about three thousand feet. But, you know, one break, that didn't happen, but they are, when they realise what's happening, they're at sixteen, fifty feet.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  And, I mean, the way I, as I said, described it was trying to imagine that you're in a phone box next to the Empire State Building. And then the Atlantic Ocean sweeps in, then all the lights go out, then you start bleeding oxygen. Then you know that rescue is at least two days away, and what you've got to do is preserve your oxygen as long as you can.

• 13:13Chris Williamson?

  Why do they know that it's at least two days away?

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Because this is the problem, and this is what makes the rescue such an incredible feat. Above them is Vickers Voyager, and the only way that they can be rescued is for, a diver can't get down to that depth.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  So the only way is for another submarine to get down to that depth and attach a rescue rope. Now submarines that are capable of doing that is Pi is Pisces two, which is in the North Sea. Pisces five, which is in um Ca- Canada. And also the curve, which is run by the US Navy, which is a remote controlled um. So miniature submarine, which had been used a number of years before, or maybe four or five years before. To pick up an an A bomb, which had which had um there had been a plane crash above Spain. One of these bombs had dropped and off the Spanish coast. And it was curve that had been sent down to finally find the submarine that that that's not fine, so I mean. Find the bomb and bring it to the surface.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  So as they are sitting there, they know that the only thing that can rescue them is a submarine, which is either in the North Sea. Canada or the United States. And and that the submarine, sorry, the the the safety vessel above them, the Vickers Voyager. That has to leave them, go back to Cork um to pick up these teams. But effectively what happens is they're on the they're on the seabed. And then a massive international rescue is put into into operation. And Vickers Oceanic at the time was one of the general managers there was was Peter Maservery. He was ex Navy and he himself had been stuck in a in the submarine. Um six hundred or sorry, six hundred feet down in Vancouver during a test um a few years before.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  So he knew exactly what they were going through. And and at the time, what they did was they put in a a kind of a a rescue operation, which was belt and braces and then belts again. So they got the submarines from the North Sea. They got that on a on a a another vessel and they started steaming back into port. They contacted the Canadians and said. We're going to have to get you guys over. And what was great was that Altrice, who devised and invented effectively the Pisces submarine, he was, he was actually in London at the time. So he was able to take part in the rescue as well. But he contacted, the Canadians were contacted and they basically swung into action. They loaded everything up onto trucks

• 15:44Speaker 00

  and contacted the Canadian Air Force and the Canadian Air Force said, look, don't worry about the paperwork. We've got a Hercules aircraft ready for you. And just whenever you can get to the airport, we'll have this Hercules ready.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  Didn't, what, isn't it a sub smash or something? Wasn't there like some huge red button that somebody pressed that marshals the entire world's forces to try and help?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that was the Royal Navy, the sub smash, which is basically there's a submarine in trouble and all help is available. But effectively, what was interesting was it was the Vickers, Canadians and Americans, and the Americans were all based in San Diego. So they did the same thing. They rushed to the raid, loaded up two Hercules aircrafts. And within, it was probably, I think it was within 10, 12 hours. You've got these Hercules aircraft, one flying from San Diego, one flying from Canada and the other team arriving into Cork. So then what you have is Vickers, the venturer on the surface

• 16:50Speaker 00

  has to leave them. Another fishing vessel comes and stays on the point. Because the point is, they don't know, as I've said in the book, they know roughly where they are, i.e. they know there's a haystack, they just don't know where the needle is. So the vessel-

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  Because they'd lost that boy. They'd lost the locator boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  So they head to, back to Cork and that's effectively where the Voyager was laden with the two submarines.

• 17:17Chris Williamson?

  So back down in the submarine, what do the Rogers do now? They land there and then they decide to test the batteries? And what are the resources they need to balance? What do they do now?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, effectively what they do is they know that the scrubber's operating so that they know that it can take the carbon, sorry, the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and replace it with kind of oxygen. So that's okay, and we've got to keep the batteries going. And they know that initially, the way it was, the way that they operated was the oxygen they had down there, if they were acting normally, chatting, moving about, that would probably last thirty, thirty-five hours. But the estimate was that if they just lay down, remained as silent as possible, I mean, as calm as possible, they could extend that till about sixty-five, seventy hours, which was the kind of roughly when the operation to hold, I mean, if they could get there, they figured they could get there within maybe fifty hours.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  So it was incredibly stressful and incredibly tense.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  In a time when they need to specifically be as calm as possible, low heart rate, low breathing rate.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And Roger Mallinson always said that, that if he had to be stuck in a submarine with anyone, he was so glad it was Roger Chapman, because Roger Chapman was ex-Navy. And both of them were terrified. But both of them had that stiff British upper lip, which is, I'm terrified, but I'm fine. I'm absolutely fine, and I'm going to operate as if I'm fine.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  So they moved.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  They were internalizing it.

• 18:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, they moved the entire sort of, they Feng Shui'd the whole internal compartment around so that they only needed to move a tiny amount to check on the few different bits and pieces.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, they moved, what they could, effectively, because of the way the submarine had landed, which is kind of butt first into the sand, they had to move their kind of benches around, and then they reconfigured it effectively so that they could fit, they moved the minimum amount as possible, so that it was just as easy as possible for them.

• 19:17Chris Williamson?

  How were they communicating with the surface?

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Well, there's an underwater telephone, which is effectively what they used. And what was interesting about it was, I mean, it was very staticky and very kind of, you could hear, but what was fascinating was that there was a lot of porpoises and dolphins in the area. And the dolphins would squeak, and they would, as Roger Mallinson said, you would lose messages to the dolphins because, you know, they would be making this kind of noise. And he didn't mind it so much because he loved the dolphins. But that was another, another element of it. But they could, yeah, it was effectively like an underwater radio that was operating.

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  So they had a timer thing, right? They were doing something every half an hour. Tell us about that.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Well, effectively, what they, what the

• 20:03Speaker 00

  The best practice was effectively to operate the scrubber every thirty minutes. And so that would take out the kind of carbon dioxide from the from the atmosphere. And but what they did was, and they had a timer to do that, so that they would either, if they fell asleep, or they would always do it, the timer would go off. But effectively, what they did was, in order to maintain the scrubber, so that the chemicals that they could only replace a certain amount of time, and in order to extend that, they started pushing it further and further. So in an ideal situation, they would do it every half an hour. But sometimes they would do it, they would go an hour, ninety minutes without doing it, in order to kind of maintain the resources as long as possible.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  What were the effects of being down there? Because I imagine cold, condensation.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Cold, because, well, the food supplies were very limited. They had like one sandwich, they had a tin of Corona lemonade, they had a flask, a half a flask of coffee, they had some chips and biscuits, and that was it.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  What about water? No water?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  No water. Which, yeah, which is incredible. But, yeah, so what they started doing was that the condensation that built up on the edge of the submarine, they would run their hands down that and they would kind of dab their lips that way. So it was, it was a tough environment.

• 21:16Chris Williamson?

  Half a canister of coffee, was it like a cheese and plowman's sandwich or something?

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, because Mallinson had jam sandwiches, which he'd eaten.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  And then a tin of lemonade?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  And some condensation?

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and that's, I mean, that's what you've got for, for three days.

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

  How long, I mean, three days must be close to the hydration limit for humans.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was something that they were, they were, yeah, it was, it was kind of tough for them, but they managed to get what they could from the, from the, from the walls of the submarine.

• 21:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've got, we've got them down there.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  They're trying to stay as still as they can every half an hour to every hour. They're waking up to play around with the oxygen, leak the oxygen back in, also scrub the CO2 out. What's happening on the surface?

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Well, on the, on the surface, the first thing is. Voyager finally gets another ship to maintain position on the surface. Then Voyager sails thirteen, fourteen hours back to Cork. And by that time, the Pisey submarine, it was in the North Sea, has been brought over to Cork. They wait for the Piseys from Canada to arrive by Hercules. They unload that, they get that on to the Voyager. And then what's interesting, two things are interesting, Altrice is delayed in getting over to Cork. And so the captain of Voyager says, we're not waiting for them, so they sail off. And then what happens is Trice has to be helicoptered out into the Atlantic

• 22:49Speaker 00

  and then lowered down on to Voyager.

• 22:53Chris Williamson?

  There's no helipad on Voyager.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  There's no helipad on Voyager, they're lowered down. And also what's happening is when I found the logs from Vickers Voyagers, sorry, from the Vickers Company, there's a lovely line where it says something like, 12.30, Altrice dropped full stop on to Voyager brackets gently.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Because it gave the indication they just dropped him on, but it was the brackets gently that I really... Again, that's the beauty of when you're writing a book, you find these little pieces of paperwork and it gives you an indication of it. So what happened then was the Americans were delayed. So the Americans, because they were obviously flying from the West Coast, they were delayed. So they get into Cork about ten hours later and they have to wait. Because of the tidal effect, their ship is put on to another ship and they're effectively, they're ten hours behind Vicker Voyager. So Voyager gets back to the scene of the accident on the early hours of Friday morning.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  So they are there, forty hours later, they are on the scene. And then effectively, there's a great line which says, how do you make God laugh? And it's tell him your plans. Because what happened was, Miss Ervery had an idea that they would get to the point, they would send down one of the Pisey submarines and they would hook them up, get them to the surface, and as it was, they'd be up by breakfast. So first thing goes wrong is they try and get their, these kind of inflatable crafts, you know inflatable kind of boats that would take them out to roughly the site where they think that the buoy, the submarine sinks. But the first engine doesn't work, the second engine doesn't work.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Eventually they have to get another engine sent over from one of the naval vessels and that's just to tow out the pious's crack. Now they make a decision, they're going down with a heavy, with a rope bound onto a kind of like a clamp, like a kind of claw effectively at the front of the pious's. And they make a decision that they want the rope to be of a certain buoyancy, the idea being that it would float up above them and would be less likely to become entangled. The problem is, that submarine goes down and it's piloted by a Greek guy called Darius Darcy, and it goes down, down, down. The problem is that the deeper it goes, the greater the buoyancy on the rope.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  And effectively what happens is they get down to about thirteen hundred feet and the buoyancy of the rope, the tension on that starts pulling on the claw and effectively go up to about fourteen hundred feet and then it gives. So not only does the rope and with the hook pull out of the claw, but it mangles the claw. So they're in a position where they no longer have a rope and they no longer have a working claw on this submarine. The decision's made to send down the submarine anyway in an attempt to try and find pious's, but after a few hours, A, they can't find it. No, that's the other thing. At some point that that pious's, that submarine springs a leak or there's a tension on board. So they have to go back up to the surface.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  So that's the first dive, which was deemed to be, the idea would be that it would be very successful, but that doesn't work. So then they bring on board the Canadians, so Altrist and his team and another pious's submarine, they are towed out and Dive Two goes down to the bottom.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  The problem is, it gets down to the bottom and it's there for eight hours and it can't find Pisces three.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  How are they doing that, just simply by sight, shine a light?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  No, by, by, but no, by, by sonar effectively. So what happens is they've got, they've got a sonar down there and um, they're, they're kind of trying, they're scanning, they're twisting round and they're scanning, trying to find it. And at one point they get a ping, but the, but the, what, what effectively is, is when they look at the scale of it, they realise that, that they're, they're one mile away. So, uh, under the water at that distance with that kind of parameter, it's, you know, it's difficult. If you, if you, if you, you were maybe five, six, seven hundred feet away, it would still be tough to find it, to get it to the point where you could actually illuminate it. Um, so they're down there for, for eight hours. No luck. They go back to the surface. Um, at this point, the claw's being worked on in the other submarine.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  They go back down again. And what they do is they get, um, Roger Chapman to sing. At one point Chapman's singing this made up song in the hope that they can, um, hear them. Um, the idea is the higher notes might help. So, so Chapman's singing away and, um, they get the team in the, in the Canadian submarine, um, are, are desperately trying to sort of, you know, find, find exactly the right spot. And eventually, the, what is a combination of, of, of both Mallinson and Chapman, hearing a, a directional change on, on, on, on their kind of underwater telephone. So, so it's a combination of them thinking they've made some kind of change on the Canadians, uh, ship and the Canadians thinking, right, we've, we've locked on to them.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Can they communicate with the Canadians?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this is the thing, uh, they can at some point. It's, um, and because at one point, um, Chap- Mallinson's keeps, keeps, um, keeps talking and the Canadians at one point saying, quiet please, quiet please. And Mallinson starts getting pissed off, pardon my language, um, because of this is, uh, this is what's, what's happened. And the other thing that annoys the, the Chapman and Mallinson is that the Canadians are talking about metres. And these guys are saying, well, what, you know, we're dealing in feet here. We have to deal in, we have to deal in feet. So it's like the old world and the new world kind of clashing. Um, so eventually at one point, they finally realised they lock on to where they think they are. And Mallinson is looking up at the porthole, um, which is almost like a skylight at that point because of the way the position, the submarines, um, is facing.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  And what they're looking for is they're looking out into just a wash of blackness. Um.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  But what they're waiting for is for light to come, because the idea being that the other submarine has lights on it, and if they, basically if the blackness out there starts to illuminate, then they know they're going to be found. So eventually what happens is they see the light in the water and they realise that PIS 5, that the Canadians have found them, and they think, fantastic. So what happens is the Canadians position their submarine really close to PIS 3, and what they're trying to do is they've got a device that they're trying to hook on to the top of the rope, so the top of the submarine, and they're positioning it with their hook,

• 29:32Speaker 00

  and as I've described in the book, it's effectively like threading a needle wearing a suit of armour. But they've done it before, they're good at it, this is what they do. But what happens is they put the hook into the eye at the top of PIS 3, and they think they've locked on, so for a second effectively they've got this rope with the lifting strength to get them up, and it's locked on, but then, again, a one in a thousand misfortune, it just falls out, it spins round effectively, and drops out of sight. So there's this situation where they have to spin round the submarine, which bangs PIS 3, and they're trying to chase this rope as it drifts away. And as I've said,

• 30:15Speaker 00

  it's like a pensioner's race, because the rope is just drifting very slowly, a balloon caught in a breeze. But they can only move very slowly and they're desperately trying to catch it before it goes away, because if it drifts out of arm reach effectively, if they miss it, they're going to have to go back to the surface, which is a few hours, find it, retool, get back down again. The bottom line is they get down, but the problem is they can't get it back on to the lift point. The only thing they can do is fit it on to a grille which is over one of the propellers, which A allows them to know exactly where the submarine is. But won't support the weight.

• 30:51Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so they would use that as kind of like a Minotaur's maze.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:57Chris Williamson?

  Way to follow it down. It might not have the buoy attached to the top, but all that you would do in future is now send a submarine. Okay, just track. With this insight, down, down, down, down, down.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  But the problem is, but the, but the, but the major problem is it doesn't, it won't support the weight of the submarine, so they can't lift.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  What about the Roger and Roger at the moment? Have they not needed to go to the bathroom? Have they not been struggling with stuff like that?

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've, they've, they've no choice. I mean, it's, it's not, it's not pretty, but in the book we have to describe how, how they, they have to go to the toilet, which is effectively just, you know, I mean, they're, it, without putting too fine a point of it, is, is defecating in a plastic bag and then putting the, put the, the bag inside a kind of a, a, a sealed metal biscuit tin. Um, so that's, that's, that's, that's the reality.

• 31:37Chris Williamson?

  Didn't one of the lads have the runs as well? Hadn't you had a bad high or something?

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that was it. He'd been, he'd been constipated for a while and he just could hold on no longer. But as he said afterwards, the relief afterwards was, was, was overwhelming. Um, so that's where, that's where they are. The Canadians have, have, have found them, but the Canadians eventually have to go back up.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  How many hours in are we here?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Oh, we're about 50 hours, 55. You know, I mean, they're, they're, they're, they're getting very close to the wire. Um, so then what happens is there's a, there's a, there's a third trip down to try and get another, another rope on. Doesn't work. Um, but they.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  Is that another Pisces that time?

• 32:16Speaker 00

  That's a, that's another Pisces trip down. Um, so, but basically what happens is by, by the Friday night, and they know that by Saturday lunchtime, they're, they're out of oxygen. By Friday night, um, they still don't have a working lift line on. And then what's, what, there's this great sequence whereby, um, you've, you've got people like Ted Carter. Ted Carter is in Barrow and Furness, and Ted Carter's a kind of, you know, assistant technical manager, and he's communicating with Voyager on the, on the radio. Um, and he realizes that they are despondent, that they are exhausted, and that it isn't, the rescue is not happening the way it should be. So he just, he decides that they should send out another team.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Of kind of fresh men and he speaks to Leonard Redshaw. Leonard Redshaw was known as Mr Polaris because he effectively worked with the Navy to design the Polaris submarine. He was a kind of real, he was the, you know, Britain's shipbuilder effectively and he was in charge of Vickers. And his idea was we throw everything at this kind of rescue mission. So he spoke to Leonard Redshaw and Redshaw said, yeah, great, put together a team. So what happened is you've got this kind of like dirty dozen mission whereby, um, sorry, Ted puts together a team of kind of men, kind of engineers, divers, five of them. They are flown in the, in the small private plane that, that Vickers have over to Cork. And the Royal Navy have got permission to fly into I S airspace and the I S have been very supportive of it.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  They touch down at Cork Airport, they run across the, the tarmac and they're loaded onto a Sea King helicopter. Problem is, um, the helicopters are going to fly 150 miles out and there's a storm. So the weather's atrocious. None of these guys have been on a helicopter before. Um, um, so they're, and what happens is they fly out in the storm and as one of the guys I was speaking to about it said, when they looked out, all they could see was white, they thought it was snow, but it was the tops of the waves just being whipped up by, by, by the weather. And they are at kind of 9:10 at night, they are lowered down in the midst of the storm onto the deck of Voyager, which is thrashing about. And what happens is they get lowered down one at a time, but every time they're about to touch the deck,

• 34:25Speaker 00

  the Voyager sinks into a wave. So they are, they, they think they're about to touch the ground, but the ground just falls underneath them. And it's just this kind of amazing piece of piloting. In fact, the pilot had got in touch with me after, after the book came out and, and he was commended and, you know, it's, it's for the piloting that was involved in that and keeping it steady and lowering these men down. So Ted gets down there with his team on the Friday evening and.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  He helps fix one of the submarines and he goes down with Des Darcy um to on the kind of early hours of Saturday morning and it's Ted effectively who this guy who was in in Barren Furness um sort of you know twelve hours before who who helps get the first actual lift line that they they developed a toggle which is effectively like an upside down um umbrella and the idea would be that this would be fitted into the aft sphere and like a T bar it would open out once it was in and and they managed to get the first one in um but at at the same time the Americans had got out there uh finally um and they

• 35:32Speaker 00

  and what again how do you make God laugh telling your plans the idea was that they would launch first that they had this high technology for nineteen seventy three um remote controlled um submarine effectively that was like a kind of as they said it was like a dog on a leash a well-trained dog on a leash that would that could be sent down and had CCTV cameras fixed on it um and that was supposed to launch about eleven at night on the Friday night and just as they're about to to power it up it's a massive kind of your power grid for it what they didn't appreciate was when they'd been wiring all up on the journey out salt water and sea spray had contaminated all the circuits so as soon as they pressed it up as soon as they effectively they powered up the whole thing just blew

• 36:17Speaker 00

  so again there's you know submarines aren't working on on Voyager the Americans are supposed to come and rescue everyone bang it's they blew and it was going to take four hours to rewire the entire system with everyone working at once um and again it's the it's that kind of system whereby because they had so many resources out there and granted every system had its own problems what happened was um Ted goes down in Pisces gets that lift line attached but they realised that they need another lift line

• 36:48Chris Williamson?

  One's not gonna be enough.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  One's, well, it could potentially be enough, but it's too heavy to risk it. They, they want to get another lift.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  Cause if they drop it a second time.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's it. They, they, they've literally got one chance with the lift. So what they do is the, the, the Americans are finally brought in on about four, five in the morning. And what's fantastic is after everything that's gone wrong with every other attempt. The Americans goes absolutely like silk, it goes like clockwork. The curve is piloted down by Larry Brady, who, who, who sadly just died a couple of weeks ago. Um, but he, he pilots it, um, I brings it down. And drops off the, another toggle into the aft sphere. And as he described it to me, he said it was like, it was like parking the car after a very, very long drive. Um, a drive of, of, of effectively three days, um, with, but it just goes that smoothly.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  So by 10 o'clock in the morning. With they've got maybe, they, they estimate they've got a few hours of oxygen left, but, but potentially less. No one's got, it has an absolute accurate account of how much oxygen's left. They're in the position where they're going to lift.

• 37:54Chris Williamson?

  What are, what are Roger and Roger like at this stage? And what sort of physiological, uh, state are they in?

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Well, they're exhausted, they're, they're stressed, they're imagining the worst. Because, uh, uh, Malinson is, is, is, is, both are, they're both amazing guys, but kind of, um, Malinson, it really knows the submarine. And he's, he's constantly overthinking what they should be doing and trying to second guess it. And Chapman's the one who's trying to sort of, um, you know, calm him down, just saying, look, there's, Chapman's attitude is that there's nothing we can do here. But effectively try and be silent and breathe as little as possible. Whereas Malinson is effectively trying to second guess and make suggestions about what they can do and really try and work out it. So when it becomes to, to, to time to lift the submarine. They are both. Internalizing it, but as, as they admitted afterwards, terrified.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Because in their heads, they can't quite grasp what the toggle is. They think it's a hook. And they, they're constantly worried that they, that like a fish on a hook. The fish is going to come off, off the hook. And initially what happens is when they start to lift. The submarine has been dragged along the surface and it's only after a certain point that it starts to lift up.

• 39:03Chris Williamson?

  It's until it gets to the plum straight line, right, below wherever it is.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  It's lifted, it's lifted up. And as they said later on, the worst part of the entire experience was the lift, was those final two hours. Because what happened was that it was being lifted from a different ship this time. They transferred over to a kind of larger vessel that was going to, that was actually operating where the curve the Americans had been operating from. And what they did was they kind of moved over to the John Cabot, that was the Canadian Coast Guard, it was an icebreaker that they were moving off from, that they decided to operate the lift from. And what happened was that because of the stormy weather, this icebreaker was constantly being forced up and down

• 39:51Speaker 00

  twenty, thirty feet because of the waves. So if you imagine you're fishing and you've got a fish at the end of the hook, but that fish is a submarine, it's constantly going up and down and it's pivoting as it goes up. So it was like a really violent roller coaster for them. And they're terrified because every move, every motion of the submarine, they're smashing about inside. But they also think that the hooks are going to come off and they're going to plummet down to the bottom. Also, communications breaking up. So at one point they're shouting for them to stop the lift, they can't get it to stop. The other guys think they want to continue. There's a lot of confusion. And then they stop at one point when the curve, which is the kind of American system, that submarine is wrapped around

• 40:34Speaker 00

  at one point, the paces, so that they're lifting both at once. It all gets very confusing and very kind of stressful. But at one point, they stop and that's because they get to about. Hundred and twenty feet from the surface and Messervy decides we've got to get another line on there. On- once it gets to the surface, it's going to get heavier. So there's a great si- situation where they send down the divers to try and attach another, another rope to it and it's Bob, um, I don't know who it was. Bob Hanley, Bob Hanley is sent down as a diver with one of his colleagues with a hook. And the idea is, as he described it, it's trying to land in a bucking bronco.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  So the submarine itself is thrashing about, moving up and down and he's got to time his dive so that he can land on it and, and effectively straddle it like you would a bucking bronco while it's, it's moving up and down with the waves at the top. And he's holding a, a, the rope with this kind of um, hook that he's trying to sort of at wedge. And in fact, that's not it. What it is, is it's a, it's a, a, a, a really thick rope attached to a U curve with a bolt attached to it and the bolts attached to a string. And what he has to do is he has to get the, the U bend of the, of the metal substance effectively under um, the top of the submarine. Then he has to screw in a bolt.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  Like, like a carabiner to sort of close off the opening, yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. Um, and all while underwater at a hundred and twenty feet on a submarine this thrashing about. And it's an incredibly tense moment, but he manages to get it on. And um, they effectively send down another rope. Um, and so we're in a position where there's all these three ropes pulling up and finally, um, they make it to the surface with, yeah, in, in a very tense moment.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so they get to the surface and then there's still complications then, right? Like getting the, the hatch open and.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Malison always remembers that, that he just, they, they were, they, they bled in more oxygen.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  But didn't they, when did they eat the sandwich?

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Well, good question. I think they ate it at some point. They certainly, they celebrated with, they cracked open the Corona lemonade as soon as they were found. That was their deal, is that they wouldn't open the lemonade until they were found. So they cracked open the lemonade then. And as Mallinson said, remember, because of everything going on, it can taste like shit, you know, but you know, shit never tasted so sweet, given the, given the conditions they were in. And but when they got to the surface, they were, Mallinson remembers it very vividly, they just, they couldn't get the actual hatch open. So he was kind of kicking it. And lying on the bottom and kicking the, the surface of the, of the hatch.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  Even though they're at the surface, this doesn't give them any more oxygen or any more CO2 scrubbing, right? You could be sealed in on the top of Everest and it would be precisely the same as being at the bottom of the ocean.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. They've got to get that hatch open to get fresh air in. Finally, bang, the kind of hatch is, the hatch is open. And as there's a lovely moment where effectively they said that they had the, the first argument of, of the whole time they were down there was then when the hatch was open. Mallinson was the pilot and Mallinson's argument was that he should be the last person out because he's pilot, he's responsible for the craft. Chapman is much wiser because they're in a storm, you know, the, the waves are thrashing about and as Chapman says to Mallinson, says to Roger, Roger, you can't swim. So that was his argument, the, the, the, the, Mallinson should be the first person out of the submarine on the grounds that if water floods in, at least Chapman can swim because Mallinson's never, never been to swim.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  And so eventually they finally get, they get them out and, you know, it's, yeah, they, they, and what was very touching is that. I, when I was writing the book to people and I was writing about the book, what, they'd been rescued by this idea of the Brotherhood of the Sea. All these other vessels had come to their aid. Men had come from Canada, from California, from the North Sea, from Ireland. Everyone had pulled together. And for this three day period, the kind of world was waiting, you know, with bated breath to find out, could these men be, be, be rescued? It was akin to the situation a couple of years back with the, with the, the school party trapped in the cave. And I think Thailand it was, where you're waiting to see, could they, could they be rescued? And, and they were rescued.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  But for the men on board who toiled for so long on Vicar's Voyager, they were on the. On the edge of the ship looking out and when they saw the sub hit the surface and finally see these guys climb out, you know, there was people just bursting into tears. These were men who'd never, you know, as I'd said, their eyes had been parched for decades, you know, they just didn't cry about anything. But it was just the overwhelming emotion of willing something to happen and for so many things to go wrong, they finally, they finally got them to the surface. And that was part of the reason why I wanted to write the book was, was obviously there was the experience of the men on board, but it was also to capture all these characters who'd been, who were in danger of being lost to history, you know, like Altrice, like Ted Carter, Bob Hanley, all these people, the

• 45:44Speaker 00

  guys who devised the toggles. And, you know, when you speak to Ted Carter today, I mean, he's very blasé about it. He just said he helps, you know, but it's, they did remarkable things. Larry Brady in California. So that was, it was everyone had pulled together to pull off this incredible rescue. And when you consider everything that had gone wrong, even to the point where at one point they needed new rope and the Navy who were out there ferried rope across in a kind of wire basket effectively underneath a helicopter. But they misjudged the weight of the rope. So as soon as the helicopter took off and started flying toward Voyager, they could see the helicopter immediately start being

• 46:27Speaker 00

  dragged down to the sea. So they suddenly, the helicopter pilot had to jettison the rope and suddenly the rope's tumbling down and Altrice is on the deck of Voyager with Peter Mesierwski looking out at the rope they're supposed to get and suddenly the rope's just bobbing across the surface of the Atlantic. And Altrice had a motto that he used to say, and his attitude was, well, if it was easy, everyone would do it. And this was a rescue that was far from easy.

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  How close to the wire was it with resources and oxygen and that stuff?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Well, it's complicated because afterwards, if you see this little footage of them on YouTube talking about when they finally touched down on the Korg, and they're very stiff upper lip British, everything's fine, oh, we have plenty of resources. It was very comfortable. At one point, they say on the bottom, it was very comfortable. And the report was that they could have gone for a number of hours afterwards. However, the people I spoke to who had first-hand experience of it, one of them said that it was his job to inspect the submarine. When it was finally brought back to Cork and he was on, he went into the submarine with the, the kind of US kind of, um, um, authority, his job is to monitor safety for submarines.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  And they said, he remembers two things very vividly. One was the stench of the place, uh, the stench of the submarine. And the second thing was that when they turned on the oxygen, just nothing came out. His attitude was that they were just absolutely down to the wire.

• 47:58Chris Williamson?

  Minutes.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. You know, we'll, we'll never know exactly how it's, it's, it's to, to, to, it's to come, his power back to, to, but his attitude was that there was, there was nothing left.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The video of the Rogers talking about it wasn't, doesn't one of them say what was the worst part of it? And he said, coming back up.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. And I think that's because a lot of what they say is very much, you know, that can stiff up our, up, up our busy lips saying it's, it's fine. And you have to kind of, knowing what, having put together the book, knowing what preceded it, we can now understand why that was because it was, I mean, they're being rescued, but it took two hours to get them to the surface and they were being smashed about for a good chunk of that. And when they weren't being smashed about, they were hanging like a, like a fish on a hook, unaware what was happening. And all the time, they know that at the very limit of, of, of what oxygen's left. So it's that thing where, when you look at all the components that had to be in place for them to be rescued, the curve being flown over from California,

• 48:56Speaker 00

  the PISs flying over from Halifax, the team coming over from the North Sea. And when you look at all the things that went wrong, you, all you have to think about is another link in that chain being delayed or another problem or something that, you know, like, imagine it took, it was four hours to fix the curve, um, electrics to get the sub down. Imagine it took four and a half or five. I mean, they were that close because it wasn't that case of it, it took a long time to get for the rescue to begin. And then the rescue went really smoothly. Literally everything that could have gone wrong with the rescue did go wrong, but they still managed to get them up. And that was, it's that kind of, it's that great line from Winston Churchill, never, ever, ever give up. And I think that this rescue is a testament to that.

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  What did the guys do after this? Did they go back to the sea? Did any of them descend again?

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, both of them. But within, within a few weeks, they were, they were back in the submarine.

• 49:47Chris Williamson?

  And lads, such lads.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, Mallinson's attitude was, you know, he, you, you, you know, it was, there was errors, but he, he wanted to, to get, to get back on, onto the submarine. And Chapman did it for a spell, but then Chapman used his experiences to set up a company that, that, that developed, um, rescue for submarines. So, so Chapman went on to, to, to take his experience and turn it into a very successful business. And that was involved and the, that was called upon, but not used tragically for the Kursk disaster. But then was called upon to, to rescue another, um, Russian submarine, um, you know, in the, you know, I think it was 10, 12 years ago. So, um, yeah, he had an amazing experience from it.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  Commercialised his catastrophe.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. But what was, what was very, very special about it was that the, the, the bond between the two remained up until, I mean, um, Roger Chapman sadly died, um, a year ago in January, I think it was. Um, but up until, up until the, the, the September before, on the day of the rescue, Mallinson would phone him at the same, at the, at the, the exact moment that they were rescued, just after one o'clock on, on the anniversary. And then afterward, at a certain point, they would meet for lunch on that day, um, every year. So there, there was a kind of very close bond that existed as a consequence of, of the rescue and their experiences down there in the deep.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  Did you get to speak to them?

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Um, I got to speak to Mallinson a lot, um, but sadly Roger Chapman had, had died before I began researching the book. Um, but I spoke to his widow, June Chapman, who was very supportive and his, and his two sons who were very supportive. And, and I interviewed Mallinson a lot for the book, along with the, as many as the rescuers who, who were, who were still alive. So it was a great pleasure to, to, to speak to them and to also to feel like, to try and effectively illuminate this story, which has been, been largely forgotten, but it is an incredible tale of, of, of heroin and also that element of, of, of what you can do if, if a team pulls together.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  There's something sort of specially nostalgic and kind of beautiful about it because as you say, it was the analog age, probably just toward the end of it. But if, uh, yeah, go ahead.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Uh, no, it's, it's interesting you say that. When I was researching the book, I discovered that, um, this was 73 when the Cantak cable wa- was laid. And as I said, 175 phone calls could be made at any point. But in that same year, the first mobile phone call was made. And it was by by one developer to another, to his competitor effectively to say that he was that they were ahead of the game. And and it's one of these regrets, actually, I didn't use it as a footnote somewhere because it was effective, I just couldn't like the touch of that. So there was, it was, it was an analog age, but it was also the year that that featured me, the future birthday year effectively. But there was that kind of nice touch. But yeah, I mean, it was, this was, this was men in boiler suits with T squares. And trying to fix things.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  So I mean, even the device, the toggle that that rescued them, that was designed on paper with T squares and manufactured in a in a few hours. In fact, a nice touch that would appeal to an Aneal and comedy, when they went over to the fabrication unit, having designed this rescue toggle, they spoke to the foreman and said, we've got to make this build. And he looked and said, yeah, look, we can start it next week. And he said, no, no, that we did this. So he put them on to Leonard Redshaw and Redshaw, in no uncertain terms, told them that it would be made today, in fact, this afternoon. And they said, right, why didn't you say? So they they made it in the in the space of a few hours.

• 53:03Chris Williamson?

  Didn't the Queen contact the guys at one point?

• 53:06Speaker 00

  Well, that was the great thing, they get a message garbled down from the phone that that Queen Elizabeth is is thinking well of you. And now, and this was very moving to them because Chapman had served in the Royal Navy. So you serve, you serve her Majesty effectively. And Mallinson was also deeply moved, this idea that at this hour, they are kind of, you know, darkest hour, the Queen, the monarch, you know, Britannia effectively was thinking well of them and it kept them going. But it was only until they got to the surface, a couple of days later, that what it was was, it was the QE two had been steaming past and had offered to assist. But that assistance wasn't required, but they said, look, wish the men well.

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  So it wasn't the Queen at all?

• 53:47Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't the Queen, it was the QE two. But but the the message that they got and that helped sustain them was that it was the Queen herself that that was that was wishing them well. So it was best they didn't know.

• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure that she would have done as well. Yeah, the the video of the guys coming out and the interview with them afterward is peak hard British guy from sort of the mid nineteen hundreds. No, it was, it was mostly fine down there. I we could have survived for another, you know, another day or so.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  It was, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's, it's, I suppose that's what's fascinating about it is that kind of age where.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  You mean, okay, what was interesting about it is they both gave quite moving interviews, one to the Telegraph, one to the Mail about a week or so later, but it was that, it's not the days where people, it's effectively kind of, the cameras brought out, please emote, and please emote copiously, it wasn't like that at all, it was, it was, how, it was that very British thing of, I've gone through the greatest trauma of my life, but how do I minimise it?

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  It was but to scratch, yeah, exactly.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, but that's the benefit of putting together a book like The Dive whereby you can, you can lay out, it's only effectively when you lay out chronologically and as much detail as I've been able to do, where you show everything going wrong and then what's put in place to rectify that. And even remarkable, people like, as I say, Ted Carter, I spoke to him about it, so his, I mean, he was down in the submarine, everything had gone wrong, his colleagues' lives are effectively, literally in his hands, because he's the man who's manipulating this toggle and he has to get it in. And I asked him about the pressure of that, and in the book I refer to the fact that, I mean, there's like fifty tonnes of pressure bearing down on the submarine, but internally

• 55:37Speaker 00

  there should be the same amount bearing down on him, but he was very blasé about it, you know, he just said, no, I'm not, some people are just built that way, that they're very, at times of great crisis they are, they can be very relaxed and very focused, and he was one of those kind of characters whereby he had a job to do, he managed to get it done.

• 55:57Chris Williamson?

  Bright man for the job.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and saved, and saved his colleagues' life along with the rest of the team.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  Amazing, man, that's such a fascinating story, I think you've done an awesome job with the book, that'll be linked, The Dive will be linked on Amazon below, any other bits if people want to learn more about this?

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, yeah, well, yeah, just buy, buy The Dive, that's the best way to do it, but, I mean, it's a fascinating story, and also what I was glad, because also in the book I tell the story of, well, there's a section where I talk about the development of submarines, but also the laying of the cable back in the kind of eighteen, eighteen fifties and sixties, this great kind of nautical journey to try and connect the old world and the new, it's quite an amazing story, and they were this little part of it further down the line, but it's, no, it's, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I hope people will read it because it's, it is one of those situations whereby... It's just the ability of people not giving in and a team of men rescuing their colleagues.

• 56:54Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful story. Stephen McGinty, ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for the time.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  No, thank you very much.