Admiral Sir Peter Herbert KCB, OBE, naval officer
Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2019 11:07 pm
Admiral Sir Peter Herbert KCB, OBE, naval officer, was born on February 28, 1929. He died on May 3, 2019, aged 90
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Peter Geoffrey Marshall Herbert was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in 1929, the son of Arthur Herbert, an engineer who went on to become the sales director for Rover cars, and his wife, Phyllis. After growing up in Coventry and attending Dunchurch Hall preparatory school in Warwickshire, he entered Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon, aged 13.
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Herbert had long experience of submarines. He had been commanding officer of HMSValiant,the first entirely British-made nuclear-powered submarine, between 1963 and 1968. When he arrived at the Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering factory in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, the first hoops had just been put on to the slipway and he watched the boat take shape from the keel up.
He faced a steep technological learning curve during the building programme; there was no working prototype for her nuclear plant, so engineers had to rely on a wooden mock-up as a training aid. When the submarine left Barrow for the first time, the main throttles stuck, forcing her to limp north to Campbeltown at five knots. For this and other glitches, HMSValiant was dubbed the Black Pig.
To test the submarine’s nuclear plant fully, Herbert sailed her dived to Singapore at full power in 1967, with just one short stop in Mauritius. The air conditioning broke down in the Indian Ocean, which pushed temperatures to 60C in the machinery room, and a small bolt worked loose in the gearbox. These faults apart, the crew was thrilled with how the boat performed. Returning to Faslane, Herbert thrashed her steam turbines again, sailing at up to 28 knots and entering the naval base in just under three weeks. She made the trip in 19 days, but had to sit at sea for 24 hours; there was a press conference the next day and the presiding admiral did not want the submarine pitching up a day early.In
1968 HMSValiantbecame the first nuclear-powered British hunter-killer to conduct a Cold War intelligence-gathering operation, sidling up as close as possible to the Soviet navy, even under the Arctic ice. Denis Healey, the defence secretary at the time, made his concerns clear. “Don’t you bloody well get detected,” he told the submarine commander as he left on the mission.
Herbert recalled how the deployment “was surprisingly easy because we were quiet and we could wander and watch things going on. I watched, from about 1,000 yards behind a cruiser, watching its missile launch and those sorts of things . . .”
Any such patrol requires nimble reflexes, though, and he had to ensure that HMSValiant smartly slid off into the deep when the Soviet submarine she was sitting beneath started to dive.
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Source; the excerpts above are taken from rnsubmusfriends.org.uk - where the full obituary can be read in PDF
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Peter Geoffrey Marshall Herbert was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in 1929, the son of Arthur Herbert, an engineer who went on to become the sales director for Rover cars, and his wife, Phyllis. After growing up in Coventry and attending Dunchurch Hall preparatory school in Warwickshire, he entered Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon, aged 13.
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Herbert had long experience of submarines. He had been commanding officer of HMSValiant,the first entirely British-made nuclear-powered submarine, between 1963 and 1968. When he arrived at the Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering factory in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, the first hoops had just been put on to the slipway and he watched the boat take shape from the keel up.
He faced a steep technological learning curve during the building programme; there was no working prototype for her nuclear plant, so engineers had to rely on a wooden mock-up as a training aid. When the submarine left Barrow for the first time, the main throttles stuck, forcing her to limp north to Campbeltown at five knots. For this and other glitches, HMSValiant was dubbed the Black Pig.
To test the submarine’s nuclear plant fully, Herbert sailed her dived to Singapore at full power in 1967, with just one short stop in Mauritius. The air conditioning broke down in the Indian Ocean, which pushed temperatures to 60C in the machinery room, and a small bolt worked loose in the gearbox. These faults apart, the crew was thrilled with how the boat performed. Returning to Faslane, Herbert thrashed her steam turbines again, sailing at up to 28 knots and entering the naval base in just under three weeks. She made the trip in 19 days, but had to sit at sea for 24 hours; there was a press conference the next day and the presiding admiral did not want the submarine pitching up a day early.In
1968 HMSValiantbecame the first nuclear-powered British hunter-killer to conduct a Cold War intelligence-gathering operation, sidling up as close as possible to the Soviet navy, even under the Arctic ice. Denis Healey, the defence secretary at the time, made his concerns clear. “Don’t you bloody well get detected,” he told the submarine commander as he left on the mission.
Herbert recalled how the deployment “was surprisingly easy because we were quiet and we could wander and watch things going on. I watched, from about 1,000 yards behind a cruiser, watching its missile launch and those sorts of things . . .”
Any such patrol requires nimble reflexes, though, and he had to ensure that HMSValiant smartly slid off into the deep when the Soviet submarine she was sitting beneath started to dive.
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Source; the excerpts above are taken from rnsubmusfriends.org.uk - where the full obituary can be read in PDF
