NAVY NEWS, FEBRUARY 1998 Options
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Despite the comings and goings, HMS Dolphin is still a busy Naval establishment - and will be until the White Ensign comes down and Dolphin reverts to Fort Blockhouse. MIKE GRAY reports.
We'll
till here! ON'T fall into the trap that several people have made when they bump into Cdr John Prime, commanding officer of HMS Dolphin.
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The gist of the conversation usually follows the "not much to command there now, is there?" line. They are wrong - HMS Dolphin continues to be a busy Naval establishment, and that is how Cdr Prime believes it will continue until the traditional home of the Submarine Service is decommissioned in the autumn and the site reverts to its historic name, Fort Blockhouse. "There is still a Dolphin, and there will still be a Dolphin until September 30," said Cdr Prime. "The First Submarine Squadron departed Dolphin on September 30, 1993, and when they left, it left a huge vacuum here. "But since then we have never been busier - we have 1,200 people here today. "What we also have here is the submarine escape training tank and the RN Submarine School, which does all the training of submariners after their initial training at HMS Raleigh. "Also on site we have the Submarine Museum, the Joint Service Adventure Sail Training Centre, the Hornet Sailing Club, the Dolphin Volunteer Cadet Corps and the Sea Cadet Corps offshore sailing organisation, including the TS Royalist. "We also provide accommodation for the Institute of Naval Medicine at Alverstoke, and overflow accommodation for the Royal Hospital, Haslar. "The Royal Hospital's business is secondary care, and we are developing into the centre for medical training. It makes sense to be adjacent to each other and maybe in the future for the sites to amalgamate, but right now each has its own commanding officer. We work together, but we are not yet a unified establishment." The Defence Cost Studies 15 analysis, dealing with the centralisation of defence medical training, brought the first of the new lodgers to Dolphin with the establishment of the Army's rapid-deployment 33 Field Hospital - a containerised mobile hospital - which went operational in January last year. 33 Field Hospital can provide 50 beds plus full medical support almost instantly, and has a full capability of 200 beds. Following them in were the first elements of the Royal Defence Medical College (RDMC), whose
• If I wasn't a gunner... Dolphin staff fire the guns on the Saluting Battery, the main saluting platform for the Portsmouth area. commandant - currently a Royal Navy surgeon commodore - will take over joint responsibility, with an RN commander commanding the joint support unit for the Fort Blockhouse site. "The Submarine Escape Training Tank (SETT) will remain here as a landmark on the Gosport skyline for the foreseeable future," said Cdr Prime. "The Submarine School will, on current plans, move to HMS Raleigh, in a gradual transfer between 1999 and 2000, with the RDMC taking some of the space vacated by the School. "There is a requirement for accommodation on the Gosport, peninsula so we are in effect a fullscale barracks with 750 spaces for officers and ranks." The Submarine School is now managed from HMS Raleigh, but the school's training is done at Dolphin, which helps account for the 350 students, from juniors to brigadiers, including foreign visitors, who are attending courses on site at any one time. One of the priorities of this year will be the orderly transfer of con-
trol from the RN, culminating in the decommissioning ceremony on September 30. "I'm responsible for decommissioning Dolphin as a unit and the transfer of HMS Dolphin as a site to the Director Medical Training Organisation," said Cdr Prime. "It's not a case of a steady rundown, last one out turn off the lights, that sort of thing. "It's like a Hong Kong in miniature - at midnight on September 30 I transfer ownership to the new owner. "But as it won't be an HMS any more I have to decommission on the day, which makes it slightly more interesting." Several tasks carried out by Dolphin are being distributed to other establishments. Some 80 per cent of Dolphin is seafront, and control of the jetties passes to the Queen's Harbour Master on behalf of the Naval Base Commander, Portsmouth. The future of the historic Saluting Battery is also currently being determined to see how the oldest firing guns in the Royal Navy - the converted artillery pieces date back to the 19th century - can continue to boom out their marks of respect.
History on loan
• Memories - HMS Dolphin in the days of submarines. In the foreground is the original part of the base - Dolphin 1 - with the old walls still visible in the curved bastion behind the waterfront wardroom. Three diesel-powered patrol submarines can be seen in Haslar Creek alongside the jetty, at the other end of which, surrounded by yachts, are the grey-roofed offices originally designed for the Upholder class. The white-roofed building at a skew in the middle of the picture is the Submarine School, next to the famous submarine escape training tank. The playing field beyond the submarine school marks the limit of Dolphin 2 - beyond that is the Royal Hospital, Haslar.
AS THE establishment runs down, homes have to be found for much of the heritage gathered over the decades. All of it is valuable, in financial or sentimental terms, and interested parties have already made bids for some items. The curator of heritage, Bridget Spiers, said a committee was considering where items will go, effectively loaning them out on behalf of the RN trophy store. "We've got paintings, etchings, lots of rather nice silverware, and in the church there is a plaque made up of six Delft tiles given by Dutch submarines which served here in the war," she said. Among the treasures are the Wyllie paintings in the wardroom dining hall, and the Jolly Roger made for Lt Cdr David Wanklyn VC, the most decorated submariner - the flag was completed just after Wanklyn's HMS Upholder left on patrol in 1942 and never returned.
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