Town marks 125 years of Navy submarine building

A town is commemorating more than a century of building submarines for the Royal Navy.

It is 125 years since submarine construction began in the UK, with the first commissioned for the navy, the HMS Holland 1, built in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria in 1901.

Heritage advisor at BAE Systems, John Bulmer, said technology had "come on massively" at the ship yard.

Commemorative events are taking place in the town organised by the Royal British Legion, Royal Navy Submarine Service and Barrow Submariners Association.

Barrow was granted Royal Charter status last year, becoming the Royal Port of Barrow in recognition of its "unique and critical contribution" to national security.

Last month, the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Agamemnon departed the port for its first sea trials, marking another historic moment for the shipyard.

Bulmer said: "Barrow is the place where submarine building in the UK started.

"It's a huge centre of industrial capability and all of that has carried on evolving into what we make today.

"There aren't many countries that design and build their own nuclear submarines, the UK is one of them, and Barrow is at the heart of it."

Barrow's shipyard was founded in 1871 by the Barrow Shipbuilding Company, and while the Holland 1 was the first submarine to be officially commissioned, Bulmer said a number of trial vessels were built in the 1880s.

He also said there were a number of "differences in the design" and they were not representative of the Holland 1 or the "way submarine design went from thereon in".

Holland 1 was built in secret in one of the shipyard's yacht sheds and was regarded as an experiment.

"Submarines were being billed as a threat to battleships, so the early experiments were done in reasonable secrecy," Bulmer said.

The 63ft (19m) vessel now resides at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Portsmouth, where visitors can go inside the preserved submarine.

Bulmer added: "It's this tiny little thing - if you've got claustrophobia, don't go in it."

As well as designing and building naval and merchant ships and their machinery, the shipyard has also been involved in the construction of electric locomotives for the Metropolitan Railway - now part of the Tube - water turbines and mining machinery.

More than 90 submarines were built in Barrow throughout World War One and Two with production of nuclear submarines beginning during the Cold War.

In 1960, HMS Dreadnought became the UK's first nuclear-powered submarine, going on to serve for 20 years.

The shipyard which has been managed by BAE Systems since 1999, has constructed almost all serving Royal Navy nuclear submarines, including Vanguard and Astute -classes to the current Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines.

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