The canoe versus the submarine...the first US vessels arrive at Holy Loch 61 years ago

“I came over from the States specially for this and I want it to be good. Are there going to be beacons, torches, rockets – and bagpipes, too?”

It was Thursday, March 2, 1961, the day before the new US Polaris nuclear submarine forward operating base on the Holy Loch – announced by Harold Macmillan the previous November, to some controversy – was due to welcome USS Proteus, a 19,000-ton depot ship.

The base had rapidly become a focal point for determined civil-disobedience protests under the banner of CND, which had been formed in 1958. Many people were understandably concerned that Scotland now found itself on the Cold War’s front line.

A ‘Polaris-action group’ had been camped on the stony foreshore at Kilmun for weeks, their tiny fire illuminating a slogan, in foot-high lettering on a wall at the lochside: “Polaris spells doom”.

Now, CND demonstrators told journalists that they were hoping to get as close to Proteus as possible when she arrived and to “hand some leaflets to the seamen if we can”.

But precautions were already in hand: Clyde protection motor fishing vessels patrolled the loch overnight, while HMS Exmouth, the frigate escort ship for the Proteus, had orders to retaliate with fire extinguishers and hoses if demonstrators tried to use force when the depot ship berthed.

POLARIS CARRYING SUBMARINE PATRICK HENRY ARRIVING AT DEPOT SHIP PROTEUS IN HOLY LOCH . STAFF PIC TAKEN BY DUNCAN STEWART 8/3/1961

The Proteus duly arrived on Friday, and six demonstrators from England, who tried to reach her in their kayaks and dinghies, were swamped by naval launches.

Watched by boat-loads of journalists, and with US sailors looking on from the Proteus’s top deck, the six led police a merry dance.

One, Mike Nolan, nimbly escaped the attentions of two launches from HMS Adamant, headquarters of the Third Submarine Squadron at Faslane; the boat-hooks wielded by their ratings were a fraction too late as his kayak jinked and dodged among the fleet.

“For 20 minutes”, the Glasgow Herald reported, “he held out, as the Proteus grew larger in the foreground, and then an unlucky current threw him against a launch’s side”.

A senior officer from HMS Adamant grabbed a boat-hook from a constable and stabbed it into the bottom of the kayak, pinning it to the side of the launch.

Nolan, who believed in passive resistance, went limp, but it still took two constables, a naval frogman and a police sergeant to haul him from the kayak and into the launch.

He and five others were taken to Dunoon and charged with breach of the peace, but the charges were dropped on March 12.

Dozens of journalists boarded the Proteus to attend a press conference given by its captain, Richard B. Laning. He declined to confirm that the Polaris-equipped submarine, Patrick Henry, was due in the Holy Loch shortly – though, if it did arrive, he added, the depot ship was ready to service it.

In Dunoon’s Queen’s Hall, the provost, Catherine McPhail, gave a warm speech of welcome at a civic reception for 150 of the Proteus’s officers and men. Captain Norval Ward, commander of the US Submarine Squadron 14, who was taking up his new appointment as commander of the Submarine Training and Refit Group, Clyde, declared that the Proteus’s mission was one of peace.

Later, there was a dance in honour of the Proteus’s crew. The town’s bars and cinemas were packed, and many shops remained open until 10pm; that first weekend, though, many shopkeepers capitalised on the newcomers by putting up their prices. (The South Ayrshire MP Emrys Hughes would shortly suggest in the Commons that approaches be made to local inhabitants “in order to prevent the Americans being exploited in case it made them become Communists”).

ANTI-POLARIS DEMONSTRATION AT HOLY LOCH . DEMONSTRATOR MIKE NOLAN SITS ASTRIDE THE AFTER-FIN OF THE NUCLEAR SUBMARINE PATRICK HENRY IN THE HOLY LOCH TO-DAY .

The Glasgow Herald welcomed the arrival of Polaris-carrying submarines, saying they “rule out the nightmare which the strategists call a ‘pre-emptive strike’. Nuclear war in the Polaris era means the certainty of mutual destruction. There is no longer any prospect of getting in a shattering first blow”.

The strength of pro- and anti-Polaris feeling around the Holy Loch was made clear the day after the arrival of the Proteus, when 1,500 demonstrators marched from Dunoon Pier to Sandbank war memorial.

Local people were antagonised by an anti-nuclear sign that was hung on the memorial. Many protest banners were visible – one read, “You’ve never had it so radioactive” (a play on Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good” speech) – and some demonstrators chanted “Go home Yanks” at US sailors. Slogans and catcalls were freely exchanged; one local schoolboy held up a poster which read, “We need Polaris. The Holy Loch was a war-time base. Go home weirdies”.

The Polaris-equipped submarine Patrick Henry arrived at the Holy Loch on Wednesday, March 8. Laurens Otter, one of the demonstrators who had been arrested on March 3, now tried again, his canoe being pursued by more than 70 civil and naval police, ratings, and naval frogmen in launches. The charge against him was dropped. (Otter died this February, aged 91.)

Two men were arrested after demonstrating outside the US Consulate in Glasgow’s Woodside Terrace. On Sunday, May 14, 2,000 people, led by Michael Foot MP, staged a protest march from Kirn pier to Dunoon. As Foot spoke at Black Park, a group of counter-demonstrators arrived in a van equipped with a loudspeaker; a group of other men surrounded the van and pushed it back towards the entrance.

There was another headline-grabbing protest on May 21, when 48 people were arrested. Around 3,000 people had sailed to Dunoon then marched to Hunter’s Quay. The march over, around 100 others descended on Ardnadam pier.There were skirmishes on the pier as police tried to clear a path for a van carrying 3,000 loaves for the Proteus. Injuries were suffered on both sides, and the police were accused of using excessive force.

Demonstrators who tried to board the Proteus were forced back by fire-hoses – but many claimed they had been pelted with nuts, bolts and heavy tins of metal polish.

A London teacher who had taken part in the demo at the pier wrote to The Herald, objecting to a comment in our news report that many of the women wore “dirty black jeans or slacks with shapeless sweaters”. When necessarily roughing it on a vital anti-Polaris demo, she pointed out, “I am not likely to don 15-denier nylons, stiletto heels, a smart suit/’little black dress’, plus an expensive hat”.

On March 27, three demonstrators reached the Patrick Henry. Mike Nolan managed to sit on its after-fin for 45 minutes before being hauled aboard a US launch. Around 350 anti-Polaris protestors were carted off by police on the weekend of September 16-17 during another big demonstration.

The Polaris subs were called upon during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The day after President Kennedy broadcast to the world, revealing that there were nuclear missiles in Cuba and demanding that they must be removed, a Glasgow Herald reporter went down to the Holy Loch, to check on the US Polaris submarines that were based there. “They were all gone, together with their tenders. They had taken their stations for Armageddon”, The Herald noted in 1992, on the 30th anniversary of the crisis.

Eleven years later, in 1973, America alerted its bombers and missile launchers, and put its missile subs to sea from the Holy Loch, recounts author Rodric Braithwaite in his book, Armageddon and Paranoia, as President Nixon sought to deter the Russians from sending troops to support the Egyptians during the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Egypt.

The events at the Holy Loch in 1961 spurred many protests, which have endured in the memory 30 years after the base closed as the Cold War came to an end. A flavour of this is evident in an article by the Guardian journalist Ian Jack, in 2007: “Soon after the depot ship arrived in 1961”, he writes, “I went as young CND member to demonstrate. Polaris had a galvanic effect in a country where the Gorbals Young Socialists flourished, Glasgow still published a magazine devoted to anarcho-syndicalism, and the folk-song movement was taking wing. I carried one pole of a banner and the poet Hugh MacDiarmid took the other.”.

The Holy Loch base is long gone, but the passionate anti-nuclear fears it stirred found lasting expression in the Faslane peace camp, which came into being in the summer of 1982, on the doorstep of the Trident missile base on the Gare Loch.