Rosse Stamp
Scientist at the Admiralty who used a novel underwater television device to find a lost submarine
ROSSE STAMP, who has died aged 92, was a scientist working for the Admiralty who was involved with the development of underwater television, which he used to help discover the wreck of HMS Affray, the new submarine which mysteriously sank with all hands off the Channel Islands in 1951.
On April 16 1951, Affray, a five-yearold A-class submarine, left Gosport harbour on a training exercise with a crew of 75. Four hours later, after the Captain signalled that he was diving, all contact was lost. As rumours began circulating about possible sabotage, the unseaworthiness of the vessel and other less likely explanations for its mysterious disappearance, a frantic search for Affray began.
Two months later, a possible location in “Wreck Valley” off Alderney was confirmed by the first practical application of underwater television. This apparatus, lowered from the rescue ship HMS Reclaim, had been developed by a team at the Admiralty Research Laboratory (ARL) led by Rosse Stamp, in a project codenamed LACQUER. And it was Stamp who, while watching the on-board television monitor in the captain’s cabin, first saw the periscope standards and radar aerial, and then the name of the submarine on the conning tower. The Affray had been found – at a depth of 280ft.
Walter Rosse Stamp was born in Sidcup on August 11 1925, the younger of the two sons of Edith Parsons and Charles Alfred Stamp, a chemist who had served in the Royal Navy during the Great War and was now a director (and future chairman) of Cave, Austin & Co, the family firm of South London “high-class grocers” and cafés.
As well as his Aunt Bertha, the artist, Stamp had two remarkable uncles. The elder was the economist and civil servant, Sir Josiah Stamp, later the first Baron Stamp, who became chairman of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway; the younger was (Sir Laurence) Dudley Stamp, the famous geographer.
Stamp studied Physics at King’s College, London, graduating in 1945. He then joined the Department of Scientific Research at the Admiralty, conducting research into the applications of photography to naval science. In 1950 he was transferred to work on television, “on the doubtful grounds”, he later recalled, “of having built a home ‘televisor’.”
When Affray disappeared the following year, the celebrated wartime frogman, Lionel “Buster” Crabb, who was already working, as RNVR but a civilian, for the ARL, immediately offered his services to help find the ship. (Crabb would himself disappear five years later, in even more mysterious circumstances, in Portsmouth Harbour under the Soviet cruiser which had brought Bulganin and Krushchev to Britain.)
Stamp, meanwhile, was considering the possible use of closed-circuit underwater television in the search but, as a junior scientific officer, was not in a position to implement the idea. To have contacted a high-ranking officer “would have been an improbability bordering on the fantastic – or the insubordinate. All such communication was the province of much higher authorities, with the exception of Buster, who was a law unto himself and invaluable in having a foot in both camps.”
According to Crabb’s biographer, Marshall Pugh, Stamp approached him for help, but “Crabb was in a strange position. All his diving life he had cursed scientists, electronic engineers, civil servants and his views on them were well known to the Navy. Stamp lived in another world from Crabb. He had a lathe in his dining-room and electronic fly killers of his own invention round the house. Crabb would not call on him, he said he was scared of being electrocuted.” Crabb and Stamp subsequently became friends, with the latter convinced that the former slept in his rubber wetsuit.
In the event, a team was assembled by Dr Nyman Levin consisting of Stamp, Crabb, RB “Jock” Phillips, an older Scots engineer, and his assistant and compatriot Jack Revie – “all”, as Stamp put it, “inclined towards unorthodoxy.” Shielded by the Official Secrets Act and working in isolation to “bypass all red tape”, Stamp and the team built a waterproof casing like a large dustbin for the conventional television camera already ordered from the Marconi firm, and designed a framework, with a powerful searchlight attached, to allow it to be steered underwater.
Developed in three weeks at Bushy Park in Teddington, the apparatus was transferred to HMS Reclaim, where it was further modified by the addition of a rudder. “Away from the camera,” Pugh wrote, “Stamp spent his entire time being seasick. By his camera he was as cool and efficient as a slide rule. He refused to get excited.”
When the television had found the submarine, Stamp received no public recognition, even though it was almost certainly the first use of a television camera underwater and the first time that a wreck had ever been identified by underwater television. He later wrote: “I did not originate the idea of using TV to identify Affray – I might have done, had I known of the problem – but it was not until Buster arrived back and reported his experiences that the fun started.”
The mystery of the Affray endures. A subsequent Board of Inquiry produced no answers; the Navy declined to raise the sunken vessel – giving rise to suspicions of a “cover-up” – and successive governments have refused to reopen the inquiry. The wreck is now an official war grave and may not be interfered with (the whole affair is recounted by Alan Gallop in Subsmash: the Mysterious Disappearance of HMS Affray). Stamp, meanwhile, wrote several papers and gave talks and broadcasts on underwater television, which he advocated as “capable of working deeper than a diver and for longer periods even than an observation chamber.” It also avoided any risk to life.
He was slightly dismayed by the way the discovery of the Affray was portrayed in the press, later insisting that “the only completely accurate account of UWTV was published in the Children’s Newspaper, now sadly defunct. There is a moral there, somewhere …” He subsequently worked on anti-submarine detection systems and, later, on sonar systems for Britain’s nuclear submarines.
Stamp retired early from the Admiralty in 1972, having become Senior Principal Scientific Officer, and disappeared to Herefordshire with his wife Alice Glanford, a colleague in the ARL whom he had married in 1950; it was a very happy, self-contained union. Unable, to their sadness, to have children, the couple then spent much time exploring Britain, eventually towing a Gobar collapsible caravan behind Stamp’s beloved 1964 MGB sports car.
Stamp once listed his hobbies as “scientific instrument making, domestic engineering, and taking anything to pieces to find what makes it tick”. His home was full of clocks and other devices that he had designed and made himself – including curious machines which successfully delighted his young nephew – and he built his own computer, at home, from scratch. His older brother would dismiss him as eccentric, noting disparagingly that his favourite food was garden peas and that he would only drink Coca-cola. But Stamp was a true individualist, of determinedly independent mind, modern and rationalist, as well as very generous. He was also retiring, delighted that Alan Gallop, the author of Subsmash, had failed to track him down.
Alice died in 2005. In his final, distressing, illness, Stamp was cared for by his niece, Jacqueline Riley.
Rosse Stamp, born August 11 1925, died June 30 2017