THE captain of a nuclear submarine was cleared of bullying his crew yesterday after telling of his concerns that they were not up to their secret mission.
Captain Robert Tarrant described his job of taking his young, inexperienced crew on such a dangerous assignment as “like taking footballers from the third division to the Premier League in six or seven weeks”.
The 44-year-old commander of HMS Talent denied at his court martial that he had continually verbally abused his crew. Prosecutors claimed that he had reduced men to tears with his “apoplectic” rages. His face would turn scarlet as he delivered withering tirades about their incompetence and screamed abuse in their faces.
The nine-day trial at Portsmouth Naval Base was told that he would start shouting at his team from the moment he woke and was still in his dressing gown. One officer told how he used to vomit before going on watch because he was so afraid of Captain Tarrant’s rages.
The heavily built and bearded commander told how he learnt his forceful “leadership style” as a young sailor in the Falklands war. The experience of serving on a destroyer in the South Atlantic had taught him that the margin of error between operational success and disaster was “pretty small”.
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Captain Tarrant, who joined the Navy in September 1979, also complained that the submarine was “riddled with defects” as it was about to set off on a classified mission. He was not allowed to reveal publicly his orders for the Trafalgar class nuclear-powered “hunter-killer” submarine, between February 1998 and July 1999.
After his acquittal on the five charges, he held hands with his wife, Tracy, as he read out a statement. He began by saying: “I wrote this myself, it’s what I believe. The Royal Navy and the Armed Forces have a zero tolerance of bullying and harassment, and it is quite right that these allegations should have been thoroughly investigated; and they have.”
The case had taken six years to reach a court martial because no member of the submarine’s crew mentioned the alleged tirades until 2003.
The prosecution had been unable to produce a taped log of all conversations that had taken place in the operational control room, where many of the alleged verbal tirades had occurred, because none of the tapes could be found.
In his summing-up of the evidence, Judge Jack Bayliss, Judge Advocate, advised the panel of five Royal Navy jury members to take into account the pressure the commanding officer was under to get his submarine ready for its secret patrol. The judge said his task with an inexperienced crew was sensitive and involved “not a little danger”.
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One witness disclosed that he had had to order the shutdown of the nuclear reactor on HMS Talent when it was in port. When he told Captain Tarrant, who was ashore, what he had done he claimed that he was verbally harangued because it meant that the start of the secret operation would be delayed.
In his evidence Captain Tarrant disclosed that HMS Talent had been sent off for an operation in January 1999.
It was at this time that Nato was preparing bombing raids on Serb targets in Kosovo and Belgrade to stop Serb troops carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of the Albanian population.
The only member of the public allowed to listen to the most secret evidence was Captain Tarrant’s wife. The intelligence officer told the judge that Mrs Tarrant, 44, was already well acquainted with her husband’s submarine work.