One of the most serious accidents suffered by Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet occurred on HMS Warspite when it was moored in Liverpool on May 2, 1976. A fire broke out in the diesel generating compartment. The vessel’s electrical systems tripped. In no time, according to an official account, the rear of the submarine filled with “vicious choking black toxic smoke which reduced visibility to almost nil”.
The vessel’s nuclear reactor was shut down at the time, but still needed cooling with pumps: the officers were confident that the emergency cooling system had kicked in but lacked the instrumentation to be absolutely certain. Indeed Terry Woods, Warspite’s commander, briefly considered “scuttling” the submarine and there was talk of evacuating parts of Liverpool.
That such extreme measures proved unnecessary was in large part due to Lieutenant Commander Tim Cannon, the submarine’s senior engineering officer, who reached the scene 40 minutes after the fire broke out. By then the Liverpool Fire Brigade had arrived in force and “the situation had become very serious indeed”.
Cannon’s first task was to evacuate the four “watchkeepers” who were still inside the submarine and whose job was to ensure the reactor’s safety. Lacking a self-contained breathing apparatus, he had to reach the men using an emergency breathing apparatus. That meant plugging the apparatus to sockets fixed at intervals along the submarine’s interior, gulping in air each time and holding his breath as he felt his way to the next socket. One of the watchkeepers was overcome by smoke and fumes, and Cannon had to drag him to safety before returning to check “by feel” that the evacuation was complete.
He then took charge of the firefighting. Fire Brigade teams had twice failed to reach the seat of the fire due to the heat and toxic fumes, so they decided to try to fill the compartment with foam. Cannon, by then equipped with a proper breathing apparatus, led that operation and remained inside the submarine until the compartment was filled. He then returned to refill it a second time. About four hours after the fire started it was finally extinguished, Cannon’s actions having “reduced the damage … by many millions of pounds”.
A modest man, he seldom talked about that day, but he and two of the Warspite’s ratings were subsequently awarded Queen’s Gallantry Medals at Buckingham Palace. “Lieutenant Commander Cannon’s personal courage and example were as much an inspiration to the ratings and civilian firemen under conditions of great stress as his thorough technical knowledge was a vital factor in securing the safety of the reactor plant and indeed of the ship,” his citation read. “The steadfastness, perseverance and great courage he displayed with disregard to his personal safety throughout the incident were of the highest order.”
Timothy Kelsey Cannon was born in Doncaster, south Yorkshire, in 1943, the older son of a naval officer, John “Pop” Cannon, who later worked for IBM. He was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, then followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the Royal Navy.
He spent a year at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, two as a midshipman in the Far East, serving on landing craft during the guerrilla war known as the Malay Emergency, and four at the Royal Naval Engineering College in Manadon, Devon. There he met his first wife, Gillian Williams, with whom he had two children: Malcolm, who became a lieutenant colonel in the army; and Harriet, who supplies equipment to the film industry. In his free time he played water polo for the Navy.
Thereafter he trained for submarine service at HMS Dolphin in Gosport, Hampshire; served on HMS Resolution, the first of the navy’s Resolution-class ballistic missile submarines; at HMS Cochrane, the shore establishment attached to the Rosyth naval base in Scotland; and in the nuclear safety section of Director General Ships in Bath. In 1975 Cannon joined HMS Warspite in Singapore. Launched in 1965 by Mary Wilson, the wife of the prime minister, Warspite was the third of Britain’s nuclear-powered submarines and the second of the Valiant Class.
In 1968 it had collided with the stern of a Soviet submarine it was shadowing in the Barents Sea and suffered serious damage to its central fin. Eight years later it suffered its second major accident with the Liverpool fire. After that, it had to be towed to the Devonport dockyard in Plymouth for two years of repairs.
Cannon spent another 14 years in the Navy, most of them in Bath, Devonport or at the Faslane naval base in Scotland, working to maintain the British nuclear submarine fleet. Having qualified as a yachtmaster offshore, one of the Royal Yachting Association’s top qualifications, he also took members of the Navy, Army and Air Force on three-week sailing expeditions in a 55ft naval yacht. In 1981 Cannon was promoted to the rank of commander, and in 1993 he retired after 32 years of naval service. Divorced in 1997, he married his second wife, Angela Bamford, a Ministry of Defence official, two years later.
He continued to work for private sector defence contractors involved in the submarine programme and in his spare time renovated a house in Brittany, held a season-ticket at Bath rugby club and became an accomplished chef and baker of bread. A lifelong engineer, Cannon loved building things including an industrial-sized catapult with which he and his grandchildren fired golf balls over his son’s home in Bath until neighbours complained that their cars were in the firing line.
He also went sailing and narrow-boating with an old naval colleague, Dave Mattick. Theirs was a friendship forged almost literally in fire. They met in 1974 when Cannon skidded off his moped on a military base, came to rest at Mattick’s feet and unleashed a string of expletives. Two years later Mattick was Cannon’s deputy when the Warspite caught fire.
Timothy Kelsey Cannon, nuclear submarine commander, was born on June 18, 1943. He died after a short illness on March 20, 2025, aged 81
