PROJECT BARNEY

The name of PO Maurice Charles Barnes off HMS/m Seal.  He survived the sinking of the Seal but did not like the POW camp in Poland. He walked out and set off for home.  He was shot and wounded on the border of the partitioned Poland, between Russia and Germany, never to be seen again.  He would not give up and neither will we on sorting out the SUBMARINERS ROLL OF HONOUR.

The item on the left is an extract from this years copy of the 'All Round Look'  the yearbook of the Friends of  the Submarine Museum.

It records the launch of the 'Submarine Online Book of Remembrance'. It credits the main contributors that were instrumental in the research, preparation and publishing of this comprehensive updated record of those of our brother submariners who 'crossed the bar' in the line of duty in the service in the last over 100 years.

A major contributor was, of course, our own Mal Blenkinsopp. Well done Mal. Its good to see your name in print crediting you for all the hours of work you put into this very important project which corrects many of the errors and omissions of previous records. Project Barney has at last come to its full and final fruition.


PROJECT BARNEY The Start. By Mal Blenkinsopp 

In the Autumn 2014 meeting Roger mentioned in his address that the “Submariners Memorial” at the Arboretum in Staffordshire was again in a neglected state and that the Submariners Association was planning to spend around a 100 pound to clean and repair. I have been a couple of times to the National Memorial Arboretum (Well worth a visit if you are in the area) but could not remember a Submariners memorial. Yes there is the Victoria Cross plinth, something we are all proud of but not a proper memorial to all our lost men and boys with no grave or memorial except the impersonal concrete monolithics in the three sync ports Pompey, Guz and Chatham. The talk in 1983 in the Faslane Senior rates Mess was about a new memorial but the idea of the Arboretum was only thought about in 1988 so it must have been another grand idea that went nowhere. So where is our memorial and who looks after it, guess what it aint there. With the new technology and lots of sites to look at it did not take long even for an old Pinky to see that something was wrong or was it again a plan from the top brass to confuse the enemy of our losses as some people were in twice and many not at all. Each site seemed to have a different source for its information and its contents with no cohesion from the many well intentioned but sadly inaccurate efforts. 

Where to start, a blank sheet of paper and a pen stayed like that for quite a while as I checked the internet for ideas or clues on the best way forward while trying not to go blind when I blundered into sites I never knew existed, honest.  The Naval History site gave many clues but then proved to be very inaccurate, Barrow submariner site ran by Ian had a very complicated algorithm but lots of information that was eventually found to come from Naval History. The Kent Submariners had many pictures and pages of information but how accurate was becoming a priority with at that time no reference as to the authenticity of the details. Then one evening a Eureka moment when I stumbled into the National Archives site based in Kew London that holds all the “Dead and Wounded Registers” as well as the original copies of “Service Documents” that are pure gold when sorting out names and official numbers.

Initially I logged onto the site every time I needed to check subs or names but after many nights when I found it impossible to log in to the Kew site a very helpful tech at National Archives mentioned it might be possible to download the whole set of files and be self-contained. Fez had always said we will need a data-base for the project to succeed and this was the start, it at the moment stands at 40Gb and seems to grow every day .   

The first few months were found to be sorting out the wheat from the chaff as every detail on names and dates had to be verified from original source documents but slowly the project took shape with sources now verified the initial priority was to find out which boats had disappeared, where and more importantly the correct dates. This is still changing as even as I write this there are some intrepid researchers searching for our lost boats. In the Baltic, Mediterranean and Northern Australia amateur teams are trying to pinpoint them then explain the losses. AE1 is still a major mystery even though millions of pounds and thousands of hours over three expeditions have found the square root of zero over her disappearance but people will keep on trying and one day we will have to change conjecture to facts. In the end it was found that to be 100% sure a list of every boat built was accrued then find out what had happened to it. Again and again this book has proved invaluable as the E Types had a penchant for disappearing then turning up again, boats that had been recovered then renamed then lost again.

Looking back over my notes it was certainly the blind leading the blind with the inevitable dead ends and disappointments part of the game.

 After the list of boats was completed the hard task of deciding which boat should be on the ROH and what information of the people lost be collected, collated, checked and be written down. As this was not a decision I wanted to make on my own “Project Barney” was born as this gave the every-day, down to earth experienced Submariner a chance to say what they wanted to see on a memorial. I had looked at many memorials over the years and months and they seemed to lack something or felt really cold and impersonal with Initials, surname and rank. No memorial is a bad memorial but surely our lost brethren deserved more and with to-days modern communications and possibility to research to far greater depths than ever before it is possible. The feedback from “Project Barney” has been amazing and many good ideas and thoughts are now a reality as shown on interim books that are available but more on that later. 

ROH 2020