Soviet fleet on the Thames (Part 1)

What do Russian hydrofoils, the Thames, the CIA, a secret city in the Soviet Union, and the Caspian Sea Monster have in common? Two mavericks on either side of the Iron Curtain, who made it come together. In London.

We start in the closed Soviet city of Gorky (later renamed Nizhny-Novgorod), where the Central Hydrofoil Design Bureau was established. Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev was a gifted Soviet naval engineer who liked to travel fast. A sailor and a dashing young man, he was intrigued by hydrofoils, a type of surface effect ship which can travel twice as fast as a regular boat by being lifted out of the water by submerged wings. Alexeyev designed several hydrofoils for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet during the Second World War, but no combat hydrofoils were completed. Alexeyev was the founder of the Design Bureau, and began work on a civilian hydrofoil in the late 1940s to carry passengers up and down the country’s thousand kilometre long rivers, as roads were limited and the railways were still in poor condition after the Great Patriotic War.

His first design was called the Raketa (Russian for Rocket), and was launched in 1957. She easily attained 60 km/hr – three times the speed of a similar displacement ship. It won Alexeyev the 1957 Award of Lenin from Soviet Premier Khrushchev. The class went on to become a great success, with almost 400 constructed in Gorky over 20 years. Whilst most were operated in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), they were also exported to 13 European countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Many Raketas were still in service in the early 2000s.

Alexeyev, founder, Chief Designer, and head of the Soviet Hydrofoil Design Bureau, also designed 11 other classes of passenger hydrofoils of various sizes, giving them space age names like Kometa (Comet), Meteor, and Sputnik. The Soviet Union was the world’s largest manufacturer of hydrofoils, building over three thousand, with some ocean going. These operated 45 hydrofoil services in Russia, carrying three million passengers per year. They were streamlined and elegant, resembling the Soviet aerospace designs of the 1950’s and 1960’s. One hydrofoil with jet engines actually reached over 100kph, and may have inspired Alexeyev’s later design leap (more of in Part 2).

Western parallel

The west was also designing hydrofoils, but not in the same numbers nor with the same success. Notably, a number of such futuristic and innovative ships worked the Thames from the early 1960s to the early 1980’s, plying the river for local and even Continental passenger trade.

But the first surface effect ship to regularly carry passengers on the Thames was a hovercraft.

My hovercraft is full of eels – 1963

Briton Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft in 1956, and only seven years later, a regular hovercraft service started along the Thames linking Westminster with Tower Bridge and Greenwich.

The Scottish Denny Hovercraft D2 Hoverbus, which could carry 70 passengers at speeds of up to 21 knots, was put into service in July 1963 by Thames Launches. Three trips per hour were run daily until October. Bizarrely, the Hoverbus actually required a permit to ‘fly’ along the Thames, as it was officially categorised as an aircraft under the Air Navigation Order 1960. The first day of the Hoverbus service ‘flew’ 500 customers. The regular fare was £1 for adults and 10 shillings for children, considerably higher than the Tube fares of 3d, 6d, 9d, and 1s (depending on distance).

The key advantage of the hovercraft over conventional boats was that they mostly floated just above the water, so could attain much higher speeds, yet leave a much smaller wake, the latter being a problem which limits boat speeds on the Thames to this day. Nonetheless New Scientist magazine described the Hoverbus as “perhaps too noisy, too enclosed and its spray visually too obstructing”.

Unfortunately, whilst technologically successful, there was no fare or schedule integration with the Underground, rail or buses, so the service was left to sink or float on its own merits. A problem that somewhat persists to the present day.

These issues rendered the Hoverbus service commercially unsuccessful, and builder Denny Hovercraft went bankrupt the following year. The Hoverbus was eventually sold in 1970 to begin a better life in the Caribbean.

For Latin enthusiasts, a hovercraft full of eels is a condition known as mea navis aëricumben sanguillis abundat.

Soviets on the Thames – 1968

This British Pathé film of 21 January 1968 shows the new Soviet Volga class hydrofoil Hydro Sky 1 at Westminster Pier, showing off by flying down the Thames. The Russians were keen on selling their hydrofoils to the West. It resulted in at least one sale, but more importantly it planted the seeds of the idea that other London companies took up.

Enter Herbert Snowball

Herbert Snowball owned The Clarendon Hotel and nightclub in Shanklin, Isle of Wight in the late 1960s. He was also one of the sponsors for the Isle of Wight pop festivals in the 60’s and 70’s, and hosted many of the artists at the hotel during the festival.

After reading a small advert in a newspaper looking for an agent to become a distributor of Soviet hydrofoils in the UK and the West. Snowball was intrigued by the possibilities. He may have also read about the Hydro Sky 1 demonstration run on the Thames. In any case, Snowball contacted SudoImport, the Soviet export company, and took a series of flights to Moscow to evaluate the hydrofoils personally and to negotiate the conditions. It is not known if Snowball met his Soviet innovator counterpart Rostislav Alexeyev in Moscow – not likely as Alexeyev was now designing Top Secret vessels for the Soviet military.

Not only did Snowball acquire exclusive rights to the Soviet Hydrofoil Design Bureau’s hydrofoil craft to the UK, the Commonwealth, Scandinavia, Western Europe, and the Far East, he also purchased Hydro Sky 1, the 5 seater Volga class hydrofoil for his own use at Shanklin. So besotted was he with the craft that he entered it in the Cowes to Torquay powerboat race, and towed it on its trailer to participate in the annual Shanklin Carnival Parade. Later, he also entered it into the Earls Court Boat Show in the 1970’s.

Before moving to the Isle of Wight in 1967, he ran the air freight and passenger business at Gatwick, which provided the whole of the catering at Gatwick in the early 1960’s. He then incorporated Airavia Ltd in 1968 to import Soviet built hydrofoils to the West. It was Airavia that organised the Kometa 120 seat hydrofoil demonstration up the Thames to central London in August 1968.

Greater London Council (GLC) enters the hovercraft game – 1970

So, whilst other countries developed and built hydrofoils for civil and military purposes off and on over the twentieth century, it took until the 1970s for a regularly scheduled hydrofoil service to start operation in the Capital.

The GLC cherished the idea of using the Thames as a passenger highway, as it had been for centuries, as a solution to increasing road traffic. Perhaps it saw river services as quicker to implement at lower cost than funding construction of Stages 2 and 3 of the Fleet Tube.

In 1970 the GLC commissioned Hover Projects Ltd. ‎to conduct a feasibility study of a Thames fast ferry service. This report evaluated available hovercraft and hydrofoils and recommended a pilot service of five Soviet Raketa high speed hydrofoils. Fans of Parliamentary Acts will be interested to note that the government added legislation for hydrofoils in 1968’s Hovercraft Act.

Thames Arrow Express Hydrofoils – 1972

However, it was the Italians that provided the first high speed passenger craft to work the Thames. Thames Arrow Express established a commuter ferry service between Tower Pier and Greenwich in May 1972 using two Italian built Rodriguez hydrofoils, the Freccia di Reggio and Freccia del Vesuvio (Freccia being Italian for arrow). There were no intermediate stops, so as to provide competitive journey times thanks to their 32 knot maximum speed.

Here is a video clip of the Thames Arrow Express leaving Tower Pier. The service was not commercially successful however and was shut down on December 8, 1972 after less than six months, and the vessels leased to Red Funnel in the Solent in late 1973.

London Hoverservices ferries – 1973

‎Hovermarine ‎Transport Ltd of Southampton started the next Thames surface effect ship commuter service, using HM.2 65 seat hovercraft, which promised low wash and great fuel economy. This design was a slightly different ‘sidewall’ hovercraft, with a side hull solid wall that cut into the water, housing the propellers, and only the front of the boat having the traditional hovercraft rubber skirt, whilst the sidewall design minimised spray, wake, and noise.

Operator London Hoverservices ‎Ltd commenced a commuter and tourist service with two hovercraft between Greenwich, Tower Pier and Westminster on 1 July 1973. Unusually, this company excited interest from both the GLC and the Department of the Environment (DoE), in the form of capital grants totalling £100,000 to help get the service off the ground. One of the requirements of the DoE grant, however, was that commuter journeys were fixed at 15p between Greenwich and Tower Pier, and 20p to Westminster to match the equivalent British Rail commuter fares. Fares for midday tourist journeys were uncapped.

After the summer tourist season however, the company started to have financial difficulties, exacerbated by inflationary labour, fuel, and parts cost increases. The company approached the DoE and the GLC for additional assistance, with the latter providing a further grant to get the service through the winter.

To fortify the service, in March 1974 the GLC funded the down payment on the purchase of a third HM.2 hovercraft, which was delivered two months later, as a spare to achieve 99 per cent service reliability.

However, the DoE low fares requirement meant that the operator made little revenue from commuters. So they were dependent on tourists to try to make up the operating and capital deficit. GLC statistics noted ‎that the HM.2s transported 20 per cent of the visitors taking the River to Greenwich, and 250,000 passengers overall in their 15 months of service.

However the amount of jetsam and flotsam on the Thames befouled operations, which affected reliability and ultimately commuter confidence. Unfortunately, like their trans-Channel cousins, the HM.2 hovercraft were quite loud, which also suppressed ridership. The GLC pulled the plug on the service in late October 1974, despite the company’s projections which estimated that the increased marketing ‎and tour operator bookings would put them into a profitable position by 1977.

Given the relatively low non-summer tourist ‎trade that even the RiverBus service of the 1990s experienced with a growing Canary Wharf development, it is difficult to see how London Hoverservices could have broken even. There just wasn’t a sufficiently large commuter or tourist base at that time.

Airavia – 1974

In 1972, ‎Snowball started to realise his own dream. His company Airavia organised a tour of an ocean-going Kometa hydrofoil of Western Europe; from the Black Sea to the Baltic, calling at Italian, North African, French, UK and Scandinavian ports.

In February 1974, Airavia received the first two 64 seater Raketas (Russian for Rocket) it ordered from the Soviet Union, initially intended for Thames tourist sight seeing excursions between Battersea and Greenwich.

The Raketas, first mass produced in 1957, were the Soviets’ main export hydrofoil, and carried up to 65 passengers on rivers, lakes and sheltered waterways at up to 32 knots.

British acceptance and passenger certification trials – 1974

The first two Raketas arrived by Soviet freighter, but due to visa problems their Soviet crews didn’t. To train the British crews to operate these foreign vessels, R.E. Crouch, Managing Director of Catamaran Cruises Ltd, had ‎to step in to captain the ships for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) passenger ship certification tests thus Tthe Raketas had British crews, with Russian engineers and ship advisers ashore. Sandbags were used to simulate a passenger load.

Raketas had a hull draft of 1.3m, but a foil-borne draft of only 0.5m, and left only a small wake, so were ideal river vessels. The Raketas handled well on the Thames, if a bit overpowered, rarely reaching their top 32 knot speed due to the crowded river. Although their side thrusters, which were designed for lakes and non-tidal rivers, were underpowered for the Thames, required an upgrade.

Modifications were also necessary to adjust the Raketas from long haul journeys to high intensity short trips. Plus, the incorporation of an eight-inch bell is a unique British requirement. Airavia Ltd also undertook adapting the vessels to meet other Western Europe marine licensing authorities’ requirements. The hydrofoils were then issued British Civil Passenger Operating Certificates to Speed Hydrofoils Ltd, the operating arm of Airavia Ltd. Airavia estimated that it cost £435,000 to update, fit out and trial each Raketa to receive the British Passenger Certificate.

Following the christening by Mrs Pamela Prescott in the presence of The Lord Mayor of Westminster, the Soviet Ambassador and wife, and Rt Hon John Prescott MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Trade, the inaugural flight of the HS Raketa Greenwich took place on 30 May 1974 from Tower Bridge to Westminster and back again. Airavia Ltd, doing business as Speed Hydrofoils, thus started operated the second Thames hydrofoil service from 1973-74, then under the name Umo Leasing 1975-76. (Prescott much later of course became Deputy Prime Minister and backed the Government’s Millennium celebration, which included seven Millennium piers used by the then new River Bus catamaran service.)

Three Russian designed and constructed Raketa class boats were imported by Airavia, the Raketa Greenwich, Raketa Thames, and Raketa Westminster. The goal was to operate a peak period Thames commuter service, with off peak trips for tourists. The company estimated that they could transport 2,000 passengers a day between Woolwich / Thamesmead and central London, ‎using a total of five Raketas, ‎but two were sold to other cities, including the already christened Raketa Westminster to a ferry service in Manila. Unfortunately, by the time that Airavia ‎launched its service, the GLC was no longer in a position to assist financially or otherwise, such as pushing for integration of hydrofoils with London Transport services. Inflation and weariness of backing another money pit were the likely reasons.

If you watched any episode of series 5 of the 1970’s sitcom Man About the House, you would have seen a passenger hydrofoil at 25 seconds into the title sequence.

Kometa World Trader

‎Airavia also imported a larger Soviet hydrofoil for charters. With a full load displacement of 56tons, the 35m long Kometa World Trader could carry 116 passengers in three areas. Despite her size, she could accelerate to 30 knots in only 90 seconds. Three air stabilisers ensured a comfortable ride, but she was not rated for passenger service on the open seas by the British authorities. Also due to British regulations, this vessel apparently had a Russian crew below deck, but commanded by a British Captain, mates and cabin crew.

Speed Hydrofoils operated World Trader for private charters, as well as for trips to Southend pier for a short period. She had a 1st Class section forward and an Economy Class section aft, with a drinks trolley service, bar, and an observation deck above. Airavia intended her as a demonstrator for longer distance services that would take better advantage of the hydrofoils’ high speed.

Home Dock

Airavia operated out of St Katharine Dock, which in the early 1970s had just lost its shipping raison d’être and lay somewhat derelict but being in the City, it was the ideal home dock for a River commuter service. The Tower Hotel was also right next to the Dock, so Snowball based himself in three hotel suites for himself, his office, and his family. He also invested in the development of the warehouses there, which later became The Ivory House, and eventually had a large flat within it.

The Airavia Thames Raketa service featured 3 by 2 seating, a tea and coffee bar at the back, and British crew and stewards. The two ships provided 30-minute frequencies at rush hour, with lesser service during the day according to tourist demand.

Herbert’s daughter Penny, who was a teenager at the time, recalls that the Raketas were full in the summer, and that they were not terribly noisy at low speeds.

Royalty chooses Hydrofoil service

Hovering Craft & Hydrofoil reported in 1975 (best read in a British Pathé voice) that:

“On May 20, HM The Queen and HRH Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh visited Greenwich in connection with Architectural Heritage Year. By the Queen’s request, their return journey from Greenwich to Westminster was made via the scheduled hydrofoil service on the Russian Hydrofoil Raketa Thames. The Royal couple are said to have been “delighted” with the 15 minute trip.”

Unfortunately, that was as good as it got for Herbert Snowball.

To be continued…

This article is dedicated to the memory of Herbert Snowball and Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev.

Acknowledgements to Penny Snowball for her memories of her father and her personal photos, and to Graham Feakins, LR video curator, for his assistance in finding the many video links.

Other articles in Reconnections’ river transport series:

Prequels

Soviet Fleet on the Thames (Part 1)

Capitalist hydrofoils strike back! (Part 2)

London’s First Highway series:

Part 1 – The Fall and Rise of London’s River Buses

Part 2 – The surprising success of River Buses

Part 3 – Take Me to the River – The Evolution of London’s River Passenger Transport Policy

Part 4 – Pier Pressure and Speed Limits

Part 5 – River Freight