NEWS & PR

Jubilee Clips Tour of Duty

05 October 2005

As a one-time naval man, Commander Lumley Robinson, the inventor of the original Jubilee® worm drive hose clip, would have been justifiably proud of the staying power of his product in the service of the Royal Navy; in particular its application on the last of the Second World War destroyers, the 60 year old HMS Cavalier.

Now a popular exhibit at The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, HMS Cavalier was originally ordered in 1942 and launched in 1944, after which she was known to have been conducting trials off the Isle of Wight on D-Day.

Now lovingly cared for at Chatham by a dedicated team of volunteers, whose members include a former serving sailor on the ship and various other ex-naval personnel, HMS Cavalier is slowly being restored to her former glory. Part of this on-going work has recently included some renovation of the plumbing in the Ratings washroom, where a severely blocked main drainpipe was causing problems. Existing Jubilee® Clips, which the volunteers suspect were the original items still in place since the vessel’s completion in 1944, were damaged during removal of the pipes and finally had to be replaced. There are 10 basins in the washroom and each required two Jubilee® Clips to be used on the upright drainpipe.

L Robinson & Co (Gillingham) Ltd, near neighbours to the dockyard and manufacturers of the Jubilee® Clip, donated two Handy Pack Dispensers, each containing an assortment of mobile stock packs, to ensure that there was sufficient variation of choice to cover all areas of the ship. There are 75 different compartments throughout the vessel where Jubilee ® Clips were likely to have been used from the outset: there were after all no other worm drive hose clips on the market in 1944. Areas of additional probable application included the engine room, hydraulics apparatus on the guns, the boiler room, the cold room, magazine and much more. One particular area of usage was for damage control following an engagement. Shell, flak and other explosion damage could, as can be appreciated, cause considerable damage to the many metres of pipe work throughout the ship. When this occurred sailors turned to the DC Bag (Damage Control), which included all the necessary tools and a good selection of Jubilee® Clips to help them quickly carry out repairs.

Every Jubilee® Clip serving on HMS Cavalier was regularly put to the test. Such trial by ordeal could include extreme changes of temperature, long periods of vibration and haring speeds of over 31 knots – HMS Cavalier has been referred to as the sole survivor of the ‘Greyhounds of the Sea’.

In 1971, at the ripe old age of 27 and one year prior to being laid up, she accepted a challenge to race the then modern frigate, HMS Rapid over a 64 mile course that lasted for two hours on the Firth of Forth with both ships running at full power: the Cavalier won the race by 30 yards. In her time, HMS Cavalier has seen wartime action in operations off Norway in 1945 as well as Arctic convoy duty. The ship has also served at Christmas Island for the atomic bomb tests, the Persian Gulf, Australia, the conflict during the formation of Malaysia, Gibraltar and many other areas around the world.

The introduction of the revolutionary Jubilee® Clip must have been much appreciated by the Admiralty and many others back in 1921. Prior to their invention for instance, warships depended on wire whipping and split pins to seal pipe joints. As one of the dockyard volunteers joked “Since those days, I wouldn’t be surprised if many ships are now virtually held together by masking tape and Jubilee® Clips!” The appropriately named Mike Fleet, one of the other volunteers working on the HMS Cavalier and himself a destroyer veteran, remarked that, “We of course enjoy our work here and find the Jubilee® Clips to be flexible and adaptable in many locations on the ship. The old clips have certainly stood the test of time and we have no doubt that the recent replacements will last at least another 60 years.”