from World War Two and sinks to the seabed after several compartments are flooded due to the explosion, killing the majority of the submarine's crew. Of the surviving crew in a watertight compartment, eight are able to escape through an escape hatch using the only available breathing apparatus. The remaining crew wait for the submarine to be salvaged. This is eventually abandoned due to bad weather and they perish. The cause of the loss of Thetis - flooding due to both inner and outer torpedo hatches being open to the sea - was used in the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra, where the character played by Patrick McGoohan describes a method of sabotaging a submarine by blocking the tube test cocks, fooling a torpedoman into believing the outer hatch was closed. How it got open in the movie without displaying on the appropriate indicator boards was avoided. Alexander Fullerton's 1994 novel Not Thinking of Death centres around a fictionalised account of the sinking (with Thetis renamed to Trumpeter). The loss of the Thetis was the inspiration for part of the "Railway station" episode (episode 2) of British science fiction television series Sapphire & Steel. In 1997, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a radio play about the Thetis disaster. The play was called Close Enough To Touch and was written by Liverpool writer Fred Lawless. The play was also broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside and the BBC World Service. In 1999, a play entitled HMS Thetis by Mark Gee in association with David Roberts, was performed at the Liverpool Bluecoat Chambers and at Birkenhead's Pacific Road Theatre. The play starred John McArdle and also the newly employed First Year Apprentices from Cammell Laird Shipyard (Paul Gillies, Dave Gill, Alan Lane, Chris Motley, Mike Jebb, Steve Taylor, Ollie Dodson, Stuie Dicken, Mark Poland, Ben McDonald, Tony Cummins, Barry Hayes, Chris Hall, Martin King, Graham Crilly, Billy Coburn, Matty Brassey). In 2000 the documentary Death in the Bay, produced by BBC Northwest, was broadcast in the UK. It covered the loss of the vessel and the subsequent enquiry, together with interviews with relatives of two of the men lost in the tragedy and the son of a survivor, Leading Stoker Arnold. Notes References Further reading External links Report on the events surrounding the Thetis disaster of 2 June 1939 held at the National Archives of the United Kingdom HMS Thetis launch British Pathe newsreel