Harry Gilmour

Like all young men of a certain age, Harry Gilmour had his own notion of how a naval battle should be. This wasn't it. Norway, 1940: Sub Lieutenant Harry Gilmour's first encounter with battleship action is not the adventure he had hoped for. Faced with a thankless task and ill equipped to handle it, Gilmour's inexperience leads to a damning allegation. His future hangs in the balance.

Spring, 1941. France has fallen but the Free French naval forces are in no mood to surrender. Royal Navy Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour is also ready for action, despite the horrors of his first taste of submarine warfare. When he is appointed as British Navy Liaison Officer aboard the Free French submarine Radegonde, he finds it anarchic, disorientating - and very French. Within its claustrophobic confines, suspicion and misunderstanding are rife.

As 1941 draws to a close, brave young men are fighting for freedom in countries across the globe. But for Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour, washed up in neutral Spain alongside 'interned belligerents' from both sides of the war, hostilities have come to a pause. Before long, his unlikely comrades must once again become his enemies, and he is back at the frontline of the battle for the Mediterranean.

It is 1942. Lt. Harry Gilmour has already made a name for himself in the Royal Navy submarine service. He has risked his life to save a fellow seaman after his first boat, HMS Pelorus is rammed and sunk in the North Sea. He’s played a leading role in HMS Trebuchet’s epic foray into a fjord in the then-neutral Soviet Union to scatter German ships secretly assembling to invade Iceland. And as number three on HMS Umbrage in the Mediterranean, he had assumed command after her skipper had been lost overboard and gone on to attack an Italian cruiser squadron.

See You at the Bar offers the sights, sounds, and smells of life aboard a fighting submarine in the second world war and how war brings into focus the true nature of humanity, both as individuals and as a collective.

The year is 1944, and Lieutenant Harry Gilmour is recovering in Beirut from an ill-fated British campaign to seize the Greek Islands. After four years at sea, he is expecting a shore job as his next appointment. Instead, a flash signal from C-in-C Mediterranean arrives: Report to Alexandria and assume command of HM Submarine Saraband. His new command has just arrived there en route to the Indian Ocean and the war against Japan. With a sullen, uncooperative crew, Harry must navigate Japanese convoy routes through the shallow, treacherous waters of the Malay Archipelago.