YOU’VE seen them in the action movies, lurking hundreds of feet beneath the sea.

But I bet you don’t know half as much about submarines as Robin Webb does.

Through his involvement with the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Mr Webb has helped revive two.

The First project was to preserve the first operational submarine in the Royal Navy – the HMS Holland 1.

Launched as an experiment in 1901, by 1913 it was declared obsolete and was decommissioned.

The vessel was being towed to a scrapyard in Wales when disaster struck – a storm flared and she sank.

The rotting submarine lay on the seabed until the 1980s, when the museum decided it was time for her to resurface.

Mr Webb explained: “They said ‘let’s go and look for it’ and found her on the seabed in 1981. They had a big fundraising exercise to raise it, but it was terribly corroded. They tried putting her on exhibition, but she just corroded and corroded.”

The museum sprayed the submarine with chemicals to try to remove harmful salts and put her on display in a tank, with visitors only able to see her though small portholes.

Mr Webb, who by then had been made a fellow of the Society for Underwater Technology, was called in to project manage the scheme to preserve her.

He had previously worked for BP, where he spent 15 years in offshore engineering.

His role was to advise the museum on how it would create a protective building around the vessel.

It would be specially air conditioned, so the steel would not corrode and visitors would be able to climb inside to see its remains.

The four-year project, which was completed in 2001, cost nearly £800,000.

During this time, Mr Webb was also made a trustee of the museum, and today continues to advise it on projects.

After this, the museum, based in Gosport, Hampshire, decided it wanted to create a visitor building, known as the Fieldhouse.

This £2.4million, four-year project transformed a rundown part of HMS Dolphin into a nuclear submarine-shaped building, jutting out into Portsmouth harbour.

Mr Webb, who has run Colchester company RWCL since 1989, oversaw its completion and it opened in 2005.

Most recently he has been involved in a project at the museum to restore the HMS Alliance, the only Second World War British submarine preserved for posterity.

The submarine was decommissioned in the late 1970s and is raised above water on two concrete cradles, next to the museum quayside, but is badly corroding.

Pigeons nesting in the submarine have added to the damage.

Costing £6.1million, with some funding from Heritage Lottery, the project will see the creation of a permanent base for the submarine to stand on, and it will be restored inside and out.

Prince William is the Royal Patron of the Alliance Appeal and the project is expected to be completed by early 2013. As a civil engineer, Mr Webb has worked on major projects all over the world.

From designing the arches of the Sydney 2000 Olympic stadium to the central hub of Kuala Lumpa International Airport, Mr Webb’s Colchester company has been there.

Two memories sit with Mr Webb, which probably influenced his decision to carve out a career in engineering. As a young man he was taken on a tour of a factory by his uncle, which he described as “hell on earth”.

There was no way he was going to end up working in one of those places, he vowed.

The other is a childhood recollection of watching his father, who was an engineer after the First World War, working on his projects. These included repairing damaged sea walls.

Asked what he loved about his lengthy career, Mr Webb, whose company, based in Gilberd Road, has 30 consultants, said: “What I love about civil engineering is it is so varied.

“Whether it is a pipeline or platform in the sea – all these physical problems – it is a matter of having people who have got a brain and can think laterally.”