PIONEER DIVER
61 divErAbove: Lauren Smith about
to go diving off Peterhead
with Chris Rickard, a fellow
Amphibian. Lauren’s dog
stayed onshore!Left: Amphibian Alf
Goodwin about to submerge
with the dustbin helmet at
Souterhead, helped by Les
McCoss and Laurie Donald,
in 1946...Below left: ... McCoss
tests his dustbin telephone
system with Ken Frazer,
while Donald checks the
loudspeaker.Right: Amphibian Club
members kit up for a dive at
Stonehaven in 1949...Far right:...Ivor Howitt
returns from a dive off the
breakwater.I
AM ABOUT TOdive in the North Sea,
with my new drysuit and the rest of
my kit, fresh from being serviced. As
I drop below the surface, I reflect on the
remarkable ease of scuba-diving today,
compared to my friend’s experiences
a mere 74 years previously.
That friend, Ivor Howitt, is I believe a
true pioneer of recreational scuba-diving
both in the UK and Australia. Yet until the
late 1990s his story had remained largely
untold. And what a story it is...Scotland 1945
A teenager at the end of the war, enthused
by William Beebe’s descriptions of the
underwater world, Ivor was determined to
go diving. Scottish temperatures, lack of
equipment and training did little to put
him off. Instead he improvised with the
materials to hand.
He modified a Civil Defence gas-mask,
and connected it to a motor car foot-
pump with a length of rubber tubing.
Then, together with his friend Hamish
Gavin, he went to a farm dam on a wintry
day with frost on the ground.
They stripped off and took it in turns
to submerge in the icy water, teeth
chattering and almost paralysed with
cold, to complete their inaugural dives.Following this experience there
followed plenty more inventions and
adventures. A 1920s-style diving helmet
was made from a sheet of copper wrapped
around a dustbin lid, with 60lb of lead
weights bolted in place.
Air was supplied via a garden hose
connected to two pairs of car-tyre foot
pumps. All of this gear was transported
on push-bikes to Souterhead, a sheltered
inlet a few miles south of Aberdeen,
which became a favoured spot to test
out equipment.
A war-surplus field telephone was fitted
inside the helmet by another friend, Les
McCoss, connected to a loudspeaker on
land so that the diver could be heard.Diving was fast becoming a core
pursuit of Ivor and his friends, alongside
their other activities, which included
mountaineering (they were all members
of the Cairngorm Club), rock-climbing
on sea-cliffs, skiing and canoeing.
And so, in 1948, they formed a small
club known as The Amphibians. It would
be the first amateur UK club to include
both freshwater and marine diving – the
first freshwater-diving club, the Cave
Diving Group, had been formed in the1930s by Graham
Balcombe and Jack
Sheppard.
Ivor revelled in the task
of designing and making
all the club’s underwater
breathing equipment.
In 1949 he wrote to the
Dunlop Rubber Company,
enquiring about the
production of fins, ☛divErNEt.comScotland 2019