Return of the Amphibians - Divernet

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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 the 1930s 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, because it had made naval frogmen’s fins during the war.

It did reply, but said that it “could see no commercial market for swim fins in peacetime”. The response, as Ivor noted, reflected the virtual non-existence of sport-diving in the UK at that time.

The Amphibians’ exploits soon brought the club to wider attention, and members were invited out to see a naval team charged with identifying the wreck of a 16th-century Spanish galleon, the Florencia, which had been sunk off Tobermory on the island of Mull.

1952 – Bill Young, Ivor Howitt (centre) and Ted Eldred at Apollo Bay, Victoria in Australia. Howitt has his Siebe-Gorman Air-Scuba set-up, possibly the first of its kind to be brought to Australia.

1952 – Bill Young, Ivor Howitt (centre) and Ted Eldred at Apollo Bay, Victoria in Australia. Howitt has his Siebe-Gorman Air-Scuba set-up, possibly the first of its kind to be brought to Australia.

In the course of this visit Ivor commented on the luxury of diving in a nice warm suit. This was noted by a junior officer, and not long afterwards the Amphibians Club became the proud owner of two old rubber frogsuits.

These, along with a couple of standard copper diving helmets condemned by the local harbour board as unsafe for further use, were paired with swim-fins (from a demobbed naval frogman). War-surplus kits designed for submarine escape were put to use as economisers, with air supplied from their home-built pumps.

It was with this set-up that the club-members began diving in a local swimming pool, and were able to begin experimenting with underwater photography and homemade housings.

A giant leap forward came in 1949, when Ivor purchased the British version of the Cousteau-Gagnan aqualung. This was the Siebe-Gorman compressed-air breathing apparatus (CABA) with cylinders mounted on a back frame, with reducing and demand valves and a pressure gauge. Corrugated air hoses connected to a simple mouthpiece.

Getting the cylinders filled was not straightforward, Home Office regulations wouldn’t allow them to be filled with air for civilian use, so instead the British Oxygen Company supplied pure oxygen, which meant that dives were limited to less than 10m.



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