(Captain) Trevor HamptonAFC (28 November 1912 – 21 February 2002) was one of the United Kingdom's first scuba divers and helped to develop sport diving in the UK.
In 1948 his first book, "Alone at Sea". about his solo sail to Spain, was privately printed.
British Underwater Centre
In 1953 a young man asked him for aqualung training, and he took £5 for a 3-day training course. This proved to be his next career and as a result, he started the British Underwater Centre, where he trained many people and some of the first members of the British Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC) in aqualung, oxygen rebreather diving and standard diving dress diving. Over the years he trained around 3000 people.
For much of the time, up until the 1960s he used a Siebe GormanMark IV Amphibian oxygen rebreather to train divers with in oxygen diving, until in the 1960s he sold it to one of his diving trainees. After that he bought a Cressi-Sub sport diving oxygen rebreather from Italy, but after a year its breathing bag perished, and he replaced it with a Siebe Gorman British naval type breathing bag, which was still as good at 2005. After he sold that to a diving trainee, he used emergency escape rebreathers which he had adapted to give a longer dive duration.
He did various commercial diving jobs down the years, including on building the Avon Dam and the Brixham Breakwater.
At the Brixham Breakwater job he had a narrow escape: He found a small hollow under the breakwater and moved some bags of cement in to fill it. When he tried to swim out again he found that bags of cement carelessly slung from above had blocked his exit. He had to fight his way out with air running low.
He described an incident when a team of trained British naval divers searched for an object lost underwater and did not find it; they then let Captain Hampton have a look, and at once he found it directly under the naval divers' boat, at the center (which had been a blind spot) of their circular search pattern.
He kept yachts and boats in Warfleet Creek, Dartmouth. He assumed the title Captain, although he had not been in the Royal Navy or a large commercial ship, because of his many long voyages in small and middle-sized boats.
Oscar Gugen and Peter Small decided to form Britain's first diving club, and were trained to scuba dive by Travor Hampton. Afterwards in 1953 they founded the British Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC). Oscar made only two dives, but Peter and his girlfriend Sylvia Gregg successfully completed the course.
Later, disagreement developed between Trevor Hampton and the BSAC because:-
Trevor Hampton had also encouraged Harold Penman, who was starting up the rival Underwater Explorers Club.
The BSAC's "always dive with a buddy" policy clashed with Trevor Hampton's policy of training divers to dive alone confidently, always with a competent seaman in attendance on the surface .
