(Captain) Trevor Hampton AFC (1912? - 2002) was one of the United Kingdom's first scuba divers and helped to develop sport diving in the UK.
Early years
Trevor Hampton was born in Birmingham in 1912 or 1913. He was an apprentice at the Austin Motor Company and raced motorcycles on the Isle of Man. He was an avid fan of boating and sailing and at the age of 23 bought a 27-foot yacht but had to give it up because his wife was chronically seasick. He joined the RAF before the Second World War becoming a pilot on a Wellington bomber. He later became a senior test pilot, raised to the rank of Flight Lieutenant and received the Air Force Cross. While in the RAF at Lossiemouth in Scotland he started diving, making a crude open-circuit scuba set from a gas mask and ex-RAF aircrew oxygen cylinders.
Post war
After WWII he bought a boat took up sailing again but had to give it up because of a knee injury. He set up business as a marine surveyor and yacht broker at Warfleet Creek in Dartmouth, Devon in England. He read Jacques Cousteau's book "The Silent World" and bought an Cousteau-type aqualung from Siebe Gorman, which had just started making them. He then took several courses on diving.
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 Gorman Mark IV Amphibian oxygen rebreather to train divers with in oxygen diving, until in the 1960's 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 is still as good as new now (as of 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 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 (and therefore the blind spot) of their circular search pattern.
He kept yachts and boats in Warfleet Creek. 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.
He sold his diving school in 1976, at the age of 63, but the buyers did not have his success and it closed down.
Several times he retired and then drifted back into working.
He died aged 89 on 21 February 2002 evening by bursting of a triple aneurysm, despite emergency surgery in Torbay Hospital.
External links
- Obituary at Divernet including photographs.