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Lieutenant George Wookey World Naval Ships Forums Archive


Lieutenant George Wookey


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[B]Lieutenant George Wookey[/B] Published in The Daily Telegraph 06 Apr 2007 Lieutenant George Wookey, who has died aged 84, established a world record when, half a century ago, he went deeper than any helmeted diver in a flexible suit; later he brought up whisky from the ship sunk off the island of Benbecula which was the subject of the novel and the film Whisky Galore. On October 12 1956 Wookey was lowered 600 ft from a diving tender into a Norwegian fjord as part of a trial to discover the depth at which a diver could assist stranded submarine crews. While he went down with a heavy steel bench, representing the hull of a stricken submarine, a decompression chamber containing a diving assistant was suspended at 220 ft to await his return. Wookey recalled how the light faded from bright, crystal clear green to a beautiful blackness, illuminated only by bioluminescent plankton surging upwards past him. Once on the floor of the fjord, he had to unshackle two wires from the bench with his fingers, which were so cold that they felt like sausages, then signal to the surface that he had completed the job. But after performing his task with relative ease he found, as he prepared to be pulled up, that part of his air-line had become trapped under the bench. For several minutes he had to clamber underneath to untangle it as those on the surface made matters worse by trying to take up the slack. Scientists in Reclaim, which was anchored on the surface above him, had reckoned on Wookey staying at 600 ft for exactly three minutes, and as he began his ascent he was struck by the thought that the most intense cold he had ever felt might prove too much for him. He had his first decompression stop at 400 ft for about five minutes, then made his way up to the decompression chamber in 20 ft stages. Once his head was inside the chamber, the waiting Able Seaman Geordie Clucas took off Wookey's helmet and helped him in. Taking turns to sit or stand in the restricted space, they edged their way up in 10 ft stages until they reached the surface, where Wookey knocked the handles off the decompression chamber and the pressure dropped to normal, causing the distinctive pain of the bends in his arms and back. Clucas scrambled past him to shout "Haul him out quickly!", so that he was yanked into a recovery chamber. Slowly, as he listened to the roar of compressed air rushing in and felt the mounting pressure, the pain began to subside. Five hours later Wookey crawled out of the recompression chamber and into a hot bath in Reclaim's sickbay. He had made his dive in standard diving equipment, with scientists on the surface monitoring every detail. The feat demonstrated that it was possible to operate at depths which only a few years earlier had been thought impossible. Wookey, then a senior commissioned boatswain, was appointed MBE. When he was invited back to Norway by the Norwegian navy on the 50th anniversary of his achievement last year, the Norwegians sent a ship and a company of sailors to honour him by unveiling a plaque on a rock near to where he had made his dive. The Royal Navy, which once thought that leadership in all maritime areas was its prerogative, was too distracted to attend the ceremony. George Alan Morley Wookey was born on October 31 1922, and joined the Navy as a boy seaman at 16 to serve in submarines in the North Atlantic and the Channel before qualifying as a diver in 1944. Four years later he was commissioned and sent to the diving school in the depot ship HMS Defiance to train X-craft crews in submarine escape and boom-defence net penetration. In 1951 he was part of a team which searched for the wreck of the submarine Affray, the last British submarine lost at sea. After a search lasting 59 days and the investigation of more than 150 wrecks, Wookey dived on Affray; and during the next three months he helped to pioneer the use of an underwater camera with Commander "Buster" Crabbe, who was later to disappear near a Soviet warship in Portsmouth Harbour. In 1957 the Navy abandoned deep diving as being too dangerous, and Wookey was sent to the fleet diving school on Malta. During his two years there he investigated an explosion in the inverted wreck of the submarine P-36, which had been lost in the Second World War, and accepted an invitation from the Italian marine archaeologist, the Marchese Piero Gargallo, to investigate giant marble pillars on the seabed off Marzamemi, Sicily. Wookey returned home to qualify in mine and bomb disposal work, and was seconded to the Army on Benbecula, where his job was to recover seven-ton Corporal missiles from the seabed after they had been test-fired towards St Kilda. On his Sundays off he searched for the wreck of the steamship Politician, whose sinking in 1941 with 50,000 cases of whisky aboard was the subject of Compton Mackenzie's novel and the 1949 film Whisky Galore. He brought up a dozen or so bottles on several occasions - though it was claimed (for the benefit of Customs and Excise) that they were heavily contaminated with sea water and oil. Years later Wookey could still draw a map showing where the best whisky could be found buried in the sand. In 1961 he undertook a plainclothes mission with minimum diving equipment to search for a sunken Russian spy ship off the Isle of Yell, in the Shetland Islands. To his surprise, on his first dive down to 90 ft, he found the wreck in clear water, shrouded by torn rigging and nets. He recovered equipment for expert analysis. Wookey was next loaned to the Royal New Zealand Navy to command the deep diving vessel Manawanui, in which he undertook oyster- and mussel-bed surveys for the fisheries department. Then, while diving officer on the staff of the commander-in-chief, Malta, Wookey was loaned to the Jordanian army, travelling in plain clothes by car and camel to Akaba to train men in diving and mine clearance. Frustrated by the lack of promotion prospects, Wookey then resigned and spent a few years on Malta restoring a motor fishing vessel. In 1966 he set sail for the antipodes. Despairing of co-operation from the Suez Canal authorities, he proceeded south close under the stern of a tanker. At Port Sudan, where he was appalled by the poverty of the locals, he recalled paying one shilling a gallon for diesel. On Perim Island, in the Red Sea, his boat was commandeered by the police, and in the Indonesian archipelago he narrowly escaped being boarded by pirates. Wookey intended to return to New Zealand, but his odyssey ended in Fremantle, Western Australia, where he set up a diving business. He was briefly master of a Kuwaiti livestock carrier, and his diving contracts included surveying for offshore oil drilling. In 1984 he retired and built a mud brick home on 162 acres at Witchcliffe, Western Australia, and took up farming. Eleven years later he married Patrice Fitzgerald in a ceremony at Gretna Green, in Scotland; then, on discovering that this was not legal, married her again and settled at Quindalup, on the Geograph Bay in Western Australia; his wife survives him, as do a son and two daughters from earlier marriages. George Wookey died on March 21.


Hi Dave.What a remarkable man he was.His expertise in diving must have been second to none.I have never heard of anyone who added more diving knowledge to the World than this man.Thanks for posting his obituary.Many Regards Steve





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