This is one of many films donated to the Yorkshire Film Archive by York photographer and filmmaker May Webb. May and her husband Frank ran a photography business in York, on Bootham, which later moved to Fossgate. As well as photography the two were also keen filmmakers, and ran the York cine club, called the Apollo Film Unit. The YFA has a collection of over fifty of their films, mainly from the 1950s and 1960s. Both May and Frank also made several films with York based designer and...

This is one of many films donated to the Yorkshire Film Archive by York photographer and filmmaker May Webb. May and her husband Frank ran a photography business in York, on Bootham, which later moved to Fossgate. As well as photography the two were also keen filmmakers, and ran the York cine club, called the Apollo Film Unit. The YFA has a collection of over fifty of their films, mainly from the 1950s and 1960s. Both May and Frank also made several films with York based designer and puppeteer Patrick Olsen. Several of these can be seen on YFA Online, including one that was made above the May’s photography shop, Love's First Flush (1967) – see the Context for this film for more on the Apollo Film Unit. They also collaborated on two marionette animations with Patrick Olsen, one of which may have been inspired by the Webb’s love of sub aqua, called Underwater Fantasy (1965), about a deep sea diver on the hunt for sunken treasure, with puppets by Patrick, camera by Frank and May directing. 

May got involved in sub aqua diving quite out of the blue when a friend of hers, Peter Madden, who had a café on Petergate, asked her to come along to a session at the local swimming baths. Inspired by this, the next day May went out and bought two sets of gear – aqualungs, snorkels and fins – for herself and her husband, who she insisted had to join her! From then on most days they would be at Bootham swimming pool practicing (often let in when it should have been closed). The first part of the film shows part of the beginner’s training, of having to put on the diving gear whilst under water, but May recollects that for quite some time she couldn’t actually swim, not needing to when underwater with fins.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this film – and of the film the Webbs made the previous year, in 1956, of the club scuba diving in St Abbs, Scotland – is that they predate the age when many people got to see film of beneath the sea. The 1950s was a pioneering decade both for wider groups of people taking up this type of adventurous sport, and for the making of wildlife films – in 1957 the BBC set up their Natural History Unit in Bristol, and David Attenborough established his Travel and Exploration Unit. The famous programmes made by Jacques-Yves Cousteau did not appear until the following decade – although in 1956 he did make a film called The Silent World with Louis Male, the title of his first book published in 1953, and Cousteau had been making non-commercial films from the 1940s.

Another member of the sub aqua club at that time, and friend of May and Frank Webb, Brian Raw, recollects for the ITV programme The Way We Were that he and others were inspired to join after seeing a film by the Swiss pioneering underwater filmmakers Hans and Lotto Hass. Brian remembers this as ‘Beneath the Red Sea’, which is probably Under the Red Sea (AKA Adventure in the Red Sea), which won first prize in the Venice 1951 film festival, although dated 1952. There are competing accounts of the titles of the films and when they were released in Britain. In fact Hans and Lotto Hass made some films for BBC TV around the same time as this film, Diving to Adventure: in the Aegean (1956) and Undersea World of Adventure (1958), part of the Traveller’s Tales series (see Wild Film History and Whirligig, References). These feature aquanauts submerged beneath the Caribbean, the Aegean and the Red Sea, and later on board the marine research vessel Aria exploring underwater life in the Indian Ocean. 

In fact the York Sub Aqua Club – which at first was known as the ‘Black Leg’ Club – took advantage of these films by having a stall in the foyer with which they attracted Brian Raw and others.  They would not have been alone, as the British Sub Aqua Club was formed in 1953 and had over 1,000 members by the time the York club joined. These clubs, along with so many others that sprung up after the Second World War – not least cine clubs – were more than just hobbies though. An important part of their attraction was the camaraderie they developed and the lively social life they had.

Both May and Brian recall how exciting it was to swim under the sea: the silence, the wonderful things they saw and the fish which often swam with them. May makes a particular point about the light as it made its way through the kelp at the surface down to the sea bed, comparing it to that in a Cathedral. Yet it could be dangerous, as Brian discovered when a large wave sent him crashing down on rocks, gashing his head – which required 13 stitches (Brian’s injury is captured in the 1956 film). The newness of the sport is reflected in the primitive nature of the equipment they had in those early days – in fact the gear they have in this film is noticeably superior to that seen a year earlier. It was only in 1943 that Cousteau helped to develop the first aqualung, and much of the gear they used was either for other purposes or home-made – such as the weights. The novelty of their hobby was reflected in the fact that they always attracted a large audience whenever they went diving, as they did often at weekends along the Yorkshire coast at Filey Brigg and Flamborough Head – where Thornwick Bay is – and, further north, the Farne Islands.

It wasn’t only the gear they wore that was partly home-made: so too was the equipment used in the filming. At that time there weren’t any underwater cameras on the market and when they did become available they were very expensive and didn’t allow for adjusting the focus. So May designed her own waterproof housing which she got made by an engineer from Scarborough, John Gretton. The biggest challenge May faced in filming underwater was the light, which limited filming much below 20 feet – Cousteau was very important in this area also: in developing new cameras and underwater lighting.

Yet another interesting aspect of the pioneering nature of the Sub Aqua Club is the work they were sometimes asked to do. The police had yet to have their own divers – in fact several policemen were members of the club – and so they would be called out for rescue operations, repairing sluice gates and looking for bodies: Brian recalls having to feel his way through the River Ouse on one such search for a body when visibility was just a couple of feet.  It ought to be noted that the sport of diving was given much impetus by the search for sunken ships and possible treasure.

Of course, diving predates the use of oxygen tanks or compressed air, as used in this film. In his book They Dared the Deep: A History of Diving, Robert Marx relates that Leonardo de Vinci, among his many other inventions, also invented the first SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), a leather diving suit, but didn’t divulge it for fear of it being used to sink ships (which is just as well as it wouldn’t have worked!). Diving chambers and suits were being designed in the eighteenth century, although it wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century that metal chambers were built that could withstand the pressure of deep diving.  

By 1953 Auguste Picard reached a depth of over 10,000 feet in his bathyscaphe. Diving using a scuba – without the need for pipes from the surface – developed in the 1870s, especially with the Fleuss rebreather, although using pure oxygen divers could not go below 33 feet. It wasn’t really until 1942 that an aqualung was developed with a regulator that could adjust air flow to the water pressure, allowing free diving to greater depths. In 1946 the Cousteau and Gagnon “Aqua Lung” went on sale in France and very soon became available around the world.

Diving as a hobby first got off the ground in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s (see Marx), but it soon took off in Britain as well.  York Sub Aqua Clubwas one of the first, andis still going strong. They still go diving mainly off the East coast of Yorkshire, especially at Whitby and Bridlington Bay, as well as the Farne Islands and every year at Mull, Scotland.

 References

Monty Halls and Miranda Krestovnikoff, Scuba Diving, Dorling Kindersley, 2006.

Robert Marx, They Dared the Deep: A History of Diving, The World Publishing, New York, 1967.

British Sub Aqua Club

York Sub Aqua Club

Wild Film History

Whirligig