"Diving with the Strathclyde Underwater police at the Glasgow National Diving School".....
....or "A day out with the Rowboat Cops"

In November I spent two days with the Strathclyde police underwater team and learned how the Glasgow National Diving School, one of two training schools (the other is in Northumberland) operates. The schools were set up after the introduction of the Diving Operations at Work Regulations in 1981. The Glasgow school, because of the special needs of Scotland, trains divers to dive to 50 metres and trains at a number of varied sites.

I have long argued that there is need for more specialisation for professional divers and it is absurd to expect divers to be Jacks (or Jills) of all trades. The police divers have to embark on a number of distinct jobs and require specialised training. I feel it is sad that a number of police county forces have closed down their underwater dive teams, it seems mainly to save on the overall budget. At present the needs of the Greater London area are served by Thames and Essex police divers, though I believe their underwater team is soon to be re-established.

A year or so back I was instrumental in drawing attention to a hare-brained scheme by a sports diving school to draw up a list of sports divers willing to ‘assist’ the police in their work. I objected that this would be taking work from my professional qualified union members but the police also did so because of the likelihood of being sued for post-traumatic stress if a body were found. The failures, in effect, of two prosecutions for underwater deaths by the Devon and Cornwall police show how vital it is for the advice, to call on the diving expertise that exists elsewhere in the police force. I will comment on these two cases more fully in my regular Column.

I was invited to visit the Strathclyde National Diving School by Inspector Fred Hall but I had already met his deputy, Sergeant Jon McConnell, on an HSE Diver Training Competences Committee, on which we both sit. The Strathclyde underwater search team consists of eight full -time divers and two part-time. They have to undergo rigorous medicals and training and are asked to leave the unit if their fitness falls below a certain standard. The Basic Air Diving Course lasts for eight weeks and the Supervisor course for three weeks. All divers have to come back for regular refresher courses. Training takes place at various sites, including the River Clyde, canals, lochs where the 50 metres depth is easily obtained, and at the unused Inverkip power station, where I was allowed to dive. The average age of the Strathclyde divers is about 32, but one of their number still dives at 45. The school trains about 30 divers a year and one basic air diving course is held each summer.

I dived with Inspector Hall in about 15 metres of water and visited the fuselage of an aeroplane, where the main job of the divers is to recover ‘corpses’ and place them in body bags for recovery to the surface. I was not, fortunately, asked to attempt this task. I was supervised by Jim McNeekin, one of the instructors at the school, and dived using their equipment. I have always been a little apprehensive of diving using the Aga positive pressure mask, ideal for diving in polluted water, as a result of an unpleasant experience at a commercial diving school, now closed. On that occasion not only had the instructor not achieved a good seal over my face, so air spewed out at a very rapid rate but they had failed to charge up the battery for the through water communication system without air and comms. I decided to surface fairly speedily. This time I had clear communications and my equipment was very carefully checked out, and, accompanied by Inspector Hall, I felt fully confident during my short dive. I was pleased to be told when filling in my log book that I should put down as the name of the designated contractor, Chief Superintendent Strachan. I have always said it is vital that a named contractor is responsible for the safety of the divers he is employing so that in the event of an incident an individual can be held responsible. I am told the Superintendent takes a keen interest in the work of the underwater team and has dived himself.

Like the Royal Navy and Royal Engineers Diver training School at Horsea Island, which I visited in January 1997, all trainees have to reach a high standard and as I have said earlier have to come back for regular retraining. The van used to transport the underwater team is extremely well fitted out, with cooking and warm changing facilities. The dry suits and woolly bears provided, mean the divers can cope with the extreme cold sometimes experienced at the bottom of a Scottish loch. I watched two experienced supervisors, one from Aberdeen and one from Brighton, being put through their paces and noted the very high level of safety precautions taken before I was allowed to dive.

Sadly the underwater team are being called out to deal with an increasing number of sports diving incidents and one of their recent unpleasant tasks was to recover the bodies of a mother and infant from a car submerged in the River Clyde. The team co-operate closely with the Royal Navy divers and a number of commercial companies. They will come fully under the new Health and Safety Executive’s Codes of Practice, shortly to be introduced.

As usual on my diving trips I was made to feel very welcome and all the questions I asked were constructively answered. I continued my discussions with Fred Hall on the intricacies of the Scottish legal system. I find I still have a lot to learn about diving and the world in general and I hope I have convinced our readers of the need for specialised police underwater teams. I have usually got on well with the police, even when engaged in spirited discussions with the then Home Secretary and top policemen, over the policing of the Notting Hill Gate carnival in the 1970s and found the policeman who told me off for stopping on the hard shoulder of a motorway near Greenock to take a quick mobile phone call could not have been more polite, even before he noticed the Strathclyde Police Underwater Search Unit pennant on the seat besides me .

Michael Cocks

Photos: Strathclyde Police