When Ian Denny started diving he had to make his own equipment. Now his is hoping to open a museum, with some of his original gear as exhibits. Nick Morrison meets a sporting pioneer.

FROM as young as he can remember, Ian Denny was fascinated with the sea. Or more precisely, with under the sea. Anything to do with submarines, divers or the undersea world captivated him. But it was not until he was 17 that this obsession turned into a lifelong love of diving.

"I went to Jersey on holiday and saw a chap in an open air swimming pool with the first snorkel, fins and mask I had ever seen," he recalls. "I couldn't get down there quick enough to ask him where he got them from."

As soon as Ian returned home to Redcar, he was on the phone to order his own set of equipment. This was 1951, in the early days of diving. And while a snorkel enabled divers to swim underwater, it restricted them to staying near the surface, so the pipe was out of the water. It was a glimpse, but a tantalising one, of the undersea world.

"I put my head under the water and it was a fantastic sensation, to be able to see underwater. I can't really explain it but it was absolutely fantastic," he says.

When he was 19, a magazine article caught Ian's eye. The magazine was Practical Mechanic. The article was on how to make your own aqualung, a device allowing you to breathe underwater, freeing you from the need to stay near the surface and granting access to previously hidden depths. The key piece of equipment was a Calor Gas valve, allied with parts of the breathing sets issued to airmen during the Second World War.

"My father said 'There's no way you're going to have one of those', but in the end he gave me a hand making it," Ian says. "We modified the Calor Gas valve, drilled holes in it and put a different diaphragm in. I bought all the parts from a firm selling ex-Air Ministry stuff."

He asked the manager of Redcar Baths if he could try it out in the swimming pool. It worked a treat. He was ready to try it out in the North Sea.

"That was something else - to be able to dive down and breathe underwater. I can remember it as though it was yesterday, it was just fantastic, even though it was cloudy," he says. "An aqualung gives you the freedom. It makes a big difference."

Ian had gone to work in his father's garage on Redcar Promenade when he left school, but decided to combine work with his hobby by opening a diving shop next door. At first he worked in the shop just on Saturdays, but as the sport grew in popularity, so the diving shop, one of the oldest in the country, took over more of his time.

After a year with his homemade aqualung, he bought his first manufactured one, for the sum of £55. But diving was still in its infancy, and equipment was basic. Oxygen cylinders had to be sent away to BOC in Chester-le-Street to be refilled after every use. It meant he had to wait two weeks between dives while the cylinder was filled and returned.

Nor did he have a wetsuit. Instead, he dived in the North Sea in just his swimming trunks. "I used to come back blue, but I was only young. I didn't feel the cold," he says.

But his exploits as one of the sport's pioneers attracted considerable interest.

"I lived on the promenade and would just go down the beach with all the gear and people would gather to watch you. I didn't have a boat then so I just walked into the sea, and they would watch me disappear under the water," he says.

Later, he got his own compressor, which would be used to fill oxygen cylinders for other divers as the sport grew in popularity, and his own wetsuit. He started to go further afield to dive, first along the North-East and Yorkshire coast, then abroad, Majorca, Cyprus.

"Near Whitby and Scarborough there are a lot of wrecks, mainly from the First World War," he says. "With my first aqualung, you could dive to 30-40ft, which is paddling by today's standards, but it is going into another world, into the unknown.

"To dive on a wreck, no matter how many times you've dived it, it is always a sensation when you go down. It is equivalent to flying to the moon. It is inner space, whereas they're going to outer space."

He took part in a spear fishing league which thrived on the North-East coast in the 1960s. Competitors, equipped with a snorkel and compressed air gun, would swim out about half a mile and spear as much fish, usually cod and flatfish, as they could.

"You would see who got the biggest catch, but it's frowned upon now. All the conservationists got very irate," he says.

He has seen the sport explode in popularity over the five decades since he put his head underwater and swam, and he has dived all over the world. St Abbs, off the Northumberland coast, is one of his favourite dive sites, for the clarity of the water, but Bermuda has the advantage of being much warmer.

"In the sixties the Jacques Cousteau films started a lot of people diving, and now people are going abroad to dive and taking diving holidays," he says.

"The thing that brought the sport on and the equipment on was the advent of the off-shore oil industry. That lifted the sport because more and more sophisticated diving equipment was made to go to greater depths."

But Ian still has many mementos from diving's early days. Copper diving helmets, some from the beginning of the 20th century; breathing equipment; diving knives, and, of course, his aqualung. One day, he hopes to open a museum to chart the sport's development, from the early days of hard hats through to the latest gear.

"All the time I have been collecting old diving gear. You just hunt around the country, and sometimes people bring stuff into the shop. It's like any collector; if you collect a certain thing you get obsessive about it," he says.

Now 70, he hasn't been diving himself for four years, and son Christopher has taken over running the shop. But Ian's enthusiasm for diving is as undimmed as his memory of his first sight of a snorkel, or his first dive with an aqualung.

"It just had something from the word go. I don't know what it was, but it's just a fascinating sport. If it gets you, it gets you in a big way," he says. "I have never lost that interest in it. It is still fascinating after all these years."