Last of the Hard Hat Divers. Questo articolo non è disponibile.Last of the Hard Hat Divers

Recently retired following a long and distinguished career as a seaman and 'hard hat' diver working on complex underwater engineering projects, Bob Sinclair now sets down both his story as one of the last hard hat divers, and his history, which takes us back to the 1930s and his childhood in Scotland. He recounts his enduring love and fascination with water, no doubt inherited from his seafaring father, the depredations and joys of growing up in wartime Scotland, and his own father's often life-endangering adventures at sea.

His own career was no less eventful and no less dangerous. Even with the most meticulous care and most highly trained 'linesmen', the hard hat diver places his life at risk from the moment he descends into the deep. Often below for astonishing periods of time (eighteen hours in one instance) and working against the clock of civil engineering contracts, Bob and his colleagues show an unstinting and unwavering sense of duty and commitment to their work, and even more importantly, to one another.

A hard hat diver's life is literally always in the hands of someone else.

Bob Sinclair was born in 1931 in Edinburgh and took to water soon afterwards, learning to love that element in the local swimming baths and at Leith Sands. He attended school at Rothesay Academy, Isle of Bute, leaving before his fourteenth birthday. In 1945 he went to work in Henry Robb's shipyard, and served his time as a ship's joiner and cabinet maker. Called up to the Royal Navy, he served at his trade until demob in 1954. He married his childhood sweetheart, Mabel, in 1955 and they had five daughters. His working life alternated between his trade as a joiner and as a deep-sea diver, and he eventually retired as a Staff Foreman with Sir Robert McAlpine and Sons.

He now lives with his wife in Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders.