"The Log of the Wookey Hole Exploration Expedition, 1935." Graham
Balcombe and Penelope Powell. Cave Diving Group, Great Britain;
reprint 2009. ISBN 978-0-901031-06-8. 6 by 9 inches, xviii+235+xix
pages, hardbound. £25 plus postage (about $70 total) from http://www.cavedivinggroup.org.uk
.
Following a pioneering but unsuccessful attempt at diving a sump in
Swilden's Hole, Jack Sheppard visited Siebe, Gorman to find out what
sort of light-weight diving equipment might be available. Nothing
suitable could be recommended, but the company offered the loan of
standard base-fed hard-hat diving gear, along with suitable
instruction in its use. Few cave-diving sites in Britain or anywhere
else would accommodate such equipment, but the sump at the end of show
cave Wookey Hole did, leading to the diving project recounted in this
book. The original edition, by "the divers," was essentially hand-made
by Graham Balcombe, with the text pages stencil-duplicated in two
colors after being typed with flush-right columns on a typewriter, and
the photographic plates were reproduced as actual photo prints, faced
with tissue. Only the cloth binding was done professionally. The
adventure of printing the book was described by Balcombe in an article
much later, and I got permission from him to submit it to "Underwater
Speleology," where it appeared in volume 21, numbers 5 and 6, and
volume 22, number 1 (1993 and 1994). The price of the 1936 edition was
7/6, about a dollar. Needless to say, copies of the original, of which
a few over 175 were printed, sell for a lot more than that today, and
even more than the high price of this reprint.
The text pages, including the dive logs, have been newly typeset for
the reprint, and the illustrations are printed in facsimile. Some
additional material has been included, including the article about the
original printing and a short summary of diving developments at Wookey
Hole since. While the technology used by the 1935 expedition was
obviously a dead end as far as cave diving was concerned, Wookey has
subsequently proved to be the site of a challenging series of sumps,
the last known of which was dove to a depth of 90 meters in 2005.
As the first cave-diving book, "The Log of the Wookey Hole Exploration
Expedition" is an important historical document, and it is good that
it has been made available again for less than the hundreds of dollars
an original would cost, if you could find one.--Bill Mixon
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