In the Beginning
When you learned to scuba dive outside of the military, in the 1950s, you were given 20 yards of neoprene, a pair of scissors, a paper template of your body size and told to make your wetsuit from it!
Then stuffing large rocks down the front of your newly fashioned condom, you waddled down the beach, or to the back of the boat with your enormous duck-fins and you donned a large metal tank, attached to a bicycle inner tube with a mouthpiece attached to it, to breathe and threw yourself in to a body of water.
When the tank ran empty, you dumped the rocks and you careened upwards. Breaking the surface like a breaching whale, you left the water up to your navel! When you finally came around from being unconscious, someone was on hand to give you a beer and a Woodbine cigarette!
You then talked about the multitudinous array of fish you could have shot with your speargun, and proudly showed your diving buddies the three small lobsters you had caught (stole from an abandoned lobster pot)
If you were in the military, it was the first experience you had had of structured diving education.
The instructors, all bitter from being unable to lay mines due to having a lung or a body part missing, made sure that the young recruits suffered as much as they could. None of this “Can I help you with your gear, Sir?”.
It was hard and only the fittest survived - if at all.
Exhaustive swims, incessant drills and the occassional drowning were all part of learning to dive in the military - all so you could blow things up and get shot at underwater.
Failure rates were high and the number of instructor candidates was limited to those having enough lung capacity to smoke the apres-dive Woodbines.
When these aquanauts made it out of the military, the unsupecting public got their first glimpse of real diving.
It was all military based and so Joe slightly-overweight-but-very-rich Public failed because he wasnt fit enough - and as for teaching girls? Well, they were indoctrinated in the art of pouring the apres-dive beer!