A year ago a man phoned me and told me he had inherited something unusual from his Father that was related to Siebe Gorman and asked me what I could tell him about the company.

Obviously I was intrigued and helped him any way I could and he was very appreciative. Frustratingly, I did not manage to find out what he had in his possession but he said he would let me know if he wants to sell it and would give me first refusal.

Two months later the gentleman came into our showroom with only a small cardboard box and a big smile. I was a little disappointed to see only the small box, having dreamt of the possibility of a one-off helmet or apprentice piece perhaps, but when I opened the box and removed one of the glass slides I nearly fell off my chair!

The first slide I had selected from the box and held up to the light was a picture of a goat in a decompression chamber. Recognising it immediately, I grabbed my Davis Deep Diving manual and instantly matched the slide to the image in the book (Fig 1a pg8) and then proceeded to find the rest of the images from that page in the box.

What I was holding and what I was able to later obtain, were the original ‘positives’ or the master images from the archives of Siebe Gorman, a company whose history is very cloudy and hard to research because many important documents and archive material was lost in a tragic fire caused by the bombing of the factory during WWII. Then came the price…lets just say I needed to take a few aspirin afterwards!