Tidworth Sub Aqua Club

   An introduction to Tidworth Garrison and it’s one redeeming feature….. TIDSAC or Tidworth Sub Aqua Club. Those of you who have read the “About Me” and the “Early Days” pieces on this site will have already heard mention of Tidworth, the shot below shows the typically bleak and, even then, rather old barrack blocks used to house the local infantry, armoured transport, tanks & support arms that used Salisbury Plain to train on. Tidworth was to be my home for Six years, Two deployments and eventually a divorce. I went from married quarters, back into the “Block” and if anything that was a relief…..  

   There was so little to do in Tidworth, as in many “Army” towns, the Two pubs (The Ram and the Drummer) were typical “holes” where you could get a beer, or several depending on your mood, and while away the hours… days…weeks….months… until something happened. Option Two, find something to do, that was easy for me, I had my wages pretty much to myself again now and could get away more, and I looked forward to Thursday evenings in the garrison Sub-Aqua Club as a break from the tedium of Tidworth military life

  Tidworth Sub Aqua Club was a welcome distraction whenever you could get there, there were weekends away, sometimes Saturdays but more often Sunday’s, as most of the civilian half of the club (TIDSAC was a joint military, civilian BSAC Dive club) relied upon “overtime”, an odd thing to a squaddie, who got no extra pay for whenever the higher echelon spammed you to carry-out “dark-o’clock work” or the endless “Stags” or those fantastic “away-days” on tasking’s…..even better, the Two week “winter holidays” trying to break pick-helves digging into Salisbury Plain’s chalk and Flint substrate, to create “trenches” in which you could freeze to death overnight, or guard endless re-runs of WWI movies playing out in front of you, or boil to death in NBC suits re-digging the same bloody trench in the August heat waves of halcyon summers! It was a blast……

    But you had to do something on the odd weekend Major Andrew’s forgot to book Salisbury Plain to bugger you about on……….and luckily Tidworth wasn’t that far from the South Coast, and there is plenty of great diving to be had along the accessible stretch Tidworth sits above, the Jurassic coastline of Dorset and Hampshire, by far the easiest to get to is Weymouth and Portland, a straight run down the A354 through Blandford Forum (Tidworth 2….. but for the Royal Corps of Signals) without stopping……..It was so accessible that I regularly grabbed a Land rover 90 or 110, a couple of packed meals and “Toots” (Denise Tuttle, another squaddie, albeit of the female persuasion and another member of TIDSAC), on a Wednesday afternoon and scooted off to dive Chesil beach or Church Ope Cove or the Harbour at Portland. Wednesday “Sports afternoon” was something of an anomaly in the services, a time to practice whatever “sport” you were involved in whenever “duty” allowed it. This helped break the monotony of the working routine for what it was, as long as you had no other duties and you had a recognised membership of the sports governing body, (in this case the BSAC) you could officially engage in the activity with the limited support of the garrison if it was free from other needs, hence the transport and packed lunches, very civilised to be honest and I loved taking the Army up on its philanthropy

   Of course you got a fair share of digs from other’s in your unit, given that getting the use of a “company car” (Army Landrover) as a Lance-Corporal, was pretty unheard of, however, when you pointed out that interfering with sheep was not an officially recognised sport, and the one taking the piss should either register it as such or take up a “genuine” sport, they usually backed off on the comments……. The Diving Officer (DO) for TIDSAC was Norman Morley, he and his wife Joy, an ex-Major in the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANC….pronounced Kwa-Rank), were the stalwarts of TIDSAC. Having been a local building contractor for donkey’s years in Weyhill, Norman was a great inspiration to me, grounded, accessible and possessing a dry, but cutting sense of humour, and endless patience with the more military side of me than any other “civvie”. I loved Norman and Joy, Joy being the typical ex-Army Major, no BS and direct, but with the nursing and caring side inseparable from her personality, you would always get a sarcastic “well that didn’t go to plan did it” kind of look, or comment, and then you’d invariably get a follow on…..”but it looked hilarious, or how about doing it this way…..”.They were truly giving and wonderful folk without whom TIDSAC would’ve been a very different place!  

  There were plenty of sites to dive and we were lucky, having Two inflatables at the club, one which was a little more modern than the other, but neither had the GPS of modern day and all of our sites were dived using “triangulation” straight from the BSAC training manuals of the day. We also did quite a bit of shore diving, apart from the trips to Portland we dived Birdlip Quarry in Somerset,  Lulworth Cove, Bowleaze Cove and Chesil Beach, and were fortunate enough at the time to be allowed to dive the Royal Navy training site at Horsea Lakes which, at the time, was not accessible to the public, being used still to train Navy and Bomb Disposal (EOD) Divers and Royal Engineer Divers too

  The club ran expeditions too, there were a couple in my time there, the one I managed to get time to attend was in Scotland, specifically out of Balmacara House, which, at the time was a military retreat used for expeditions across Scotland and ideally placed as it looked out to Skye and the wreck of the Port Napier (perhaps more on that later in the “Wrecks” section!). Balmacara was a great location and we easily ran the ribs up onto the shore right in front of the house itself, and dived around the area with ease as there are plenty of great dives on the Kyle of Lochalsh and in the surrounding area like Plockton and Kyle Rea, Strome Ferry slip and Loch Carron, all great dive sites with something different to offer at each, from deep walls to drift dives and Scallop hunts to wreck diving, a truly great dive location! 

  Closer to home the sites at Portland and Weymouth, particularly Swanage, a kind of Mecca for divers with its “New” and “Old” piers, both giving a look at the myriad of small aquatic creatures that take shelter in and around the pier pilings, Tom-Pot Blennies, small Wrasse, and the odd crab,  were exceptionally popular with us and we enjoyed many dives in the area as a club, and often in dive pairs, on sports afternoons and occasions where the club couldn’t get enough members to warrant dragging the RIBs down to the coast

   Well, that’s enough of an introduction for now, I’ll take up further dives and diving with TIDSAC as we go on and hopefully there’ll be time to get several posts on some of the more popular dive-sites I dived with the ever changing Tidworth Sub-Aqua Club membership over the years I had left in the Army