At the end of the war I returned to my home town of Preston to discover that in my absence, and much to my surprise, I had been awarded the British Empire Medal (Military), of which I am immensely proud to this day.

But though the war is now over, there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done in all of the ports in Great Britain. For the previous six years Hitler had been dropping bombs and mines all over the country, many of them falling into the docks and harbours. A good number of these did not explode and were lying in the mud in a very dangerous condition and a great threat to the movement of shipping. The admiralty therefore formed a group of specially skilled Clearance Divers to search for them. I tried to reunite with Comm Crabb but had no success for he was away on some type of secret work, details of which I was only to discover some time later.

My first job at this time was in the London docks at the Royal Albert and Tilbury with a new boss, Lt John Crawford RN. Our working conditions were the worst I had ever experienced for although the water was only twenty to thirty feet deep it overlaid a layer of liquid mud about ten to twelve feet in thickness. When I descended into it on a trial dive the visibility was nil and I could not move my limbs more than a couple of inches at a time in any direction. We used to refer to the conditions as black custard!

Our diving boat and living quarters was a converted wooden trawler, HMS Dipper, and after completing our work in London, we sailed into the English Channel and north to Liverpool to commence another dock and harbour search. But our good old ship was coming to the end of her days and we were eventually ordered to return to Portsmouth where we would commission another ship, HMS Diver, an ex-German salvage vessel. We all loved her, especially as she had been built with a gantry crane over her stern which was perfect for lifting objects from the sea bed.

After a couple of months in Portsmouth we were ordered to the Channel Islands on mine clearance duties with another new boss Lt Commander “Jackie” Warner DSC OBE, an ex Submarine Captain and a man who I grew to admire due to the very civil way he treated the men in our party. He had many long conversations with me, especially about my exploits with Comm Crabb.

Fate of the Spanish galleon

The galleon Florencia (right) had apparently fled around the north tip of Scotland after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and, having been badly damaged, was being refitted in Tobermory harbour by Mac Lean of Duart (Scotland was at that time a neutral country).

I was told by the XI Duke of Argyll that the story was that an emissary of Mac Lean went on board to demand settlement of the refit but was seized and confined near the ship’s magazine. Rather that let the Spanish sail without paying his master, the brave man managed to lay a trail of gunpowder into the magazine and blew up both himself and the ship

To the Isle of Mull in search of treasure

In the spring of 1950, our Royal Navy clearance-diving team set off on a training exercise to search for a galleon, the Florencia, a ship from the Spanish Armada, which had been lying under the sand and silt in the Bay of Tobermory, Isle of Mull since 1588 and which by law was the property of the Duke of Argyle. We left Portsmouth on the old LMS. line heading north to Scotland by steam-train; this became our fastest and most common mode of transport, resulting in us having the nick-name of the British Railway Team. During the journey I left my compartment to visit the toilet and, glancing into another compartment, saw a Naval Officer sitting there with three gold stripes on his sleeve. I was overjoyed to see it was my old boss and diving companion Comm Crabb, who I had last said goodbye to in Venice, Italy, five years before. I knocked on his door and recognition dawned in his eyes. “Hello Sir” I said; “Hello Knowles” he replied. What a touching reunion, but we both understood its significance. Unbeknown to me he was to be in command of the diving exercise.

Delighted to be reunited, I assist Comm Crabb with his dive preparations

We were joined at Tobermory by HMS Gossamer, a floating laboratory of underwater detection. Our party dived to the bed of the bay, between 80ft to 100ft deep, our target the galleon being another 20ft to 30ft under four hundred years of sand and silt. We searched with pressure probes trying to locate timber, which we finally found after many days of frustration. In 57 days, due to wind and weather, we only spent 17 of them underwater. I found a Spanish dagger sheath and planks of African oak, and we also discovered a scull and a good number of human bones, which were sent to Glasgow University. The exercise had proved lengthy and frustrating and we could stay no longer. We were recalled to HMS Lochinvar, a shore base at Port Edgar almost beneath the Forth Bridge in South Queensferry.

A few years later, my service in the Royal Navy having by then come to an end, I used my severence pay to buy an old ERF lorry and gained a contract with the Star paper mill in Blackburn delivering great rolls of news print to Fleet Street. During this time I was still in regular contact with Comm Crabb, visiting him whenever I was in London at his flat in Hans Road.

In the spring of 1954 he informed me that the XI Duke of Argyll had asked him to form a civilian diving team in another attempt to find the Galleon and its treasure in Tobermory Bay. He asked whether I would join him and, very soon afterwards we got together a group who had dived on the previous Royal Navy attempt, all of whom had now left the service and were looking for adventure.

In August we started diving. Working in shifts, again 80 - 100ft below the surface of the bay controlling an airlift that functioned like a giant vacuum-cleaner sucking sand, clay and stones from the sea bed. We were hampered not only by the amount of rubbish that had accumulated in the area over the wreck in the four hundred years since she sank but also by being directly in line with the flow of water that roared over a large waterfall nearby.

Instructing Terry Yetton, my stand-by diver at Tobermory

It fell to me to discover how dangerous our work had become. I was working 87ft below the surface in a deep hole, facing a solid wall of clay, when a boulder slid from the wall behind me and held my body and (hard hat) diving helmet down on the seabed. I was buried and held down for almost an hour while Terry Yetton, my stand-by diver, was sent down and accompanied by Commander Crabb, who had plunged down in his frogman suit, together struggled to remove the boulder from my back and drag me clear out of the clay, I was not injured but worked with much more caution afterwards.

We worked on for weeks, still removing boulders and clay, but with little progress - no sooner had we cleared an area than a storm or  some heavy rain would cause the waterfall to produce more debris, once again littering the sea bed so that we were back to square one. That, combined with the approach of the really bad Scottish winter weather, convinced us that our attempt to reach the Galleon was well and truly over.