It’s never on a lovely day

In the first of a three-part series tracing the history of police diving, pioneer John Bowman, 72, talks to Fiona Morris about his time in the earliest days of what became the Police National Dive Squad.

They were ‘bullet proof’ young police officers, volunteers who used their own gear and took the sort of risks health and safety staff have nightmares about.

“Emergency diving is never on a lovely day and it’s never in lovely clear pristine water," says John Bowman, at his home on the Kapiti Coast. “It’s more likely to be in sewer mouths or dirty water.

“We did it simply because some poor devil had their family - you know - a body down there, and to recover that body was a big thing for closure.

“It wasn’t a pleasant job, I might add, when you are groping around in the water.”

John’s first dive on the job was just up the road in Waikanae, New Year’s Eve 1964. A call went out for a six-year-old boy who had gone missing so John and four others went up in a patrol car.

“We didn’t have lights or anything so the locals all lined up their cars on the side of the river with their lights on and that was our means of looking in.”

John says they found that little boy - but for a young man more used to diving for crayfish and flounder with his family, recovering a body was tough.

“Frightening. That little kid… I drove him back in the patrol car, first body I’d ever seen, 19 years old, on my own.”

After that and a couple of other jobs around Wellington - a rowing cox lost overboard (“we didn’t find that poor guy”); a watersider who fell off the wharf along with his bike - John says he and others were keen to start a proper squad and “get a little bit professional about it”.

But the organisation wasn’t convinced. “They just wanted to utilise the Navy personnel. The Navy guys, they were good - but they were only interested really in looking after their ships or planting bombs.

“They weren’t trained to recover evidence nor available later to provide details for a court case.”

It took several more “little jobs”, says John, before the bosses finally agreed to build a squad. In 1967 Police organised six staff from Wellington and six from Christchurch to attend the Navy diver basic training course at HMNZS Philomel in Auckland.

It was a very hard course and more physically demanding than any Police dive John was ever involved in.

The timing proved excellent when, on 10 April 1968, the passenger ferry Wahine foundered at the entrance to Wellington harbour and the Wellington team faced its first major operation.

“We recovered evidence, we went right down into the boat and recovered the radio log. We also tracked where she went across Barrett Reef, and I took a sample off the propeller.”

Other tasks including cutting loose the life-rafts still hanging off the ship, and generally “making things a little bit safer”.

John says what he and the team were able to do on the Wahine was one of the most rewarding experiences in his career “even though it did ruin our wetsuits”.

They went on to many more jobs, including diving the Waikato River in June 1970 during the Crewe murder inquiry.

“That was a big dirty river, no visibility. It was so swift - we were out in the current – trees and stuff pummelling down all the time.

“Just recovering Harvey Crewe’s body and making sure we got all the evidence off it - axles, and the wire that was tying him up and everything - I’d say that was one of the greater moments.”

While teamwork was the foundation of the team’s success, John explains how each person had to play their part in searching.

“If you are in dirty water you lay out ropes. Then you’re on lines far enough apart so if I put my arms out I could touch the next guy, and you’re clipped on with a big long line with six of you, and you just move along the mainline you’ve put across the bottom.

“Then once you get to the other end it’s moved over a bit, and back you go. It’s like ploughing a field.”

He says there was always that ‘I bet I find it’ feeling. “I didn’t really want to find it. But we are down there to find it. We did everything possible to find it.”

John says although he didn’t like sewers, over time divers adapt to working with bodies.

“I mean they can’t hurt you, so you just get on with it.

“One day we had a training dive at the overseas terminal and one of the guys come up and his eyes were like saucers. He’d just stumbled on a body and we didn’t expect it. So we recovered it from lying on the bottom.”

Recovering bodies is the most visible part of the dive team’s role, but John says retrieving other evidence is equally valuable.

“In the early days if you threw something into the harbour to get rid of the evidence, it was a good, safe thing because no one is going to find it. But once we started diving and getting the evidence back, it helped a lot in investigations.”

The team was enthusiastic. Members received no additional pay or time off but they enjoyed the camaraderie and the challenge.

After finishing a job they’d get together, have a few drinks and share some black humour.

John says it was the “harden-up” approach to coping with the work and he welcomes changes brought in with health and safety regulations.

“There was no psychological support. Now it’s marvellous. Throughout my career I’ve seen some pretty gnarly things and it’s only in the last 20 years people get the support that they should get psychologically.”

John retired in 2000 after 36 years in Police, seven volunteering for extra duties as a diver.

He credits “the old switch-off trick that police develop” for helping him through.

“You do develop it… but not totally. Even that first little boy, after all these years I still know his name.”