In 1992 there were only a handful of liveaboard dive-boats in Egypt, mainly operated by foreigners, but the Egyptian business world had discovered the embryonic diving industry, and it was clear that foreign owners would soon no longer be welcome.
Taking a sabbatical as a dive guide, I was present when Shimshon Machiah, an Israeli dive-boat owner/skipper who offered mainly fishing charters, revealed to a group of us the whereabouts of a rather special wreck.
He said he'd known about it for nearly 20 years. It was a life-changing experience for me.
We all dived it extensively. I well remember that Kenny MacDonald spent a dive hammering the end off a metal box to reveal, to his evident surprise, the four 4in shells that have provided iconic photographs for divers ever since.
Of course, other dive-boat skippers in the area must have secretly dived it too.
In May 1993, DIVER published the first English-language article about the Thistlegorm. The original picture of the wreck by Rico, the artist briefed from my rather inaccurate sketch, still hangs on my wall. Pirated reproductions have been reproduced on endless T-shirts and books.
Friends then in Sharm still blame me for revealing the secret, and kick-starting what has become a million-dollar industry in itself, within the Egyptian diving industry.
I'd already been back with another skipper, Jan Ellingsen, and written for DIVER about how divers were vandalising the Thistlegorm before TV producer Caroline Hawkins and Peter Scoones made an award-winning programme about the wreck.
You can imagine my disappointment that John Kean ignored this part of the history when he wrote his definitive history of the ss Thistlegorm. It's an otherwise excellent book. He includes an interview with Shimshon, but it's as if the making of the TV programme was the start of diving on the Thistlegorm as we know it today. In fact John Kean seems to have become quite proprietorial about the wreck since he first dived it in 1997.
He has put a lot of effort into the book, and it shows. There are photographs, mainly by Caroline Hawkins, reproductions of documents, contemporaneous photos of those involved with the ship at the time of its sinking, numerous collected anecdotes and the recollections of the author, written in what could be considered an easily read fictional style.
This revised edition includes the first full-length digitally gathered picture of the wreck, which is interesting, if slightly disappointing in its quality. There's a chapter devoted to survivor Angus Macleay's story, from the Stornaway Gazette in 1942, and another on a fifth survivor, William Jamieson, not in the original text.
The impressions of bomb expert Peter Le Suer, who dived the wreck in 2008, are recorded too. Naturally, there's a belated conservation message added, in a chapter entitled "Saving ss Thistlegorm".
John Kean has worked out in Sharm only since the Egyptians, themselves strangers to what was Bedouin territory, took over the diving industry in the mid-'90s. I feel his book suffers from their obviously one-sided input. It's as if nothing happened in the diving world there before they arrived.
The Thistlegorm needs no introduction to divers today, yet her existence was never a real secret. Sunk by enemy action in 1941, vessels passing her mast tops that once broke the surface used to dip their ensigns in respect on their way up to the Suez Canal.
It was Jacques Cousteau who first organised dives on the wreck. He devoted a chapter to it in his book The Living Sea. It featured in an edition of National Geographic in the early '50s, too. It's just that it was overlooked in the intervening period, while scuba diving became popular.
Today, vast numbers of divers enjoy what remains one of the most spectacular shipwrecks in the world. John Kean's book, updated with a further interview with Shimshon, will add pleasure to that experience. For my part, I see myself looking into a mirror with many old friends, and find no reflection of us.
John Bantin
John Kean/SS Thistlegorm
ISBN: 9771707531
Hardback, 200pp, £21.95
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