Originally published in Pearson's Weekly (C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.) vol.1 #33 (07 Mar 1891).
There is a great deal of diving done on the Thames, but the greatest interest of the business is associated with sea-diving, in which there has been adventure enough, according to all accounts, to elevate the diver's art almost to the regions of romance. In the river here at London it is prosaic enough, though even here the fact that labouring men can make fourteen shillings a day for eight hours' work—four hours under water and four above—seems to indicate that diving is not exactly in the roll of common occupations.
Half-a-crown an hour appears to be the ordinary pay for a diver actually at work under water in the Thames, and a shilling an hour while he is above tending a comrade working below. The men work in turns, above four hours and four hours below in the course of the day, and they can make about four guineas a week. Six pounds a week is not an unusual sum for one of them to earn; indeed, that seems to be the general rate for good men when things are brisk.
With such wages it may, perhaps, be thought surprising that there are not more competitors for the work, unpleasant though it may be. Diving in the Thames is not a very difficult or dangerous matter. A man ought to be in sound and vigorous health, and capable of resisting the effects of cold, but beyond this there is no special qualification required. It is the deep diving which tries a man, and the depth in the Thames is, of course, never great.
But even in the Thames the work is very apt to find out the weak places in a man's constitution; and it is not everybody who can work for even half an hour in the bed of the river in the depth of winter. Men who are robust in constitution do not seem to suffer from it, and even many years of the work do not appear to result in any particular form of disease. It has been asserted that men have grown old in the business, though in early life they have been in danger of consumption, and the theory explaining this is a simple one.
Men under water in a diving dress are breathing a condensed atmosphere, and are, therefore, inhaling oxygen in a concentrated form, and this, it is assumed, is conducive to the cure of consumption. It was announced three or four years ago that a Continental physician had been fitting up condensed air chambers for tho treatment of phthisis on just this principle, though what "the faculty" generally may have to say about it we do not know. But whether the praetice of diving may be regarded as a specific against disease or not, it certainly does not appear to be ordinarily attended by any particular malady.
But there are two or three barriers in the way of a man's embarking in the diving line. Anyone who goes into it at all, and means to thrive in it, must be prepared to do whatever is demanded of him, and divers often have to undertake jobs that are rather trying to the nerves. A man cannot be sure that he will always find a job as unobjectionable as shovelling about the mud in a caisson at Blackfriars Bridge. He may occasionally have to go down to a Princess Alice steamboat, where a ghastly company of the dead will confront him in the gloom and loneliness of the river bottom.
Even in ordinary work in the river he may very likely now and again find himself in contact with the dead before he is aware of it. On this account alone a man who intends to become a diver should be tolerably strong of nerve, to say nothing of the risk, real pa not very great, of an accident by which he may be choked in his waterproof casing. Then, again, as we have said, he requires to be of a sound and vigorous constitution, while, above all, he must be a man who can work.
A man who can't work above will certainly not be worth much below; and when we come to put these necessary qualifications together, it becomes plain that it is not everybody who can become a diver. And of those who are qualified, and are wanting work, it is only here and there one is found who gets an opportunity of learning this curious business. The apparatus is costly, and no one will employ a new hand while plenty of experienced divers are about.