27 May 2010
By CHRIS MAIR
Diver and treasure hunter who retrieved gold from wreck of HMS Edinburgh
Born: 10 May, 1933, in Keighley, Yorkshire.
Died: 22 May, 2010, in France, aged 77.
IT WOULD be interesting to see what Keith Jessop had on his passport under "occupation". It is safe to assume it would not have been "treasure hunter" – although that is exactly what he was.
He started deep-sea diving off the coast of Scotland, and that was when he realised it could prove a lucrative endeavour. He was to be very good at his job – his exploits included finding "Stalin's Gold" in the wreckage of HMS Edinburgh, 800ft down in the Barents Sea.
Jessop was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1933, the illegitimate son of a penniless mill girl – he never knew who his father was. He was raised in abject poverty and left school aged 14 without a single qualification to his name.
His first and only "real job" was at a local textile mill which paid a pittance and provided little in the way of job satisfaction. During his weekends, he would take advantage of the Yorkshire outdoors, excelling at rock-climbing and reaching a high level of fitness. Such was his prowess and his overall stamina that his national service was spent with the Royal Marines.
After that, Jessop went back to Yorkshire and to the day job he despised. In 1955, he married Mildred Woodhouse, and they started a family that would grow to two sons and a daughter.
To keep food on the table, Jessop was holding down two jobs, supplementing his pay at the mill by giving driving lessons in the evenings.
His time in the marines had introduced him to diving, but this never blossomed into a hobby until he was offered the use of a friend's underwater scuba gear. His first dive was in the River Lune at Kirkby Lonsdale, in Cumbria, and his abiding memory was of the shoal of salmon that enveloped him as they swam by.
He continued to dive, fascinated by the underwater environment and the magical world beneath the surface. He moved from the shallow river waters of Yorkshire to the seas off Scotland and discovered that this world contained something considerably more valuable.
The pivotal moment came during a weekend dive in the Mull of Galloway whilst exploring a wrecked ship on the seabed. It was full of brass and copper, which he collected and sold onshore. It didn't earn him a huge amount, but it was enough to convince him there was mileage in this new career.
It was never going to take much to persuade him to leave the mill, and, along with two friends, Jessop began his new life, mainly scouring the coasts of Scotland for sellable debris. At first, he made very little money and spent much of his time in very real danger. His equipment was far from state-of-the-art, diving in a second-hand Royal Navy dry suit using a homemade air compressor manufactured from various household appliances including a washing machine and vacuum cleaner. To collect his loot, he had amalgamated a tractor tyre and a mesh basket. This worked fine for the smaller pieces they located, but the larger finds required a different tactic. Instead of hoisting items from the seabed with a crane – they had no crane – the three divers would simply lift the item on to their collective shoulders, and walk it out of the water.
Jessop was self taught to a large extent and the fact he survived all his dives was more down to luck than skill or judgment, especially when he began to use underwater explosives in "trial and error" experiments. He acknowledged he was "lucky not to blow myself into oblivion in the process".
However, he was still alive, and making money. In fact, he had made enough from his recoveries to buy a Fleetwood trawler that he called Black Pig, partly in tribute to Captain Pugwash and partly because it was covered in oil. It was the ticket to his fortune that Jessop had been waiting for, enabling bigger and more lucrative dives.
Eventually, the three-way partnership broke up and Jessop ventured on alone. The hardest past of his new career was not the dives themselves, but the research into where to dive to find the best wrecks. It transpired he was a rather gifted researcher, adept at finding the most opportune dive sites using knowledge gleaned from local fishermen and various archives. In particular, he could identify a prime site, even if the evidence suggested it was average at best.
His breakthrough to the big time came in 1969 when his hounding of the Salvage Association (SA) finally reaped rewards. Jessop wanted the recovery rights to some of the wrecks the SA had on its books. Eventually, the SA sent him to look for the Johanna Thorden which had sunk off Swona in the Pentland Firth. He was not the association's favourite person and he was given a simple instruction: find her or don't come back. No other salvage crew would take the job, deeming it to be too dangerous, but whether the SA expected him to be unsuccessful, so ending any association with Jessop, is immaterial – he did find the wreck and recover the vast amount of copper that had sunk with it. His reputation was cemented.
His success continued and he realised that new diving techniques were not just beneficial to exploration and research, but also to wreck recovery. He worked in the oilfields for experience and even recovered from deep waters in the Arctic, but he was by now focused on one big recovery.
In 1942, the British vessel HMS Edinburgh, carrying ten tonnes of what was known as "Stalin's Gold", had been sunk by a German submarine. Jessop knew roughly where she had sunk and at what depth she sat, 800ft below the waves of the Barents Sea.
He wanted the salvage rights and got them, partly because of his less-damaging recovery methods as Edinburgh had been granted war grave status.
It was a huge undertaking and Jessop remortgaged his house to cover the costs. In terms of the location and actual recovery, the project was nothing short of a technical nightmare. The sea was impossibly cold and Jessop and his dive teamwere entering the unknown. However, he emerged triumphant with more than $100 million worth of gold bullion – it was Stalin's payment for goods shipped to the Soviet Union by the Allies during the war. Jessop was officially the most successful underwater treasure finder in history. The dive had earned him about £2 million.
His triumph turned to pain when a writer accused the dive team of having desecrated the war grave and claimed that Jessop had bribed the SA to acquire the salvage rights. Jessop sued and settled out of court.
However, the saga did not end there and he was prosecuted at the Old Bailey. He was acquitted but lost faith with the British system and moved abroad.
He continued to dive and search for treasure, targeting the really big wrecks of history, such as Columbus's Santa Maria and the lost treasure of Henry Morgan.
He published his autobiography, Goldfinder in 2001 and son Graham is now a successful salvage operator in his own right. Keith Jessop is survived by his partner and his three children
By CHRIS MAIR
Diver and treasure hunter who retrieved gold from wreck of HMS Edinburgh
Born: 10 May, 1933, in Keighley, Yorkshire.
Died: 22 May, 2010, in France, aged 77.
IT WOULD be interesting to see what Keith Jessop had on his passport under "occupation". It is safe to assume it would not have been "treasure hunter" – although that is exactly what he was.
He started deep-sea diving off the coast of Scotland, and that was when he realised it could prove a lucrative endeavour. He was to be very good at his job – his exploits included finding "Stalin's Gold" in the wreckage of HMS Edinburgh, 800ft down in the Barents Sea.
Jessop was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1933, the illegitimate son of a penniless mill girl – he never knew who his father was. He was raised in abject poverty and left school aged 14 without a single qualification to his name.
His first and only "real job" was at a local textile mill which paid a pittance and provided little in the way of job satisfaction. During his weekends, he would take advantage of the Yorkshire outdoors, excelling at rock-climbing and reaching a high level of fitness. Such was his prowess and his overall stamina that his national service was spent with the Royal Marines.
After that, Jessop went back to Yorkshire and to the day job he despised. In 1955, he married Mildred Woodhouse, and they started a family that would grow to two sons and a daughter.
To keep food on the table, Jessop was holding down two jobs, supplementing his pay at the mill by giving driving lessons in the evenings.
His time in the marines had introduced him to diving, but this never blossomed into a hobby until he was offered the use of a friend's underwater scuba gear. His first dive was in the River Lune at Kirkby Lonsdale, in Cumbria, and his abiding memory was of the shoal of salmon that enveloped him as they swam by.
He continued to dive, fascinated by the underwater environment and the magical world beneath the surface. He moved from the shallow river waters of Yorkshire to the seas off Scotland and discovered that this world contained something considerably more valuable.
The pivotal moment came during a weekend dive in the Mull of Galloway whilst exploring a wrecked ship on the seabed. It was full of brass and copper, which he collected and sold onshore. It didn't earn him a huge amount, but it was enough to convince him there was mileage in this new career.
It was never going to take much to persuade him to leave the mill, and, along with two friends, Jessop began his new life, mainly scouring the coasts of Scotland for sellable debris. At first, he made very little money and spent much of his time in very real danger. His equipment was far from state-of-the-art, diving in a second-hand Royal Navy dry suit using a homemade air compressor manufactured from various household appliances including a washing machine and vacuum cleaner. To collect his loot, he had amalgamated a tractor tyre and a mesh basket. This worked fine for the smaller pieces they located, but the larger finds required a different tactic. Instead of hoisting items from the seabed with a crane – they had no crane – the three divers would simply lift the item on to their collective shoulders, and walk it out of the water.
Jessop was self taught to a large extent and the fact he survived all his dives was more down to luck than skill or judgment, especially when he began to use underwater explosives in "trial and error" experiments. He acknowledged he was "lucky not to blow myself into oblivion in the process".
However, he was still alive, and making money. In fact, he had made enough from his recoveries to buy a Fleetwood trawler that he called Black Pig, partly in tribute to Captain Pugwash and partly because it was covered in oil. It was the ticket to his fortune that Jessop had been waiting for, enabling bigger and more lucrative dives.
Eventually, the three-way partnership broke up and Jessop ventured on alone. The hardest past of his new career was not the dives themselves, but the research into where to dive to find the best wrecks. It transpired he was a rather gifted researcher, adept at finding the most opportune dive sites using knowledge gleaned from local fishermen and various archives. In particular, he could identify a prime site, even if the evidence suggested it was average at best.
His breakthrough to the big time came in 1969 when his hounding of the Salvage Association (SA) finally reaped rewards. Jessop wanted the recovery rights to some of the wrecks the SA had on its books. Eventually, the SA sent him to look for the Johanna Thorden which had sunk off Swona in the Pentland Firth. He was not the association's favourite person and he was given a simple instruction: find her or don't come back. No other salvage crew would take the job, deeming it to be too dangerous, but whether the SA expected him to be unsuccessful, so ending any association with Jessop, is immaterial – he did find the wreck and recover the vast amount of copper that had sunk with it. His reputation was cemented.
His success continued and he realised that new diving techniques were not just beneficial to exploration and research, but also to wreck recovery. He worked in the oilfields for experience and even recovered from deep waters in the Arctic, but he was by now focused on one big recovery.
In 1942, the British vessel HMS Edinburgh, carrying ten tonnes of what was known as "Stalin's Gold", had been sunk by a German submarine. Jessop knew roughly where she had sunk and at what depth she sat, 800ft below the waves of the Barents Sea.
He wanted the salvage rights and got them, partly because of his less-damaging recovery methods as Edinburgh had been granted war grave status.
It was a huge undertaking and Jessop remortgaged his house to cover the costs. In terms of the location and actual recovery, the project was nothing short of a technical nightmare. The sea was impossibly cold and Jessop and his dive teamwere entering the unknown. However, he emerged triumphant with more than $100 million worth of gold bullion – it was Stalin's payment for goods shipped to the Soviet Union by the Allies during the war. Jessop was officially the most successful underwater treasure finder in history. The dive had earned him about £2 million.
His triumph turned to pain when a writer accused the dive team of having desecrated the war grave and claimed that Jessop had bribed the SA to acquire the salvage rights. Jessop sued and settled out of court.
However, the saga did not end there and he was prosecuted at the Old Bailey. He was acquitted but lost faith with the British system and moved abroad.
He continued to dive and search for treasure, targeting the really big wrecks of history, such as Columbus's Santa Maria and the lost treasure of Henry Morgan.
He published his autobiography, Goldfinder in 2001 and son Graham is now a successful salvage operator in his own right. Keith Jessop is survived by his partner and his three children
