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Bicycle Pump Diver
Wembury Bay played a small but significant part in the early history of modern marine ecology. In 1931 and 1932, Jack Arthur Kitching, T. T. Macan and H. C. Gilson carried out a detailed underwater survey of a submarine gully near Tom Rock, south-west of Wembury church. Their work, published in 1934, studied the plants and animals living below the shore, from low water down to about 40 feet. Using early and improvised diving equipment — including a helmet supplied with air by a bicycle tyre pump — they examined the hidden kelp-covered world beneath Wembury Bay. Their work marked Wembury not just as a place of rockpools, wrecks and coastal scenery, but as a serious field site in the development of subtidal ecology. This song tries to celebrate Wembury as a place where science, sea, courage and curiosity can meet beneath the tide.
[Verse 1]
Fourteen July, nineteen thirty one,
Low tide under the morning sun,
Church on the hill and Tom Rock near,
Green sea moving cold and clear.
Down by the reef with rope and line,
Not much kit, but plenty of time,
Helmet, hose and a borrowed pump,
Science starting with a thump, thump, thump.
[Chorus]
Keep pumping so I can breathe,
Keep pumping and we’ll believe,
There’s a forest in the bay,
Where the kelp moves like a dream.
Keep pumping, hold the line,
Give me air and give me time,
There’s another Wembury waiting
Underneath the tide.
[Verse 2]
Fifteen minutes in the cold,
Rock wall rising, dark and old,
Sandy floor and silt like smoke,
Every wave above them spoke.
Scrape the stone and fill the bag,
Seaweed, shell and living rag,
Not just names in a dusty drawer,
But why they lived on that sea-floor.
[Chorus]
Keep pumping so I can breathe,
Keep pumping and we’ll believe,
There’s a forest in the bay,
Where the kelp moves like a dream.
Keep pumping, hold the line,
Give me air and give me time,
There’s another Wembury waiting
Underneath the tide.
[Verse 3]
Light fell down through the kelp-green shade,
Measurements lost when the diver swayed,
Grease on the skin did nothing much,
Cold got in with a bony touch.
Back on the shore with shaking knees,
Sugar and tea in the salt sea breeze,
Four in a team and one below,
Learning the things the tide would show.
[Bridge]
Not a wreck, not a sailor’s grave,
Not just rockpool, cliff and wave,
But a hidden parish, dark and wide,
Living under the turning tide.
[Final Chorus]
Keep pumping so I can breathe,
Keep pumping and we’ll believe,
There’s a forest in the bay,
Where the kelp moves like a dream.
Keep pumping, hold the line,
Give me air and give me time,
There’s another Wembury waiting
Underneath the tide.