"Five Bells" Job Done:
Copyright © A.G.Liddicoat.
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About the book
Diving since his teenage years, Liddicoat mastered all three categories of diving: commercial, military and recreational. He recounts his progression through these disciplines, managing to mix all three during a career that spanned nearly 50 years. His diving adventures have taken him around the world, to every ocean and to many different lands. He has experienced the extremes of climate and terrain and accepted many challenges, including diving inside a nuclear reactor, placing and detonating explosive charges, searching for bodies in sewers and training new divers on a tropical island.
No stranger to peril, Liddicoat learned that life is too short to hold back, even when writing. "I write with my heart on my sleeve," he says. "Like all lives, there are highs and lows, and I share these times with the reader openly."
As magical as it is frightening, "Five Bells" Job Done captivates readers with its scenery, action and, above all, courage.
Read an extract from this exciting autobiography by clicking here
Reviews of Five Bells, Job Done - A Divers Story
Click here for full size image of this review in X-Ray Magazine.
"As so many times before, reality beats fiction when it comes to captivation and sheer entertainment. This tales takes us back to some of the early diving days, starting in 1963 when the author joined the British Army, to be precise. The autobiographic narration is generously illustrated mainly with old grainy black and white photographs, like from an old family album. But that only adds to the realism. I can hardly believe the equipment they had,or didn't have, back then. It certainly puts things in perspective. Not only does one begin to appreciate the technological advances we can now all enjoy, but also how different the life of a military or commercial diver is from that of a recreational diver. During almost five decades of diving, Tony Liddicoat has seen it all, from military assignments all over the world to excavating wrecks, searching for bodies in severs and diving into nuclear reactors, to the more recreational aspects of diving taking place on tropical islands. It's a "boys book" I guess, being full of adventure and bravado, military and hardware, but highly entertaining, and it gives you an insight into diving and sides of it that Discovery Channel cannot. So, if you don't want to save it for a long flight overseas, or for you live-aboard, switch off the telly and put on the kettle and make yourself comfortable with "Five Bells" Job Done.
Peter Sykes, X-Ray Magazine, Edition 22, 2008
"Reading some of Liddicoat's stories you can't help but feel a great deal of respect for the man and the conditions he worked and lived in. It certainly puts a daily working life in front of a computer into stark contrast. I've had a fleeting experience in the standard dress diving wear and one thing it made me appreciate is the difficulty with which people who wore such equipment for their work had to endure. Whether you just dip in and out of the collection of stories depending on your interests, or read from cover to cover, there will be a lot to grab your attention. I have a feeling most will not be able to put this down."
Martin Bruce, Sport Diver Magazine
Tony Liddicoat learned to dive while doing his military training in Dover, and his underwater career has spanned almost 40 years.
Searching for victims of drownings, helping Jacques Cousteau navigate the reefs of Belize and undertaking many forms of hazardous underwater salvage are typical incidents that pepper this personal account of a diving life.
Perhaps the most remarkable story in "Five Bells" Job Done concerns Liddicoat's management of a successful inwater recompression for a diver suffering a near fatal case of the bends.
Not only did Liddicoat have to take the semi-conscious patient into deep water in the face of an oncoming hurricane, but he commenced the dive without the use of his own mask!
He writes, as he says, reluctantly, about his own heroism, a feat that earned him DIVER's Diver of the Year award in 1981.
Submerged at more than 30m, at night, and suspended from a shotline attached to a leaking RIB, and with the patient diving in pyjamas, Liddicoat saved the other diver's life.
Ironically, the Army's initial response was to punish him for breaking the rules, although he was later awarded the Queen's Commendation for Brave Conduct.
"Five Bells" is very much Liddicoat's story in his own words, and many ex-military divers will empathise with the anecdotes he relates. His enthusiasm and can-do spirit shine through the stories and make the reader wish they could join him in the bar for a pint to hear more.
Tim Ecott, DIVER Magazine
Click here to read this review on line
This is an immensely readable book probably because he kept a running log of all his activities over the years which gave an enjoyable continuity. More importantly perhaps we should recognise that the first part represents one man's history of a period in modern British Army diving (Miners and Sappers had famously worked under Col Pasley on the Royal George wreck in the 1840s) during what was called the 'Cold War'.
Peter Dick, The Historical Diving Times