Margaret Naylor
British woman who became first female deep-sea diver
Anne Margaret Mary Therese Naylor (10 July 1893 – 16 August 1967) more commonly known as Margaret Naylor was the first woman deep-sea diver.
Naylor was born in 1893. During the First World War Naylor worked for the British government eventually working in the Ministry of Information as part of the Office of Propaganda in Enemy Countries or the Crewe House committee.
Diver
By 1919, Naylor had become the secretary to Kenneth Mackenzie Foss, a retired Indian Army colonel. Foss held a salvage licence to a sunken Spanish ship from the Armada which had gone down in Tobermory Bay in 1588. Foss believed the ship was the Florencia, one of the Spanish flagships and carrying a fortune in gold coins.
Naylor was fascinated by the work of the divers and asked Foss for the opportunity to dive herself. Initially her proposal was rebuffed but after Naylor studied the subject and questioned the male divers, Foss relented and with no prior experience allowed Naylor to dive on the wreck, 70 feet (21.3 m) down. The first dive almost ended in disaster as Naylor's suit telephone stopped working and the surface team started to haul her up. On reaching the ladder, the surface team continued to haul but one of Naylor's boots had jammed in the ladder.
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This entry incorporates text from “Margaret Naylor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.