Intrepid friend with genius for invention

SCOFF and I met 30 years ago. He was wearing a big smile, wooden clogs, a rather garish hand-knitted green and yellow sweater and a matching pompom hat.

He’d knitted them himself — he said it helped to pass the time during undercover operations as part of his job for HM Customs and Excise.

He worked with a team from the national Crime Agency, tracking down national and international drug smugglers, often disguised as a tramp. But he was far too modest and discreet to talk about all that. So I got to know him as a kind, wise, brave, generous and very funny friend during many happy years at the Bradford Pothole Club.

He was an expert caver and hugely respected member of the club, spending any weekend he could in the Yorkshire Dales with his caving friends and his incredibly supportive wife of 30 years.

As well as caving, he embraced cave diving — a dangerous branch of the sport which involves exploring flooded underground passages in caves. It’s not a hobby for the faint-hearted but Scoff loved it and became chairman of the British Cave Diving Group.

He was a gifted musician, playing keyboard in a blues band that performed in pubs and clubs, he had several of his innovative caving maps published and was a popular afterdinner speaker.

But it was his inventiveness that really set him apart. Using old plumbing parts, he designed several pieces of cave diving equipment that are now standard kit worldwide and created his own mountain tents and eclectic outdoor clothing using just his old sewing machine and swathes of nylon and Gore-Tex.

In 1997, during an international diving project in the Doux de Coly, a huge clear water cave in the Dordogne, he made his own electric underwater scooter (to ferry heavy diving equipment) out of odd bits of old lavatory plumbing and christened it the Bog O’Zepp. Later that year at Buckingham Palace, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh honoured him and six other divers for their part in the project.

It was in 2016, on his return from a diving trip in Spain, that his wife noticed his skin had developed a yellowy tinge. Doctors diagnosed him with terminal liver cancer and told him he had months, rather than years. As he couldn’t go caving or cave diving any more, he took up kayaking, spent time wild camping, hiking, biking and wrote a book.

BRYAN ‘SCOFF’ SCHOFIELD, born January 13, 1956, died August 12, 2017, aged 61.