Charismatic former pilot who popularised the wetsuit

If he didn’t actually invent the wetsuit, Jack O’neill certainly popularised it, said The Daily Telegraph – and in so doing, helped turn surfing into a global sport and a multibillion dollar industry. O’neill had bodysurfed at Long Beach in southern California as a child, and after moving to San Francisco following the War, he took it up again to relieve the stress of his job as a salesman. But the water there was cold, especially in winter: the hardy few who tried it could only stay in for half-an-hour. Some wore greased long johns; O’neill experimented with latex (as used by US frogmen), but it was thin and fragile. His breakthrough came in 1951, when he heard about neoprene suits, designed by Hugh Bradner, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Then only used by commercial divers, these suits worked not by keeping the water away from the skin, but by thermal insulation, trapping body heat in air bubbles in the fabric.

The following year, O’neill opened his first Surf Shop. “One of the guys told me: ‘O’neill, you’re going to sell to the five guys on the beach and then you’re going to be out of business.’” He wasn’t very confident himself, but once he’d designed a nylon interior to make the wetsuits easier to peel off, sales rocketed. His customers were mainly divers; surfers thought wetsuits were uncool. But O’neill – a charismatic former navy pilot – had a flair for marketing: he toured the US, dressing his children in wetsuits and dunking them in icy baths at trade fairs. “It’s always summer on the inside,” was his slogan. By the 1960s, even purists were relying on wetsuits in the winter: using them opened up swathes of coastline formerly off limits. In 1971, he lost an eye in a surfing accident. It didn’t stop him: he put on an eyepatch, and used his piratical features (complete with bushy beard) to promote the brand. By the time his son Pat took over the firm in 1985, O’neill was the world’s biggest supplier of recreational wetsuits.

Jack O’neill had six children with his first wife (who died in 1973). He brought them up in Santa Cruz in a clifftop house overlooking the Pacific, with a trampoline in the front hall. He rarely gave interviews, but was known to love sailing and hot-air ballooning, and to have been especially proud of his Sea Odyssey programme, which teaches children about marine conservation.