Ross Kemp: Deep Sea Treasure Hunter - Meet the team
Mallory Haas (centre) and Neil Brock (right) assisted Ross Kemp on his shipwreck adventure.
Ross Kemp: Deep Sea Treasure Hunter sees the BAFTA award-winning documentary-maker dive on a series of incredible shipwrecks around the British coastline to reveal some of the nation’s murkiest and best-kept secrets.
From the remains of a slave ship discovered off Plymouth, to the Kaiser’s sunken Imperial Fleet in Scapa Flow and an experimental submarine aircraft carrier, which sank with all passengers and crew on deck during its sea trials, Ross uncovers Britain’s hidden maritime past.
Ross is joined in his adventures by expert diver Emily Turton, maritime archaeologist and professional diver Mallory Haas and dive supervisor Neil Brock as they delve down into Britain’s past.
Emily Turton – Dive Guide
Emily Turton is an advanced technical diver and dive boat skipper based in Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s historic naval base in the far northerly Orkneys. After seeing the lands and waters of the Orkneys, Emily gave up training as an opera singer to settle in the remote islands.
She is a lecturer in Maritime Studies, a fellow of the Explorers Club, and can usually be found aboard her purpose-built dive boat MV Huskyan – the Orkandian word for ‘strength’ – taking sports divers out to explore the many shipwrecks strewn beneath Scapa’s waters. Emily has dedicated the last 18 years of her life to wreck diving and continues to champion the WWI German Fleet wrecks.
Emily was the driving force behind the ‘Scapa 100 Initiative’ to commemorate the centenary of the scuttling of the WWI German High Seas Fleet and before that she co-organised surveys of HMS Hampshire, HMS Vanguard, and the HMS Royal Oak. She uses underwater photography, videography, and 3D photogrammetry to build a digital record of shipwrecks and bring them to the surface for the wider community to see.
Mallory Haas – Maritime Archaeologist
Mallory Haas began her career working in public archaeology in Cleveland, Ohio, where she managed several seasons of field courses for inner schools, engaging underprivileged youth in historical archaeology to create an interest in science and history.
After getting involved in diving and maritime archaeology in the Great Lakes in the USA, Mallory is now a commercial diver and mixed gas technical diver. She has undergone specialist training with the US Military in Hawaii to be a lead investigator on missions to recover human remains underwater from wrecks or crash sites.
Mallory moved to the UK about a decade ago and started working with the SHIPS Project in 2013, where she is now director and chief archaeologist.
She is the lead for the Stray Finds Project which aims to record objects found underwater by sports divers and the SHIPS Project is developing a scheme to train leisure divers as shipwreck explorers, bringing more citizen science to underwater heritage. In addition, she’s launched a new environmental initiative called the ‘1000 Tyre Project’ that encourages volunteer divers to remove tyres and other harmful abandoned junk from Plymouth Sound.
In the past few years, Mallory has started to consult for media outlets, helping to develop several shipwreck investigations in both the UK and USA. She was the archaeological advisor for the landmark BBC television series Enslaved, and her most recent work includes a collaboration with Mohini Chandra at the Plymouth College of Art.
Diving is and always has been her passion and she spends many a weekend plunging into the waters around Devon to explore its many shipwrecks.
Neil Brock – Dive Supervisor
Neil began sport diving almost half a century ago and has been doing it ever since, progressing to commercial diving in 1981.
In his time, Neil has worked on complex oil and salvage-related projects all over the world, from the warm waters of the Caribbean to the icy seas of the polar regions. The challenging and often risky work has taken Neil down to extreme depths, more than 300 metres, and put him at the cutting edge of the ever-developing skills, and technology, of diving.
In more recent years, Neil has developed his own company, Bristol Channel Diving, into the UK’s foremost expert in the logistics and delivery of high-level underwater filming. Neil’s team have been at the centre of world-renowned award-winning series such as Blue Planet 2 for the BBC and The Dark Secrets of Lusitania for National Geographic.
Neil heads up a busy team that runs the health and safety executive’s diving assessment centre and sits on the Society for Underwater Technology Diving and Manned Submersibles Committee. He still, occasionally, graces the water himself and shows the youngsters how it’s done.
