Captain Trevor Hampton was born in Birmingham in 1912 or 1913. He joined the car making firm Austin as an apprentice and raced motorcycles on the Isle of Man. At age 23 he bought a 27-foot yacht but had to give it up because his wife was chronically seasick. He became a Wellington bomber pilot in the RAF. He became a senior test pilot and Flight Lieutenant and got the Flight Cross . While in the RAF at Lossiemouth in Scotland he started diving, making a crude open-circuit (probably constant-flow) scuba from a gas mask and ex-RAF pilot's oxygen cylinders.

After WWII he bought a boat and set sail on it but had to give it up because of a knee injury. He set up business as a marine surveyor and yacht broker at Warfleet Creek in Dartmouth in Devon. He read Cousteau's book "The Silent World" and bought an aqualung from Siebe Gorman, which had started making them, in case it was any use to him. He dived with the first Cousteau-type aqualung made in Britain.

In 1953 a young man asked him for aqualung training, and he took £5 for a 3-day training course. As a result, he started the British Underwater Centre , where he trained many well-known people and some of the first members of the BSAC in aqualung diving and oxygen rebreather diving and standard diving dress diving. Over the years he trained around 3000 people.

For much of the time he used a Siebe Gorman Mark IV Amphibian oxygen rebreather to train divers with in oxygen diving, until in the 1960's he sold it. After that he bought a Cressi-Sub sport diving oxygen rebreather from Italy, but after a year its breathing bag perished, and he replaced it with a Siebe Gorman British naval type breathing bag, which is still as good as new now. After he sold that, he used emergency escape rebreathers which he adapted to have a longer dive duration.

He described an incident when a team of trained British naval divers searched for an object lost underwater and did not find it; they then let Captain Hampton have a look, and at once found it directly under the naval divers' boat, at the center (and blind spot) of their circular search pattern.

He kept yachts and boats in Warfleet Creek. He assumed the title Captain himself because of his many long voyages in small and middle-sized boats.

He sold his diving school in 1976, at age 63, to two men, who tried to run the centre after him, but not well, and it closed down.

Several times he retired and afterwards drifted back into working.

He died 21 Feb 2002 by bursting of a triple aneurysm, at age 89.