Roger Cox: Meet the original daredevils who sought the best waves and surfed their way into Scottish history

For a start there are the wetsuits – not the specialised one-piece “steamers” that began to appear in the early 1970s but primitive two-piece “beavertail” affairs, named after the dangling flap at the back of the jacket which had to be passed between the legs and buttoned up at the front to hold the whole ensemble together. Then there are the boards. The shorter, slimmer craft second right contrasts with the wide, unwieldy boards around it, hinting that we might be in the late 1960s, when leading pros like Australia’s Nat Young first started experimenting with shorter, more streamlined designs.

In fact, the picture was taken in 1969 and the five fresh-faced young surfers are, from left to right, Bill Batten, Pete Rennie, Phil Mathewson, Glyn Fielding and Andy Bennetts − the first people to surf at Pease and also some of the first people ever to surf in Scotland. Four decades on, Bennetts, 61, still lives and surfs in the area, and he looks back on those early days with a mixture of affection and amusement.

“You have to bear in mind that there were limited weather forecasts back then and there was no internet, nothing to tell you whether there was a wave or not,” he says. “You had to go down to the beach and find out just by looking. It took us quite a while to work out the weather forecasts and what would give you a wave and what wouldn’t.”

Today, Pease is one of Scotland’s best-known surf spots, but it took Bennetts and Co a while to find it. Based in Edinburgh, from the autumn of 1968 the group first started surfing at Belhaven Bay, a gentle beachbreak near Dunbar, but then Batten made a discovery that changed everything.

“Bill said he’d driven further down the coast,” says Bennetts. “He told us he’d gone up this road and he could see waves breaking in a bay beneath him but he couldn’t work out how to get down there – and that was Pease.

“I think we worked out pretty quickly that Pease was better and more consistent than Belhaven. It was a bit more dangerous too, given our limited ability − you had the psychological bit to get over that you weren’t surfing over sand, you were surfing over boulders, but you soon got the idea that you weren’t really going to hit the bottom unless you dived straight down.”

Nowadays, when a surfer becomes separated from his board, he can retrieve it easily thanks to a stretchy polyurethane leash attached to his ankle; in the early days at Pease, however, there was no such luxury. A board washing in to the beach meant a lengthy swim, often against strong currents. So whereas today’s surfers usually look for empty waves to surf, away from everyone else, Bennetts and his buddies tended to stick together, both in the interests of safety and for moral support.

“At that time there were probably about eight people surfing [in south east Scotland], and the biggest issue was trying to get people together to go down,” he says. “You were a bit reluctant to go down yourself because it could be six or seven foot and banging in and nobody there. So we usually phoned round on a weekend – ‘who’s comin’ down the beach?’ kind of thing – then piled into a van, car or whatever and went surfing.”

The group also pioneered surfing at Coldingham, Thorntonloch and North Berwick, but with nobody else in the water until the mid-1970s, when surfers started coming over from Glasgow, they saw little point in exploring further.

Being one of the first people to surf an iconic spot like Pease Bay would be an impressive enough claim to fame for any surfer, but it’s only one part of the remarkable Andy Bennetts story. So tune in again next week to find out about his historic, wetsuit-free visit to Aberdeen in September 1968, his early (and very messy) attempts to build his own surfboards and his first forays to the wave-rich north coast.