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The Torquay Marine Spa swimming pool tragedy is a nightmarish story – how 11-year-old orphan John Moran died after being sucked 12ft underwater along a drainage pipe in July 1971.

Here we look back at the terrible story.

But what many people don’t know is that it was the second time that a similar thing had happened at the same pool. Horrifically the first victim survived the ordeal. She was pulled underwater and held her breath as she was sucked 150ft through the barnacled outflow and dumped out to sea, her body stripped of skin.

Phyllis Williams was 15 when she was dragged into the ten-inch diameter pipe in 1930. Experts predicted she would never recover. She was stripped of skin and flesh over many parts of her body and became the worst case of septicaemia her doctors and nurses had ever seen.

Miraculously she survived and told her story in full to the Western Morning News 70 years later when she was a great-grandmother.

After Phyllis was sucked into the pipe it was made smaller to prevent it ever happening again.

But sadly John Moran did not survive after he was sucked 12ft into the filtration pipe. This time the pool and Marine Spa (now the site of the Living Coasts penguin zoo above Torquay harbourside) had to be demolished after it took rescuers with drills 26 hours to cut away the concrete end wall of the pool and recover his body.

John was one of three children from the former St Vincent’s Children’s Home in Torre, now Mount Stuart Hospital who had gone swimming one evening.

He was in his last year at the Church of the Assumption primary school in Abbey Road, Torquay and was known as the best swimmer in the school who could hold his breath for a long time underwater.

The children were playing a game to see who could remain the longest at the bottom of the swimming pool.

It’s thought John sat on the grill covering the pipe and a vacuum was created, preventing him from swimming away. The vacuum became stronger and stronger and he was sucked backwards into the pipe.

At 8pm the pool was closing, John was missing and his clothes were found in a changing cubicle. School friends believe that the other two tried to raise the alarm because they feared he had been sucked into the opening, but were not at first believed.

Torquay Fire Brigade was called and divers realised that the missing boy must indeed be in the pipe.

The pool was emptied of 90,000 gallons of water and, using torches, the child’s body could be seen 12ft inside the pipe.

It was too late – a rope couldn’t be attached and efforts to reach him failed.

Work then went on throughout the night using pneumatic drills to reach the pipe and John’s body was eventually recovered.

Today, there is a memorial to John Moran, at the entrance to Beacon Cove.

Great-grandmother Phyllis Williams told the Western Morning News in the year 2000 how she had been at the centre of one of the most bizarre incidents in Devon.

Phyllis, originally from Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire, had been staying at the Palace Hotel nearby for the resort's annual tennis tournament when she joined a group of nearly ten friends and family in the Marine Spa pool.

But the 90,000 gallons of water were being emptied and the force of the water squeezed her through the pipe. The suction was so great that it dragged her 150ft along the rusty and barnacled interior of the pipe and around a bend before dumping her bleeding body into Beacon Cove.

She remembered every second of her terrifying ordeal.

"I can remember it so accurately because I was conscious all the time – if I hadn't been I would have drowned when I came out in the sea. This is where I remember it so clearly. It was reported at the time that I had come out in the shallows, but I hadn't because I remember swimming back in to the beach. I had taken a deep breath as I went under in the baths. I thought I'd had it – I can remember thinking that this was it. But then I came out and I suddenly saw the sky.

"I came up at the side of a lady who nearly had a heart attack. But she helped me out of the water and I walked up the beach. I was totally unaware that my bathing costume was in ribbons and I was covered in blood. I had no idea I was even hurt."

She was driven to Torbay Hospital, sitting on the lap of her sister Mary in a car being driven by a friend in his bare feet.

"There were no emergency units or intensive care units then and there were no drugs of any description. The pipe had been terribly rusty and my lungs were full of rusty water.

"I was conscious when I went into the hospital but then they clapped iodine all over me – well, that was the end of that. I lost consciousness immediately, which was perhaps just as well.

"My parents were sent for and I was very ill with complete general septicaemia – my hair all fell out and so did my nails. I was the worst case they had ever seen at the hospital and when I was unconscious my parents were told there was nothing more the doctors could do for me.

"They told mother that all she could do was to kneel down and pray for me, which she and father did."

Phyllis was unconscious for several days and when she eventually came round there were two big disappointments waiting for her. One was that her precious watch had been stolen from among her clothes at the baths – it had been her first ever watch and a gift from her father – and the other was that she was forced to withdraw from Junior Wimbledon, for which she had just qualified for the first time.

Phyllis spent three months in hospital and it took her almost a year to get to somewhere near to a full recovery.

But she is not bitter about the incident: "They did say to us when we arrived that the pool was being emptied, but nobody warned us of any danger. They only told us not to dive in.

"I never held any animosity towards anyone because I was just glad to be alive. But my father did take some sort of legal action later and I got £250 which was put into postal savings. I remember seeing a lawyer who said I had ruined his case because I had recovered.

"But what was never taken into consideration was that I could never wear a decent evening dress for years after because of all the scars I had, and also it completely ruined my career. I had been down to go to Dartford Physical Training College, but I was told that I would never have the stamina to get through the course there or to do anything like that for the rest of my life because my lungs had been damaged as well.

"But what a good job, because I've often thought I would not have met my husband if I had become a gym teacher."

Phyllis had a happy marriage of 34 years and it was after her bank manager husband Tony died that she moved to Chagford to be near her daughter.