Oscar Gugen

In the 1970s, E. T. Skinner & Co. Ltd. was renamed Typhoon and a factory was built in Redcar, where the company continues to operate. Typhoon is a manufacturer of dry suits for diving and other water sport, rescue, commercial and military applications, and lifejackets and buoyancy aids.

Gugen retired from chairing the BSAC in 1958. In the club's magazine Triton, Peter Small paid tribute to Oscar Gugen's service as club chairman: "It is impossible to over-estimate what Oscar Gugen has accomplished for the club. He and I started it over a glass of beer, but it was mainly his inspiration (the Club, not the beer) and it was he, rather than any other single person, who has guided the Club from those humble beginnings to its present position of national, even international, authority." According to an article elsewhere in the same issue, Gugen was subsequently elected president of the BSAC London Branch, which is the original branch No.1 of the British Sub-Aqua Club.

The 1956 and 1966 editions of Skinner's handbook for skin divers served as the company's product catalogues during the 1950s and 1960s. This guide provided basic safety advice and listed the company's full range of underwater swimming products, both imported lines and its own-brand "Typhoon" articles of British design and manufacture. Both editions contained product descriptions of diving masks (the Typhoon Super Star and Blue Star diving masks pictured right appeared in both issues), breathing tubes, swimfins (the Typhoon Clubmaster swimming fins pictured right appeared in both issues, while the Typhoon Speedmaster swimming fins pictured alongside them only appeared in the 1956 edition), dry suits, wetsuits and harpoon guns. The 1966 issue also listed an underwater camera and demand valves.

During the 1950s and 1960s, E. T. Skinner & Co. Ltd. filed several successful British patent applications:

Gugen's partnership was named E. T. Skinner & Co. Ltd after Eric Skinner. The firm traced its origins back to 1948. E. T. Skinner & Co. Ltd. traded from premises at 400 Harrow Road, London W9, then from 1955 at 2 Lochaline Street, Hammersmith, London W6. Gugen used his knowledge of languages and business acumen to expand by importing swimming goggles and swimfins from France, as the Dunlop Rubber company, who had made wartime frogmen's fins, had decided that there would be no market for them in peace time. Soon he was selling 300 pairs of fins a week, mainly to Gamages and to Colin McLeod at Lillywhites.

Norbert Oscar Gugen (20 January 1910 – 19 March 1992) co-founded the British Sub-Aqua Club, "the largest and most successful diving club in the world", and the partnership E. T. Skinner & Co. Ltd., which became Typhoon International, "the world’s largest manufacturer of drysuits". Born Norbert Oscar Gugenbichler in Paris with dual Austrian and French citizenship, he was naturalised British as "Manager and Secretary (Toy Manufacturers)" on 29 August 1951.

Gugen was born in Paris in 1910 to an Austrian father and a French mother. He started as a hotel kitchen hand in Austria, peeling carrots. By the age of 21 he was a hotel director in the south of France. When World War II started, he joined the French Army. After the Germans broke through into France, he destroyed his papers, swam across the mouth of the Loire and boarded the last British destroyer which was evacuating British troops. As he had no papers, he was interned on the Isle of Man, and released at the end of the war. He became a swimming pool attendant, and then managed an American Army Officers' Club. After the Americans left, he became a partner of Eric Skinner, who was selling jigsaw puzzles.