I know about the 'Snake-Pit' and Karl Gotch etc, but does anyone know of any existing practitioners of Hooking? Or any info about it?

There are probably guys training at AOWC to this day who are up to hooker level. Also Lancashire Wrestling always featured (what would come to be known as) hooks as a basic feature (it was a sport about crippling, just as boxing is a sport about causing brain damage) so on this side of the pond, such knowledge was quite widespread.

Shooters, by definition, had to know some basic hooks. Accurate information about different wrestlers' skill levels is hard to come by however. Many top TV wrestlers had access to hooking knowledge. Johnny Saint, for example was trained by Billy Robinson. Kendo Nagasaki was trained by Geoff "Count Bartelli" Condliffe who was an early student of Billy Riley himself. How good they actually were in comparison to each other is very much a mystery.

You could also have learned it at several other Wigan gyms (Charnock's etc) as well as at the now defunct Dale Martin gym at 313 Brixton Road (it's now somebody's house btw.)

And of course There's Tietam Brown in the Mick Foley book of the same name. Mick talks about hooking in my interview with him on wrestle-zone.co.uk