In the circle of life, it’s the wheel of fortune
It’s the leap of faith, it’s the band of hope
Till we find our place on the path unwinding
In the circle, the circle of life (Lebo, M. 1994)
I have recently been reading Swell: A Waterbiography by Jenny Landreth (2017) and I cannot recommend it highly enough; I couldn’t put it down. It very cleverly interweaves Jenny’s own ‘history’ of swimming (her waterbiography) with an account of the history of swimming in general – and in particular, the history of women’s swimming. It describes how, in the 19th Century, swimming was almost exclusively the domain of men and amazingly, it wasn’t until the 1930s that women were ‘reluctantly’ granted equal access.
Regardless whether you enjoy reading about swimming, if you enjoy reading about social history and the journey on the road towards women’s equality, you will enjoy this book. Even better, it is written as though narrated by a stand up comedian. It is laugh out loud funny.
Through this blog, I have been discussing my more recent journey into open water swimming. However, as I laughed in an ‘I was there’ kind of way at so many of Landreth’s descriptions, this book caused me to reflect back on some of my own earliest memories of swimming. It also led me to reflect on how much of my pre-adult swimming was in fact outdoors – and even if not all year round, it was certainly often in cold water. Jenny Landreth says in her book: “we all have our own story to tell about how we learned to swim (or not), our relationship with water, the people who encouraged us and the places we came to cherish” and so this is a little bit of mine.
It’s a family affair
I would love to be able to say that the people who inspired me into swimming were women. But – and probably for all the sociological reasons outlined in Jenny Landreth’s book – they weren’t. It was my dad who always took us to the swimming pool and who also always swam in the sea with us. And it was his father before him who was probably responsible for passing on that love of swimming to him.
My grand-father was born in Bristol in 1890. I know little about his life, but one thing I do know is that he ‘taught’ swimming – as a volunteer coach, with the youth organisation The Boys Brigade. This is a photo of my granddad (in the centre) with, presumably, two of ‘his’ champion swimmers. I don’t know the date that this photo was taken, but guessing (by the boys swim-suits and the age of my grand-dad) I would say it is the early 1930s.
After the First World War, health concerns and a general increase in the popularity of outdoor pursuits led to a high demand for activities such as swimming. Between 1922 and 1937, in the effort to meet Bristol’s Baths Committee’s target of every home in the city coming within one mile of a swimming facility, six public swimming baths were built. Bristol South Baths (where my grand-father taught) opened in 1931. Life came full circle for us when, later, in the 1980s, my own three daughters learned to swim in those same baths.
I also have a couple of old grainy photos of my grandfather with my dad at the seaside. They are both fully dressed in these, and sitting on the sand, but they do show that my dad, like a growing number of families in the late 1920s, started to enjoy trips to ‘the seaside’ – even if they did nothing more than paddle in the sea.
Thanks, I imagine, to my grandfather’s interest, the love of swimming was passed down to my dad – and then to me. Throughout my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, my father took us swimming just about every weekend. He ferried us all to swimming lessons and later to swimming clubs, and when we went on holiday to the seaside, it was always my dad who came in the sea with us.
Come Outside
In this photo, taken in 1955, my dad is nurturing my earliest engagement with the sea. I am two years old and clearly enjoying it. The waves in the background, the deserted beach and the windblown nature of our hair suggests to me that it was probably not a hot summer’s day! And that would not be unusual. Most years, especially when I was very young, we generally took our family holiday in the Spring, presumably because it was cheaper then. I now know that, in the Spring, the sea is not yet warm – and yet we always went in – as did he. And we enjoyed it!
In the summer months we also, often, swam outdoors in lidos. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s everywhere seemed to have an outdoor pool – a lido. These lidos usually had a ‘paddling’ area where the younger children and non-swimmers could gain confidence and enjoy the water (that’s me in the big nickers!).
Lidos became hugely popular across the UK in the 1930s when outdoor swimming began to grow in popularity. Concerns about health, increased focus on ‘recreation’ and the beginnings of a tradition to have a ‘family holiday’ led to the growth of entertainments at both ‘the seaside’ and in the parks. Not everyone could access the seaside resorts, but most towns had access to a lido. However, in the 1970s, when the foreign holiday in the sun began to become more popular and less expensive many people started to abandon outdoor pools at home and many lidos were closed.
As it happens my first swimming lessons, at around the age of six years old, were in an outdoor pool – in Long Eaton, Derbyshire. My only memories of those swimming lessons are a) that it was very, very cold and b) that I was launched into swimming independently with a sort of canvas belt around my middle that was attached to a rope, which the swimming teacher used (in my memory) to haul me into the pool side.
As I recall, the only two children being taught to swim at that time were myself and my sister. I’m sure the rest of the population judged it to be much too cold. The lessons were probably ‘on offer’ at the beginning of the outdoor season and that would be why we were there! I can still vividly remember the uncontrollable shivering and our blue lips when we got out.
My dad, however, used to make the most delicious hot cocoa and he always took a flask of it for us to drink after a swimming lesson. I still associate hot cocoa with cold water swimming. Hot cocoa and shivering seem to belong together and while admittedly, my own flask these days contains ‘instant’ hot chocolate, the tradition continues.
Once we had learnt to swim, my dad took us swimming almost every weekend. The outdoor pools weren’t open in the winter and so we were taken to swim in indoor pools, which always seemed to be rather a long way from where we lived. These indoor pools were always noisy, over-crowded, over chlorinated and over-heated. If there were life-guards, I have no idea how they would have spotted anyone in difficulty. The water was cloudy. People could dive in off the high board and off the spring board into where people below were swimming. There were no lanes for swimming in. People just launched themselves in from wherever they fancied and swam in whichever direction they could. As our family grew, my dad would be responsible in that water for 5 or 6 children, some of whom were wearing those ineffectual inflatable rings that non-swimmers wore in those days. We loved it! And there was always hot cocoa afterwards.
We still went to the British sea-side for our holidays and we still visited lidos – and a local lake – in the school summer holidays, but the serious business of swimming was, from that point on, always done in an indoor pool.
Upside Down
When I was 10 years old we moved house again, to a village in Hampshire. The nearest indoor pool, where the swimming lessons were held, was in Aldershot, a garrison town. The pool was owned by the army and was only open for ‘public swimming’ at particular times of day. The swimming instructor was an ex-army PE instructor and, aged 11, I was enrolled into one of his swimming classes called ‘Improvers’. Once again, off we went every Saturday for our lessons, followed by an hour of ‘public swimming’.
The Saturday morning swimming lessons became a sort of club that you belonged to as you moved up through the stages, working towards badges and other awards. Normally there would be only one transition route for a young promising swimmer and that would be into the ‘competitive’ world of swimming races. However, in 1965, the swimming instructor had seen a Canadian teacher on an exchange visit practicing synchronised swimming in our pool. Being an ex-PE instructor, he was inspired by this new gymnastic swimming skill and he set about recruiting a small group of girls who swam in his classes and formed the Synchronised Swimming Club. One of those girls was me.
These were very early days in the life of synchronised swimming. That little club of which I was one of the first members, went on to become one of the top clubs in the country – The Rushmoor Synchronised Swimming Club – and to produce several Olympic Champions. It was far from being that when I was a member though – and the truth is – I wasn’t that good at it. In fact, I left the club in 1969 in order to concentrate on my A Levels. But I have remained a firm fan – and champion – of synchronised swimming.
“To and fro she’s gently gliding, On the glassy lake she’s riding” (Rolling Stones, 1967)
I mention the synchronised swimming because it reminded me that I also used to swim in lakes – many years before I took up my more recent pursuit of open water swimming. In the summers of 1973 and 1974, when I was a student, I worked at a summer camp in Maine, USA. This camp was situated at one end of a lake in which we taught swimming, water skiing, canoeing and sailing. I swam in the lake every day and at the end of each summer I joined in the ‘event’ to swim the length of the 2 kilometre lake. At the end of each summer we also organised a swimming gala and, the summers that I was there, one of the highlights was the staff synchronised swimming display in the lake.
– one of those pairs of legs is mine!
It interested me, reading Jenny Landreth’s book, that displays of ‘gymnastic’ swimming skills were common in the later 19th century – primarily as a theatrical ‘sport-as entertainment’ tradition allowing women (who were not permitted to swim publicly in races or other endurance challenges) to showcase their skills. Even when women began to push against this prejudice and take on endurance challenges they seemingly had to do so as a theatrical entertainment.
Agnes Beckwith, in 1878, swam 20 miles down the Thames from Westminster Bridge to Richmond – and back – and yet her swim was reported as ‘a youthful water sprite … gliding prettily along … wearing a closely fitting amber suit adorned with white lace, a jaunty hat and fluttering blue ribbons’! She went on to be called the greatest ‘lady swimmer’ in the world and to perform in frequent ‘ornamental and scientific‘ displays at the Royal Aquarium.
Annette Kellerman, an endurance swimmer, advocate of women’s swimming and the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel became more famous as a Hollywood star renowned for helping to popularise the sport of synchronised swimming after her 1907 performance of the ‘first water ballet’ in a glass tank in New York.
Hilda James, Olympic Silver Medallist in 1920 and the first woman to swim the ‘new’ stroke called ‘American Crawl’ in Britain, gained support for women’s right to compete in swimming by ‘doing silly water tricks‘ in gala comedy routines.
And in 1915, in America, Charlotte Epstein, who campaigned to allow women to register in swimming events, won a small victory when she was given permission to organise the first ever ‘Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships’ – where New Yorkers ‘gathered in their thousands to watch a display of women’s ornamental and practical skills‘. Two years later swimming was formally recognised as a sport for women.
It strikes me as particularly ironic, therefore, that it took until the 1980s for synchronised swimming to be finally recognised as an Olympic Sport – amid much ridicule and patronising let us not forget.
The Times They Are A Changing
Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’. (Bob Dylan, 1964)
Looking back through some of my old memories it struck me that most of the outdoor swimming pools, lidos and paddling pools in which I swam and played are now gone. Some of the old indoor pools I swam in have also been replaced with modern, indoor ‘leisure centres’. From a peak of over 300 lidos and open air pools in Britain in the 1950s, only around 100 now remain. Cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, which until the 1950s each had several public open air facilities, now have none. London’s total of 68 is now reduced to 8.
Ayriss (2009) attributes the demise of lidos to the ‘advent of Health and Safety Regulations’ that required the removal of diving boards and water slides from nearly all swimming baths. In addition, most lidos used to contain unheated water and ‘with the changes in social conditions and improvements in household heating, the nation became used to higher temperatures’. There was also the trend, in the 1970s, when the foreign holiday in the sun began to become more popular and less expensive and many people started to abandon the cold outdoor pools at home in favour of warmer waters.
However, in 2005 English Heritage published a book by Janet Smith: Liquid Assets – the lidos and open air swimming pools of Britain, exploring the past, present and future of open air swimming pools. This was followed by a conference in 2006 called: “Reviving Lidos” that kick-started a movement to campaign for the restoration of many of our lidos.
Ten years later in 2016, Vanessa Thorpe was able to describe, what she considers to be,“signs of a national movement: a retro bathing boom that reflects a wide interest in the quality of the whole swimming experience”. This movement, she argues is driven by a “fresh impulse to swim in the open air” but has mainly been made possible by the support and interest of Britain’s architectural historians who have been championing the restoration of British Lidos.
Currently, Janet Wilkinson and Emma Pusill are crowd funding to be able to publish their Lido Guide in which they hope “to cover every single open-air pool that survives in the UK, alongside those where there is a realistic chance that they may be saved”. This is not a history of lidos past, it is very much a practical celebration of lidos present.
And, of course, it is not just lidos. As I have discovered since I have been swimming outdoors, the recent renewed interest in open water swimming has led to a rapid growth in participation. Laville, writing in The Guardian in 2015 noted that ‘open-water swimming has become a pursuit enjoyed by tens of thousands in the UK … more and more people – most from their late 30s and into their 80s – across the UK are safely moving from swimming pools into open water, be it lakes, rivers or oceans’.
And for me, I have discovered that this has been a ‘back into’ journey. I have re-engaged with the forgotten joys of swimming in the sea and in colder waters and in common with everyone I have met and everyone who has written a book or an article about it – I have fallen in love with it again. In the words of Jenny Landreth (which could so easily have been mine):
“I swim for the healing, the health, the confidence. The adventures, the risks, the fun. The way it feeds me and at the same time clears my head and fills it with a bit of peace. The enrichment and the escape. The community, the camaraderie … I have never regretted a swim. I have cried into my goggles but I have never got out feeling worse. Always better. Swimming has made me happy”.
References
Ayriss, C. (2009) Hung Out To Dry, Lulu.com
Dylan, B. (1964) The Times They Are A-Changin’, from the album The Times They Are A-Changin, Colombia Records.
Landreth, J. (2017) Swell: A Waterbiography, Bloomsbury
Laville, S. (2015) “Different Strokes: Open Water Swimming Takes the UK by Storm” in The Guardian, 18th August 2015.
Lebo, M. (1994) The Circle of Life, from the The Lion King (Soundtrack), Disney
Rolling Stones, The (1967) Gomper, from the album Their Satanic Majesties Request, London Records.
Ross, D. (1980) Upside Down, from the album Diana, Motown.
Sarne, M & Richards, W. (1962) Come Outside, Parlophone
Sly & The Family Stone (1971) It’s A Family Affair, from the album There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Epic Label.
Smith, J. (2005) Liquid Assets: The Lidos and Open Air Swimming Pools of Britain, Historic England Press
Thorpe, V. (2016) “Lidos: UK Rekindles Passion For Swimming”, in The Guardian, 19th June 2016.
Wilkinson, J. & Pusill, E. (forthcoming) The Lido Guide, published by Unbound
Post Script. April has been a funny month weather wise. It started off freezing, then became (briefly) like summer and as it ends we are experiencing ‘unseasonably cold’ temperatures. I have swum this month in glorious sunshine, in a hail storm and in fog. The water temperature has gone up (we all got hugely excited) and down again and is currently hovering around 11 degrees celsius. But through it all I did Just Keep Swimming.
Just Keep Swimming 