BATHING-PLACES.
WHEN Dr. Richard Russell, in the days of George IL, published his treatise on the beneficial effects of sea water, and shortly afterwards removed to Brighton to look after his patients, he set a fashion which has surely changed more slowly than any of the last two centuries. Sea-bathing in many places and for many people remains to-day very much what it used to be. That is the case partly, no doubt, because the sea is just as often rough in our day as it was a hundred and fifty years ago, and also because large numbers of bathers, probably the majority, cannot swim. But there are other ways in which the fashion has stood still. Bathing- machines are still made on the old pattern. It is still possible to be drawn down to the sea and up again in the kind of vehicle of which Mr. E. V. Lucas, in Highways and Byways in Sussex, quotes a description from a Guide to Brighton of the year 1794. " By means of a hook- ladder the bather ascends the machine, which is formed of wood, and raised on high wheels; he is drawn to a proper distance from the shore, and then plunges into the sea, the guides attending on each side to assist him in recovering the machine, which being accomplished, he is drawn back to shore. The guides are strong, active, and carefal, and in every respect adapted to their employments." The guides, perhaps, to-day are adapted to slightly different employments, for not every bather needs to be attended to sea. But there are still ropes attached to hooks and stretched out into the water ; there are still bathing women as rotund as Martha Gunn, queen of the ocean in the days of the Regent ; there are still machines built with step-ladders and high wheels, which creak over the sand, drawn by horses of the ancient quality; still the unlearned bob and exclaim in the oncoming rollers, still the floors of the machines are wet and sandy, and the looking-glasses cracked, and the clothes-pegs too few. Times change, but we do not change with them by the sea. Even the motor-car does not affect the bathing-machine. You cannot sell a brougham to-day, but you can buy a bathing-machine of a type which would have been recognized by Dr. Johnson.
Of course, the old conditions do not remain everywhere unchanged. There are many seaside places in England where the ancient bathing-machines are supplemented, and in some
cases supplanted altogether, by other arrangements ; there are tents, or it is possible to bathe from the pier. In these days of advertisement it is dangerous to mention names, or to compare one holiday resort with another to the advantage or detriment of either; but there are certainly some bathing- places of which the writer has had experience which differ from others as the blue water of the Land's End differs from the chalky wash of Tripperton-under-the-cliff. One in par- ticular remains in the memory: the water is clear green, without a hint of sand or chalk, and it runs bubbling at high tide under a wooden staging built on to the end of a stone pier. To the staging are connected platforms of wood— not a solid planking, but spars of timber separated by an inch or so for the water to rise through them with the tide; these platforms are of different depths, and surrounded with wooden rails, so that children and those who cannot swim can bathe as easily and safely in them as in an inland swimming. bath. There are other platforms and diving-boards built out over the open water, with a good broad run which makes all the difference between comfort and awkwardness in taking a header; and out in the sea beyond the diving-boards there are stagings on which you can sit in the sun until you take another header to swim back again. That is a memory of some years ago : it is to be hoped none of the planks either of recollec- tion or of the bathing-stage has been washed away. Another bathing-place is of a different kind, more solid and without planking. It consists of a point of rock jutting out into water which is deep at high tide; this rock the town authori- ties with unusual wisdom, in order to celebrate a jubilee (or it may have been a Coronation), decided to smooth and transform, filling up fissures and gaps with flat ledges of cement, so that the rock became a group of stone spaces above the tide, with convenient shelves on which to be seated or to place clothes. Here you may dive into ten feet of water blue as aquamarine—as, indeed, sea water should be—and you can dry yourself unconcerned in the sun, which is an advantage denied to a tent. The only drawback is that, being entirely in the open, it will not do for mixed bathing—which is one of the few recommendations remaining to bathing from the old- fashioned machine. But this particular bathing-place suggests a question of its own. Why should not the authorities of other towns follow an excellent example in an even fuller and more complete way ? Town authorities in these days spend large sums on tramways, on lighting, drainage, parades, promenades, advertisement ; why not more on bathing ? Why should not watering-places vie with one another in providing ideal open-air swimming-baths in the sea ? The development and possibilities of such an idea are almost endless. Imagine a stretch of clean sand with an enclosure of staging reproducing at high tide all the best features of a first-class swimming-bath, with diving- boards, water chutes, platforms at different heights from the water, well-ventilated boxes for dressing in, hot soft water always ready in buckets, and think of an enclosure so built that the rough water would be broken, and the waves would remain on the outside for those who preferred swimming in them. Or suppose the staging of the enclosure to rest on a foundation of solid wall, so that the tide could be allowed to fill it and then be shut in by a sluice gate; then there would be bathing every day and all day, and the huge bath could be filled and emptied at night. Would not a seaside town with a perfect swimming-bath of this kind attract visitors from all over the country ? Yet arrangements for bathing still remain a secondary consideration in the minds of most municipal authorities, and are allowed to grow or develop haphazard. How many English seaside towns make bathing absolutely their first consideration, even preferring it to excursion trains? If the bathing were there, the trains would run of themselves.
From the sea the mind travels naturally to the river, even to the pond. An open-air swimming-bath as an accessory to a country house is the race exception, not the rule. Yet a bath can be made for swimming in just as easily as a tank can be made to take the rain-water from the roof, even on the driest and highest of hills. The gardener can have the water if it is not wanted for swimming in ; thus may the necessary pastimes of summer be combined with the severest methods of horticulture. As for the country house which is fortunate enough to own a pond, even if it is a muddy pond, there is a swimming-bath almost ready-made; all that is needed in the muddiest, shallowest, and weediest is to clear and deepen an area big enough to take headers in. But when there is actually a river, or even a stream, at band for the builder and engineer, there is no excuse for the absence of a swimming-bath. A. bathing-place in a river may be as delightful as any in the sea; let those attest who remember at Oxford Parson's Pleasure with the happy name, or the Lasher which needs a stronger swimmer ; or those who have been privileged to spend morn- ings and afternoons in the best bathing-place in the kingdom, which is Boveney Weir in high summer, with the Thames pouring green through the sluices, and in the wind the smell of water and wet weed. We cannot have Boveney Weir even in miniature everywhere, but there is nothing simpler than to make, as it were, a level weir cutting by the side of any stream, be the current fast or slow. All that has to be done is to cut out of the soil, at a little distance from the stream, a hollow of whatever size be determined on for the swim- ming-pool, the soil which is taken out being perhaps piled up at the sides at one end of the pool, in order to make a convenient height from which to dive. When the pool has been excavated it can be puddled, or lined with planks like a lock, or even walled with bricks and cement—the details are a mere matter of cost. Finally, it can be connected with the stream by a narrow cutting at each end, and to prevent the pool from being silted up in winter or in flood-time there should be a sluice-gate at the top, if possible on the bank of the stream, by which the flow of the current can be cut off. The result may well be a swimming-pool which, if it were provided by Nature, would probably be welcomed as ideal. It is a strange reflection in the heats of July that we should so frequently forgo an ideal which can so easily be attained by the simple process of digging.
Previous page
