swimming clubs, which generally have one night a week for their
meetings and practisings. With few exceptions they have all attached to
them a professional swimmer, in most cases one of the bath attendants,
who teaches swimming to beginners and coaches aspirants after prizes
in that extraordinary mode of rapid swimming adopted by the London
aquatic athletes, in plunging, in picking up eggs from the bottom of
the bath, and other equally useless feats. The shallowness of the baths
prevents all practice of the really useful accomplishment of diving
deep in water from a height or while swimming; and I am not aware of
any instruction being given in the very difficult art of rescuing a
drowning person. I need not say that this is a dangerous and difficult
operation as long as the person to be rescued is able to struggle and
clutch at his rescuer. It too often happens that the desperate efforts
of a drowning person drag both himself and his would-be preserver to
the bottom. In some books it is recommended not to attempt the rescue
of a drowning man until he has ceased to struggle, when it may be too
late. There is a method of grasping and supporting a drowning person,
however lively, that should be taught to swimmers, which will enable
them to save life without much peril to themselves; and this could be
taught in our swimming baths, but no prizes are awarded for it, and
professionals, for the most part, think only of teaching what will win
prizes at the swimming competitions. By the way, either Shakspeare
understood little about swimming or he intended to represent Cassius
as a vain boaster, which, however, is hardly consistent with his
character in the play, when he makes him talk about rescuing the
drowning Cæsar by taking him on his shoulders as Æneas did Anchises.
The above, as far as I can ascertain, are all the places expressly
constructed for swimming purposes at present existing in London,[3]
and if they fully answered the ends for which they were designed, and
enabled their frequenters to obtain the full benefit of the hygienic
exercise of swimming, one could scarcely say that they were too few for
even such an immense town. But they are of little use in a hygienic
point of view. I must remind the reader that in order to derive the
full health-giving advantages from swimming, it must be performed
in cool and deep water, with plenty of room, and surrounded by the
wholesome accessaries of fresh air and sunlight. Moreover, the mind
of the swimmer should not be harassed and anxious. Now, the London
swimming baths satisfy none of these requirements. They are, with one
exception (for we cannot count the three ancient plunge baths among
swimming baths, on account of their puny dimensions), all tepid. This
is no fixed temperature, but varies in every bath, and in the same bath
at different times. It may mean any temperature from 65° to 80°, or
upwards. The lower temperature would not be objectionable in the point
of view of salubrity, but it would not be relished by the swimmers,
who would insist on more warm water being added, or otherwise the
most of them would forsake the bath. When the water approaches the
higher temperature indicated, swimming in it is followed by languor
and prostration, more prejudicial to health than otherwise. To me
the water in this state feels sodden and lifeless, and though one can
stay in it a long time without shivering, the longer one stays in the
more prostrated does one feel afterwards, and a good cold douche or
shower-bath would be required to restore anything like tone to the
system.
[3] There are, I believe, several additional tepid swimming baths
in the course of construction in London and suburbs, and one
has been recently opened at Stratford, but that town can
scarcely be considered as part of London, though within the
postal district, and as Mr. Sweedlepipe says, “we must draw
the line somewhere.” Some may think I have not drawn the line
narrowly enough, when I have included in my survey Hampstead,
Hammersmith, Greenwich, and Blackheath, but I preferred to
make it possibly too wide than to incur the reproach of having
made it too narrow.
The London swimming baths are all shallow, with two exceptions,
and these are only six feet deep at their deepest part. There is
consequently no opportunity for diving deep and experiencing the
powerful influence of the pressure of a considerable column of water
on the organs of respiration and circulation.
With few exceptions the London swimming baths are too small. When
any considerable number of bathers are in the water, then there is
hardly room for the swimmers, who are consequently continually butting
against, or kicking, or even scratching one another in a manner
anything but favorable for the preservation of good temper—a most
essential requisite in a hygienic point of view.
None of the London baths have the advantage of pure fresh air. Some of
them are close, stuffy and fœtid. The best of them can only be said to
be well ventilated, but no amount of ventilation in a covered building
is an equivalent for the caller air with its fresh breezes, that play
around and about the exposed body of the open air bather.
Few of the London baths have a sufficiency of light. Some are mere
gloomy cellars. In the very best of them the body does not receive the
direct rays of the sun, the light being transmitted through glass of
greater or less thickness, often artificially dimmed, in case it should
impinge too strongly on the exposed body. The powerful hygienic effects
of light on the body have recently received much attention, and it is
no doubt a chief agent in the salubrious influence of open-air bathing.
To construct a swimming bath where the light is nearly excluded is to
forego one of the greatest advantages of the bath.
Lastly, how can the mind remain free from anxiety, when, according
to the arrangement in every bath in London, with one exception, the
bather’s clothes and valuables have to be left in open boxes, to which
any person can enter, while in most baths a notice is stuck up to
the effect that the bath proprietor is not responsible for clothes or
valuables, but that each bather must look after his own. In some of
the baths the ticket givers will take charge of watches, jewellery,
and money, but in many others they refuse to do so, and one is forced
to leave everything exposed. With this alarming notice staring one
in the face, what must be the state of mind of a timid bather under
such circumstances, when the bath is tolerably full of the extremely
mixed company which frequents these baths, I shall leave the reader to
imagine. Certainly if the conditions were otherwise hygienically good,
the moral state thus induced would suffice to neutralize them.
Besides the above swimming baths, cold and tepid, under cover, and not
to be enjoyed without payment, London has, or had, two large open-air
gratuitous swimming baths, fulfilling in many respects the requirements
of hygienic swimming baths, but objectionable in several important
particulars; I allude to the great bathing lake in Hyde Park—the
Serpentine, and the two smaller lakes in Victoria Park.
_The Serpentine_, before the “levelling-up” operations commenced,
was in very bad repute. Its depth was supposed to be very great
in some places; a delusion its drainage has dispelled, for it
appears to be nowhere above 12 or 14 feet deep. Its bottom was
supposed to be foul with the accumulated sediment from the
sewers which discharged themselves into it for many years; its
drainage has shown it to be foul beyond all conception, and the
wonder is that its water was not more impure than we know it to
have been, resting on such a thick stratum of abominations. The
water was impure,[4] there is no denying it, and its impurity
was often as obvious to the nose as to the eye. And yet a swim
in the old Serpentine on a cool spring or autumn morning was not
a bad thing—_experto credite_. It was a fine expanse of water,
with beautiful surroundings. The eye rested with pleasure on the
green sward of the park, the stately old elms, the picturesque
bridge, the pretty little Swiss boathouse, and the monstrous
black Duke prancing over the trees. Then if you did not examine
too minutely the green confervæ that rendered the water almost
opaque, if you kept your eyes more skyward, if you became used
to the faint ditch-water smell around you, and “made believe
a good deal,” you might almost fancy yourself disporting in a
retired lake far away in the country. The company was not so bad
as was usually supposed. The roughs don’t like getting up early
even to wash themselves, so there were few of them; they mostly
deferred their bathing till the evening. Most of the bathers
seemed quiet, steady, respectable people. The regular bathers
would generally bring along with them a bit of carpet, or hire a
rug from the Humane Society’s boatmen to lay their clothes on,
and thus save them getting wet by the dew. There was room and to
spare for all on the broad bosom of London’s great lake, and when
you could forget the stories about the horrors below you, and
refrain from looking too curiously at the green abominations that
thickened the water, a long swim in the deep placid Serpentine,
with the sun shining down on you, and the gentle breeze fanning
you, was infinitely preferable to any cold or tepid swimming
bath in London. If the lover of the swimming bath is to gain
nothing by the works now going on in the Serpentine besides clear
water in a shallow bed, he will, perhaps, rather regret the
loss of his deep but dirty lake. Bathing was permitted in the
Serpentine from 5 to 8 a.m., and again after sunset for an hour
or so; but no provision at all was made for the accommodation of
bathers, beyond a couple of boats belonging to the Humane Society
stationed near where most bathers resorted.
[4] I suppose it was this impurity of the water which
produced a remarkable disease among the young sticklebacks
and minnows, many of which I have found with deposits,
apparently of pus, on various parts of their bodies,
rendering their movements languid and awkward, and in some
cases, especially where these deposits were on the head,
causing hideous disfiguration.
_Victoria Park Bathing Lakes_.—There are two of these lakes. The
more easterly one is nearly 300 yards long, and is surrounded by
a gravel walk, beyond which are shrubs. The more westerly one
is nearly as large, and is more hemmed in by trees and shrubs,
and has several islands in it. Both have a depth of 6 feet in
their deepest part, becoming gradually shallow towards the
shore. The eastern lake is much the clearest. There is a raft on
one, and a small shabby bathing house on the other. A swimming
master resides at one end of the eastern lake, who apparently
adds to the profits of his profession by selling ginger-beer
and sugar-plums. The time when bathing is allowed is from 4 to
8 a.m. The remainder of the day the best of the lakes is much
resorted to by the owners of miniature yachts, in order to test
the sailing powers of their tiny craft. There is, of course, here
also no arrangement for the safe bestowal of one’s clothes while
one is in the water, so that, as in the Serpentine, you bathe at
your own proper peril.
The lakes in these two parks are the only places in which the
inhabitants of London are permitted to indulge in open-air bathing.[5]
To be sure there is the river, and there are numerous canals in which
the gamins plunge in summer, but they do so at the risk of being seized
by the police and brought before a magistrate charged with the heinous
offence of indecency, so that all who have any respect for the law are
practically debarred from making use of these waters. Besides, in spite
of the recent drainage works, the Thames is still little better than
an open sewer, and it will be long before it is anything else;[6] and
the canals are, with few exceptions, so dirty, that there is little
inducement to the respectable swimmer to brave the terrors of the law,
and defy the threats against trespassers, in order to indulge in his
favorite exercise in either river or canal. So, practically, he is
limited to the Serpentine and Victoria lakes, and to these only at the
inconvenient hours, and under the uncomfortable circumstances I have
described.
[5] I do not forget the lower ponds of Hampstead, which were once
magnificent sheets of water, but then they were the property
of the New River Company, and bathing was strictly prohibited
in them. Now they seem to be abandoned by the Water Company,
but they have been allowed to drain away or evaporate, until
they are little better than muddy pools with a broad margin
of sticky clay which would deter any one except a London
street Arab from attempting to bathe in them. It would be
possible to convert one or more of them into excellent
swimming baths of any required depth.
[6] Were the Thames once more the “crystal stream” that poets
used to call it, I fear its tidal character would offer some
difficulties to placing on it, between the bridges, floating
baths, such as we see on the Seine; for these, if placed near
the side, would be left high and dry at every ebb, and, if
stationed in mid-stream, would seriously interfere with
navigation.
While almost every second-rate continental town has ample provision
for open-air bathing, it is disgraceful that a large and wealthy
metropolis like London should virtually have nothing of the sort.
How much pleasure do its citizens consequently lose! what a powerful
hygienic agent are they not deprived of! And yet London offers more
facilities than almost any other town I know of for the construction of
open-air swimming baths of the best kind, and that without infringing
on the comfort or privileges of any one. In the Serpentine, when the
levelling operations are completed, the finest swimming baths the world
can show might be constructed for a very small sum of money, and I
venture to say that while the convenience and wishes of thousands who
delight in swimming, and to whom an open-air bath is a source of health
and pleasure, would be gratified, no person would be inconvenienced,
nor would anything unpleasant be presented to the eye.
The arrangements heretofore in force pleased no one; the bathing public
were put to every sort of inconvenience, and the non-bathing public
were disgusted that for certain hours in the day the banks of the
Serpentine should be handed over to a horde of naked savages, rendering
it impossible for any decent female to venture near them. It is surely
the duty of the authorities who permit bathing in the Park to provide
that it may be done with safety and comfort, and without outraging
decency.
I would suggest that a first and second class swimming bath be built
at the south side of the Serpentine when its depth has been equalised,
as proposed, to 5 ft. 6 in., shelving into shallow water towards the
shore. These ought, I think, to be, not floating baths, but permanent
constructions of light and elegant appearance. Each bath should be
at least 150 yards long by 50 or 60 wide. Round the bath should run
a platform flagged with slates, with steps down to the water, and
spring-boards. There should be boxes for bathers round the whole bath,
to the number of 200 or 300. These boxes should be numbered, and
have complete doors, with a pane of glass let in, and closing with
a spring lock, to be opened by the attendant to the bather having a
corresponding ticket. This for the security of the bather’s clothes
and valuables. For what right, I may ask, has any one to invite me into
his bathing establishment, induce me to divest myself of my clothes
and valuables, and plunge beneath the water, while he offers me no
security for my property, which he directs me hang up in a perfectly
open box, and cautions me to look after myself? How I am to look after
it when I am swimming in or under the water he does not inform me. Even
if, when so engaged, I were to perceive a thief occupied in rifling
my pockets or appropriating my garments, it would avail little that
_de profundis clamavi_, “stop thief!” By the time I could get out of
the water and make towards him, he would probably have got clear off
with his booty. Therefore, the simple plan adopted in the Marylebone
first class swimming bath, of full doors closing with a spring-lock,
is indispensable for the security and comfort of the bather.[7] To
make the security absolute, it would only be requisite to provide
each bather with a ticket of bone or metal, the number of which would
correspond with his box; and this by a simple contrivance might be
fastened to his bathing drawers (without which no one should be allowed
to bathe), and the attendant would only open the door corresponding
to this number. I have dwelt, in what some may think too much detail,
on this apparently trivial matter, but from experience I can testify
that much of the comfort of a bath depends on one being assured that
one’s clothes are in a place of safety. The boxes should be closed in
at top with a glazed roof, as in the Hammersmith bath, and the roof,
either glazed or of corrugated iron, should extend over the platform,
as in a railway station, to afford shelter from sun or rain when not
in the bath. The water should be quite open to sun and air. The prices
of admission need not be greater—might indeed be less—than those of
the generality of the parochial baths, viz. fourpence, first class,
twopence, second class. For this the bather should be supplied with one
or two towels, and bathing drawers, unless he prefer to wear his own.
And here I would hint that the towels should always be washed after
being used, and not merely dried, as seems to be the case in some of
the baths, if I may be allowed to infer from their sickening smell. It
would surely not be too much to expect a refreshment room or buffet in
connexion with these baths, as is often to be found on the continent;
such an addition would be highly desirable, if practicable.
[7] The proprietor of a swimming bath which has full doors
inveighed against them to me as affording facilities for
thieves, but then his doors have neither locks nor numbers.
These baths should be open from an early hour until dusk, so as to suit
the convenience of all. Many persons cannot take an open-air bath in
the morning without injury, but can derive benefit from, and enjoy, a
swim in the middle of the day. Again, their occupations make it more
convenient for some to bathe at one time, for others at another time,
and the tastes and convenience of all would be consulted by having the
bath open all day.
When such swimming baths are built, bathing, except in these, should
be altogether forbidden in the Serpentine. Thus the non-bathing public
would gain greatly by being spared the indecent scenes that have
hitherto rendered that part of Hyde Park impassable for women in the
morning and evening, and swimmers would have everything they could wish
for. It might be a question whether bathers might not be permitted
to swim from the bath in the Serpentine outside of it early in the
morning. In the competitions of swimming clubs, greater space is often
desirable than could be obtained in any bath.
A similar construction might be made on the eastern lake in Victoria
park, which is in size, depth, and form, quite adapted for it. If
the Lilliputian yachters should think their vested rights thereby
interfered with, the other bathing lake might be abandoned to them
entirely.
Excellent swimming baths might also be made on one of the arms at the
east end of the lake in St. James’s Park, without interfering with
any one’s rights or comfort. The water is already of the required
depth, and the part indicated is but little frequented except by a few
water-fowl.
The lake in Regent Park is also well adapted for a swimming bath.
There is a portion of the water, midway between the two suspension
bridges, nearly hidden from every habitation by an island covered with
trees, where the bath might be built so as to be in nobody’s way.
However, as it is quite easy to make the structure pretty, I don’t see
why any person should object to a full view of it.
Battersea Park possesses a large expanse of water, and a few hundred
yards of it might be very well spared by the gardeners and aquatic
birds, to whom it is at present dedicated, for the purpose of a large
swimming bath, which would complement the gymnasia in which the park at
present abounds. The water, being only about 3 feet in depth, would not
be suitable for a swimming bath without further deepening, but that is
an operation which, I presume, would present no difficulty. It would be
a great advantage to have a continuous and steady influx and outflow
of water in all these lakes; this would insure constant freshness of
the swimming baths. I am not conversant with engineering matters, but
I should think that this might easily be effected by means of artesian
wells in suitable situations, if the flow of water cannot be obtained
from the water companies.
I have thus shown how the great want of London, in the matter of
open-air swimming baths, might be supplied by utilizing a portion of
the water in five of the existing parks.[8] As there are other parks
projected, or in course of formation in other parts of London, it
would, of course, be easy to apply the same principle to the lakes that
might be formed in them.
[8] I have purposely said nothing about the extra-urban parks of
Greenwich, Wimbledon, Richmond, and Wanstead, all of which
offer great facilities for the construction of swimming baths,
all having fine sheets of water. I confine myself to the more
pressing wants of the teeming millions of London proper.
These baths would not interfere in any way with the existing swimming
baths, for there would still remain a sufficiency of bathers who prefer
tepid to cold water, and as a vastly greater number of persons would
take to bathing than do now, they would, undoubtedly, first resort
to the covered baths, in order to learn to swim, before frequenting
the open-air baths. The covered swimming baths would also still be
resorted to by those who prefer to swim in the evening, and by those
who like to continue their bathing during the winter months.
And here I should say a few words respecting the prejudice in favour
of sea-bathing, which is almost universal with us. It is believed that
there is something in the sea water that renders it far more salutary
than fresh water. This is undoubtedly true with respect to certain
morbid states of the body—such as scrofula; but it is far from being
universally true. To many persons the seaside and sea water are little
else than poisonous, and bathing in the sea, or mere residence near
the sea, produces very prejudicial effects. To most healthy persons it
is not the contents of the water that do good, but the exercise and
the reactions caused by the temperature and the other elements I have
indicated above. By many swimming in the sea is preferred to swimming
in fresh water for various reasons, independent of any medicinal action
of its salts. They like the charm of bathing in the boundless ocean
with all its romantic accompaniments; they swim with greater facility
and confidence, as the greater specific gravity of salt water floats
them higher. It may be urged that medical men invariably send people
to the sea for bathing. That is nearly true; but then medical men are
not altogether free from sharing the national prejudice in favour of
the superior salubrity of sea water. Moreover, it is for patients their
advice is sought, not healthy persons, and the maladies these patients
are suffering from may seem to them to require the medicinal effect of
sea water. But undoubtedly the chief reason for their recommendation
is, that they know that there are facilities for bathing in the sea,
but they would be much at a loss to name any place where their clients
could obtain comfortable freshwater open-air bathing. For my own part,
though I love the sea in all its moods, and in part because it has so
many moods, I dislike the sticky hair and generally dirty feeling it
causes, and its nasty taste when one gets a mouthful; and I would much
prefer that its waters were as soft, sweet, and cleansing as those of
a Scotch or Swiss lake. To my mind the finest swimming bath in the
world is the Lake of Geneva. There you have the changing moods of the
ocean, while the water is fresh and sweet, and of such a lovely blue,
that your body when immersed in it seems as white as marble, and, like
Narcissus, you are ready to fall in love with your beautified person.
Give us freshwater baths in the open air, and a removal to the seaside
will not be desired or needed by many who are now attracted thither.