Downstream

by Caitlin Davies

  On the Thames there was Port Meadow, an area of ancient grazing land still used by swimmers, and Long Bridges, near Donnington Bridge, once the university bathing place. ‘A lady told me the elderly lifeguard was a friend at Long Bridges and he used to pour a kettle of hot water into the river to warm it up for her!’ says Heather. ‘It was a large bathing area, with walled banks, changing rooms and toilets. You can still see the shape of a pool in concrete.’ Tumbling Bay was another favoured spot, a pool between two weirs on a backwater of the Thames, which traces its history back to the nineteenth century.

  It’s no wonder then that many adults in Oxford spent their childhoods immersed in local rivers. ‘Our mum used to take us for picnics by the Thames, and we swam from what seemed to us to be miniature beaches. As far as I was concerned, that was what rivers were there for!’ says Jenny Rogers, who was born in Oxford in 1952. ‘I mourn the passing of the River Bathing Places that gave us such simple pleasures for so many years, and helped us to grow up strong and fit.’

  Oxford also has a long tradition of competitive river racing. The earliest recorded race appears to have been in the summer of 1840 when the National Swimming Society, formed three years earlier, offered silver medals as prizes for ‘swimming matches at Oxford’. The races were divided into five heats of four competitors, and the banks and towpath were thronged with up to 3,000 people. At 4 p.m. the starting gun was fired and the first men plunged in from a houseboat stationed at a bridge just beyond Iffley. The distance was 400 yards.

  While the inhabitants of Oxford appear to have been far earlier participants in organised river racing than those at Lechlade, the impetus for learning to swim, at least among university students, was rowing, and early rowing almanacs suggest bathing was part of their training. The poet Robert Southey was said to have ‘learned two things only at Oxford, to row and to swim’. But as was the case upstream, many people died in the much-loved rivers; some drowned while bathing, others were carried over a sluice in a boat and some perished after recklessly leaping from a skiff at a weir. In 1859, after four undergraduates had died ‘in rapid succession’, Dr Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine, called a meeting of ‘boating men and others’. ‘Of course a great deal of nonsense was talked,’ reported one attendee, but it was agreed Oxford needed ‘a tepid swimming-bath’ and a rule that no one who ‘did not possess a swimming certificate should row in any University race’.

  In 1870 the press reported on the ‘first’ Oxford swimming races, which took place on the ‘Isis between Harvey’s Barge and Iffley’, but spectators were ‘scanty’ and the race ‘seemed little known to the Undergraduate world’.

  However, the following year the Penny Illustrated Paper was ‘glad to note that the Oxford University Boat Club has at last followed the example of Cambridge, and started some swimming races’. They took place between ‘the Gut’ (a bend or narrow passage in the river) and Iffley and included a half-mile race open to all university members, a distance diving race, a hurdle race and a 50-yard race open only to the ‘pupils of Harvey, the University water bailiff, an old and valued servant of the University’. In 1890 the Oxford University Boat Club agreed members had to have a certificate from the Merton Street Baths proving that they had swum ‘twice the length fully dressed’, the Oxford University Swimming Club was formed, and by the early 1920s there would be a women’s club as well.

  An Oxford Regatta held during the First World War also included swimming. A Pathé News clip of the period opens with a row of boys diving off a long floating raft, then using an impressively fluid front crawl. Yet despite this tradition of river swimming there is very little in the way of documentation in any of the city’s museums or archives. Why is the history of Thames swimming so hard to find and why are documents so scarce? Why aren’t local museums full of evidence of how bathers once used the river? Perhaps, as local historian Mark Davies believes, ‘it was too commonplace to mention’.

  But there is a rare Victorian book at the Old Bodleian Library, a manual of swimming written by Charles Steedman in 1867. A Londoner by birth, Steedman learned to swim at thirteen and six years later became a champion swimmer. He then emigrated to Australia in 1854, during the gold rush, where he continued his swimming career as champion of the state of Victoria. Steedman’s book is not the first of its kind; back in 1587 Everard Digby had written a treatise on swimming for Tudor gentlemen in Latin, De arte natandi, with woodcut illustrations. He argued that ‘man swimmeth by nature’ and set out when, where and how to swim, even including tips on cutting toenails while in the river. This was then translated into English by Christopher Middleton and a shortened version published in 1595, which now resides in the British Library. But Steedman’s manual is said to be the first text on competitive swimming and its emphasis is on what would today be called wild swimming. It was initially published in Melbourne but a later London edition gave it international renown and it’s often described as marking the beginning of swimming’s modern era.

  It’s a dull spring day when I reach Oxford and I can barely move for people offering tours – walking tours, bus tours, ghost tours – the pavements before the grand sandstone buildings of the university packed with tourists. I head for the Bodleian Library on Broad Street, where I’m directed to the admissions building, closed today for a degree ceremony. Suddenly down the street comes a pack of graduates, black gowns and white scarves flapping in the breeze. I’m told to ask ‘one of the men in bowler hats’ to let me in, which he duly does, opening a pair of heavy black gates. Inside the office I watch a Canadian submit his forms, have his photograph taken and read out the Bodleian promise. He vows that he will not remove, mark, deface or injure any of the documents, he won’t ‘bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame’ and neither will he smoke. The words are a translation of a traditional Latin oath, from the days when libraries weren’t heated because fires were so hazardous.

  ‘It’s bonkers today,’ says Sara Langdon, assistant admissions officer, as I’m finally shown to her desk. She goes through my forms, her face serious as she reads the section where I have to justify why I need to use the Bodleian and where I’ve explained I’m writing a book about Thames swimming. ‘How wonderful!’ she says, looking up from my form. ‘Swimming the Thames. It takes me back to my childhood.’ River swimming was something Sara took for granted while growing up in Oxford, and she has fond memories of swinging from trees and ropes and launching herself into the Isis. Why, she asks, hasn’t anyone written about this before?

  ‘I live in Wolvercote and last year I was crossing Port Meadow when I saw some young people, in their early teens, jumping off the bridge by the marina. It was a jolly hot day and I didn’t tell them off but I was quite concerned. I asked what they’d do if something went wrong and they said, “we do it all the time”. You can’t stop children, can you? But when I think of our mothers and how they let us swim in the Thames!’

  I get my ID card and head back to the Bodleian, crossing the flagged courtyard as if about to enter a castle, heading for the lower reading room reserve on the first floor. There, at last, I get my hands on Steedman’s Manual of Swimming. After all this, it’s a disappointingly small book, just 270 pages. I was expecting a huge manual. I sit down at one of the reading desks; above the bookcases the white stone walls are hung with ancient portraits. The silence is broken only by the squeaking of shoes as someone walks past and the sound of my neighbour tapping away on her laptop.

  I start leafing through the manual, looking at sections on bathing, plunging, diving, floating, scientific swimming, training, drowning and rescuing. Bathing has several subheadings including ‘Necessity of Cleansing the Skin, Pores, Perspiration, Virtue of cleanliness, Gouty persons’. The English, it seems, weren’t known for their cleanliness in Steedman’s day: ‘without exaggeration it may be safely asserted that the bodies of thousands have never been thoroughly washed.’

  Swimming, he explains in capital letters, is THAT SPECIAL MODE OF PROGR
ESSION WHICH ENABLES A PERSON TO DERIVE ENTIRE SUPPORT FROM THE LIQUID IN WHICH HE IS IMMERSED. How complex this seems today, evidence that in Victorian times swimming was a new science, and a new art. It needed to be properly defined and would-be swimmers required plenty of advice. The best time to bathe in the open air was the early morning, for then the ‘robust and healthy body’ had been ‘strengthened by the night’s repose’ and benefited most from the shock of immersion. But it was ‘injurious’ to bathe on an empty stomach and Steedman advised, ‘take a cup of warm milk or coffee with a biscuit or a slice of stale bread before going into the water’. However, it also wasn’t a good idea to bathe on a full stomach.

  An illustration of the ‘vertical header’, part of a pack of swimming cards produced by a Professor H. Bocock in 1888. In Victorian times, swimming was a new science and a new art.

  Steedman devotes much of his book to the subjects of drowning and rescuing, at a time when ‘more people have lost their lives’ because they couldn’t swim than from ‘any other one cause of accidental death’. In England and Wales ‘more than six persons’ drowned on a daily basis. While swimming was not as popular with the English as it was with the Prussians and French, Steedman assures his readers that this was not due to any physical inferiority, but because there were few good teachers and too many ‘amateur and defective ones’. This is presumably why he goes into great detail concerning proper leg and arm strokes, with accompanying diagrams. Cramp was a common affliction, but generally a minor one, and as far as Steedman is concerned made into more of a drama than necessary and unfairly blamed for several deaths.

  Digestion and sweating are major concerns, however, and he gives plenty more tips on diet. Beef is most nutritious, but mutton is best thoroughly digested; underdone meat is better than overdone, and some swimmers, he notes, are partial to raw meat when training. It is all right to drink water, but no more than three pints a day; home-brewed ale is also acceptable as long as it is draught rather than bottled, and no more than a pint should be drunk. When training for a swim the ideal meal was an underdone steak or chop without fat, stale bread, a couple of mealy potatoes and greens.

  Feeling hungry myself now, I leave the Bodleian in search of food as I make my way to the scene of a once famous endurance swim – undertaken by a man who may well have read Steedman’s manual. Fifteen minutes later I’m standing in the middle of Folly Bridge, looking down over the river. The water is green, spotted with silver glimmers of sunlight. Salter’s Steamers Boatyard, established in 1858, juts out into the river; a boat full of rowers appears in the distance. It was here that Lewis Carroll set out for Godstow (a hamlet on the Thames) with Alice Liddell and her sisters and, while journeying upriver, first came up with the story that would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His 1865 book includes Alice’s swim with Mouse in the Pool of Tears, and illustrations variously show her doing a basic breaststroke or front crawl; but it’s unlikely the real Alice knew how to swim.

  Professor Bocock explains how to swim fully clothed. Only ‘really advanced swimmers (could) swim in women’s garments on account of them wrapping around the feet’.

  It was also here at Folly Bridge that in 1890 the honorary secretary of the ‘Professional Swimming Association’ (otherwise known as the National Swimming Association), Mr. T.C. Easton, attempted a six-day swim to Teddington. On 22 September he ‘commenced one of the most genuinely sportsmanlike performances ever attempted,’ reported the Morning Post admiringly. He would swim ninety-one miles to Teddington, covering eight hours a day, ‘and though the journey is a very favourite one for boating parties, the idea of accomplishing it by swimming does not seem to have previously occurred to any one’.

  The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne joined one such boating party near Oxford when he toured England in the 1860s, finding the river narrow, shallow and bordered with bulrushes and water-weeds, the shores flat and meadow-like and the water ‘clean and pure’. Boat trips from Folly Bridge to London were ‘very much the thing to do,’ explains Oxford historian Simon Wenham, ‘it was known as “the Thames trip”. Today the Boat House Tavern houses the drags for recovering bodies and the resuscitation apparatus. I’ve always wondered what the latter would have been in Victorian times.’

  By then, Easton was already a well-known swimmer (in 1898 he came up with the idea of launching a professional long-distance championship from Kew to Putney) and he’d already made several attempts to swim from Richmond Bridge to London Bridge. In 1888, ‘owing to a very sluggish tide’, he’d only managed to get to Putney, but the following year he got as far as Westminster Bridge where he ‘seemed to become weak’ and left the water after completing fourteen miles in just over four hours. But he was back in the river again a few weeks later, this time covering twenty miles from London Bridge to Purfleet, and in 1890 he’d swum twenty miles from Blackwall to Gravesend. Now he’d turned his sights on Oxford and the press expected he would be ‘fully qualified to wrestle with his arduous task’, noting that he was thirty-seven, stood 5 feet 11 inches and weighed 16 stone.

  At eight in the morning Easton entered the water at Folly Bridge and an hour later had reached Iffley Lock, a mile and a quarter downriver. ‘The weather was beautifully fine, although there was a strong adverse wind’ as, seven hours later, he reached Abingdon Lock and then stopped at Culham Lock after nine miles and five furlongs. Press coverage was substantial, with headlines such as EASTON’S LONG SWIM IN THE THAMES, though reports of the distances he covered each day varied. The Star reported a large assembly witnessed the start, and that Easton left the water ‘in a good condition’. Oxford already had a basic sewage system in place by the early nineteenth century, with the drains emptying into the Thames or its tributaries, but there were several serious cholera epidemics in the first half of the 1800s. A more efficient sewage system was put in place in the 1870s, though how clean the water was during Easton’s swim isn’t mentioned in the newspapers.

  The following day he resumed swimming and ‘by means of a steady breaststroke’ continued until 10 a.m. ‘when a severe storm passed over’. However, he ‘persevered gallantly with his task’, according to the Daily News, and again stayed in the water for about eight hours. When he reached Shillingford Bridge, ‘Easton was in capital condition . . . and intends resuming his swim at eight o’clock this morning’. But at some point things went wrong, and after several attacks of cramp, and ‘a strained leg’, he was compelled to abandon the attempt on the fourth day having managed twenty-seven miles. ‘Folly Bridge may to some sound like an appropriate starting point for such an enterprise,’ remarked one journalist, but Easton had ‘plenty of pluck . . . He is, I believe, a milkman by trade – this perhaps explains his partiality for water!’

  Although today no one seems to have heard of Easton’s four-day feat, it’s a clear precursor of modern-day endurance swims, and proof that since Victorian times we’ve seen the Thames as the ultimate challenge. Easton tried out different courses on the river and when he attempted a six-day swim no one, apparently, had ever thought of doing it before. It would be more than a hundred years before anyone did manage to swim between Oxford and Teddington, and that was Andy Nation as part of his non-tidal Thames swim in 2005. He had the same motivation as Easton – no one had done it before – although on this occasion he was also aiming to raise money for charity.

  I find it strange that an event so widely reported at the time has now been forgotten; it’s as if each time someone in the twenty-first century attempts to set a record in the Thames they’re unaware that it has been tried before. I’m beginning to think that the history of Thames swimming has so many stops and starts that it will never be a straightforward, linear story; rather, we repeatedly need to flash back to the past in order to make sense of the way we use and view the river today.

  I leave Folly Bridge and head to a very different river spot, a place for enjoyment rather than ‘sportsmanlike’ challenge. Tumbling Bay lies behind Oxford’s railway station, t
hrough Botley Park. It’s not clear when it first opened but in 1893 the town clerk put a notice in a local paper announcing that as from 5 May ‘this Bathing Place will be OPEN, Free of Charge, for FEMALE BATHERS ONLY, on each FRIDAY during the Season, between the hours of 6am and 8.30pm. Bathing Dresses will be supplied, Free of Charge, and must be used.’ In addition, a bathing attendant was engaged who would supply towels for a penny.

  I walk past a community centre and across a field and I can hear the place before I see it, with a loud rushing sound coming from behind the trees. It’s not as big as I’d expected, a rectangle of water between two weirs rather like a concrete-lined lido. Two teenage boys emerge from bushes on the opposite side and as they cross the bridge towards me I ask if they ever swim here. ‘Yes,’ one says, ‘if it’s a sunny day. My eighty-six-year-old grandma swam here. It’s really packed in the summer. Some people say we shouldn’t because of that rat thing, but I don’t know anyone who ever got it.’ And is the current fast? ‘You can stand under the bridge if you need to,’ he says, then he points to the far end. ‘That part is weedy, but you can dive near the steps.’ There is gravel on the ground, and quite a few pike and perch, which he’s fished for in the past.

  As the boys leave I walk around the pool; the bottom looks shallow and sandy and there are plenty of weeds and mud. On a hot day it must be a perfect place to cool off, and in the 1940s it was here that schoolchildren were taught to swim. ‘We didn’t have a bathroom at home, so the nearest I usually got to water was a quick rub round with a wet flannel,’ Bob Hounslow told the Oxford Mail. ‘The thought of immersing my whole body in cold water wasn’t one I relished.’ But at Tumbling Bay the instructor would order the scrawny boys to stand in a line in the water, then dive forwards, arms outstretched, ‘and glide along until we bumped into the weir’. The process was then repeated, using the swimming strokes they had learned lying on straw mats in the school playground. Eventually they managed the width and then the length of the pool and gained swimming certificates. Today the old changing rooms have gone except for their concrete bases, but the ladders remain – apparently to ensure the council can’t be sued if someone gets into trouble.