In 1923 L. Badcock, Superintendent at the Maidenhead outdoor pool, completed the two-mile men’s course in forty minutes and won the Dunkels Cup, named after Ernest Dunkels, a wealthy local resident and former president of Maidenhead Football Club. After the war it was the turn of Badcock’s sons, George, Eddie and Derek, to dominate the event. They were also members of the Maidenhead Swimming Club, and used to train by swimming against the flow from the Sounding Arch to Boulter’s Lock. In 1950, at the age of fifteen, Cynthia Brooks won the women’s event, having first taken part when she was eleven. She was a member of the Hammersmith Ladies Swimming Club and in 1948 travelled to Belgium to take part in a sports event aimed at restoring friendly relations after the war. ‘It was a great experience,’ she later recalled, ‘and the first time I’d seen either ham or iced cakes.’ She went on to win numerous swimming events at both county and national level and was presented with Maidenhead’s ‘Woman of the Year’ award.
River traffic was still an issue on the Thames at Maidenhead, however, as the Jackson family discovered one sunny bank holiday in 1954 when Margaret and Ken and their five children hired a rowing boat. When a 60-ton steamer appeared, Ken, who was rowing, pulled their boat over to the side, but they were sucked back by the current right into the path of the steamer, which ploughed straight into them and cut their boat in half. ‘My husband and the older kids went one way and I went the other,’ Margaret, who couldn’t swim, later told the Bucks Free Newspaper. Then a fifteen-year-old ‘schoolboy swimming champion’ heard her screams and dived in. ‘He came for the baby. I can remember grabbing hold of him and I can remember him saying, “I can’t take you both. I’ll take the baby”.’ But in the end everyone was rescued and their story made national news.
Open-air swimming continued to be a popular pastime in Maidenhead, with the annual river races held from about 6 p.m., after the boat traffic had finished for the day. By 1966, however, increasing costs meant there were only a couple of safety boats for the entire race. ‘We swam in costumes only,’ remembers Derek Harris, ‘no wetsuit, goggles, earplugs, swim hat. The speed of the river’s flow had a major effect on race times. I seem to remember winning one year in less than thirty minutes. As for preparation and training, there really was none for me, other than being in the swimming pool all summer with friends and playing water polo.’
But as with Reading, in 1969 the river races came to an end; numbers were down and the great tradition was abandoned. However, in a similar way to Henley, and again thanks to a group of rowers, things have now been resurrected, with a new Boulter’s to Bray Swim, run by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.
The idea came from three members of Maidenhead Rowing Club, Tom Jost, Rob Davies and Keith Dixon, who wanted to swim on the Saturday morning of the annual Henley Regatta, just ‘as a bit of fun’ from the Rowing Club to the Waterside Inn in Bray. Tom mentioned the idea to fellow rowers and one said, ‘hang on, I think it used to be a regular thing’, explaining she’d spotted an old trophy for a swim from Boulter’s Lock to Bray in an antiques shop. Just like Tom Kean and Jeremy Laming in Henley, they’d discovered a lost tradition.
Tom Jost decided to investigate and placed a small article in the Maidenhead Advertiser and soon people who had competed in the ‘Long Swim’ got in touch. The three men then decided to organise it as an official event, but first they did the swim themselves, with fifteen participants following the Boulter’s to Bray course. ‘One of the swimmers worked for the council,’ explains Ben Collins, an ex-army officer who used to row for Maidenhead, ‘and she said “why not make it a council event? Then you’d be covered through their insurance.” The council have been great.’ Ben has also been doing triathlons since 2009 – ‘old rowers don’t die, we become triathletes’ – and with the Long Swim ‘I suddenly realised we were taking the lid off something massive and historical and significant. Once the swim was announced and word got out we discovered all this history. The Babcock family got in touch and people remembered it fondly; it was a significant community event and we wanted to retain that ethos by forming a charity.’
The first official event was held in 2012, starting at 6.15 in the morning before river traffic commenced, and 120 swimmers completed the course, including seventy-four-year-old Mike Hughes who had won the men’s Long Swim in 1967 and 1968. Cynthia Lockie (née Brooke), who won the women’s race in 1950, brought her family along to watch. ‘She told us there used to be a big house near the river and they would open up their garden and people got changed there,’ explains Ben. ‘It may have belonged to Ernest Dunkels. She was thrilled to see the swim and she presented one of the trophies.’
Today the distance is 2.8 kilometres and there are three categories: Open, Masters 49+ and Junior 15–18. ‘Lots of people who enter are rowers but I try to get anyone to enter,’ says Ben. ‘People ask “is that safe?” They are worried about pollution and the cleanliness of the water and there was a bit of a worry in 2013 when river treatment works upstream overflowed a couple of months before our swim. But I used to work for the EA; we know the river is cleaner because of the wildlife.’ As for wetsuits, if swimmers sign a disclaimer and prove they are competent they don’t have to wear one.
The Boulter’s to Bray Swim Trust is now a registered charity with five trustees, including Ben, with the objective of promoting local sporting projects. ‘For triathlon you need expensive kit, so it becomes exclusive,’ he says. ‘I’d love to see open-water swims more accessible. Lots of commercial outfits do Thames swims, but newbies can be put off, and we’re community-centric, the money we make goes back into local amateur sports projects.’ This means that for a £33 entrance fee Maidenhead residents can enjoy the river just as they did some 120 years ago, and with the full backing of the council.
But what puzzles me is not so much how we lost the tradition of swimming in the Thames, but how we lost the knowledge of this tradition. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were well-organised river races at Oxford, Reading and Henley. They were regularly covered in the press; there were medals, prizes and certificates. Champions were created, records were broken. How could all of this have been so easily forgotten? Perhaps because people left the river in favour of warm indoor pools, old bathing places closed, other sports such as rowing replaced swimming, and bathers were put off by fears of pollution or by outright bans. If an old trophy for a swim from Boulter’s Lock to Bray hadn’t been spotted in an antiques shop, would hundreds of people now be swimming the very same course that existed in the 1920s? Time and again we are drawn back to the Thames where we discover our lost heritage, re-enacting history and finding out a simple truth: we swim in the river because we belong there.
8
Windsor and Eton
‘Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace’
Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, 1747
Windsor and Eton have a unique place in the story of Thames swimming because, unlike other riverside towns, the tradition of bathing, among royalty and privileged Eton College boys, has been well documented here for hundreds of years. In 1303 the eighteen-year-old prince who would later become Edward II injured his Court fool, Robert Bussard, while playing ‘a trick’ on him in the Thames one winter’s day, and had to pay four shillings’ compensation. By the 1500s pupils at Eton, founded in 1440 by Henry VI, were bathing at numerous places along the river, while it was a group of Old Etonians who helped form an outdoor bathing group, said to be the first swimming society in England. Less well documented, however, is the swimming tradition among the townspeople, who were keen river users as well, with a public bathing place on the Thames as early as the 1850s, followed by local swimming clubs for both men and women.
The train from Waterloo to Windsor & Eton Riverside is busy with tourists; next to me a German woman and her daughter are cons
ulting maps, while three Japanese visitors take snaps of the Thames from the window. They are presumably all on their way to the castle, the Queen’s official residence. The Thames is a short walk from the station and the water looks icy cold and grey; to my left is Windsor Bridge, to the right a large red DANGER sign in the middle of the river.
A newspaper illustration from the 1880s showing Eton boys at Athens and Boveney, two of the college’s swimming spots on the Thames. In theory bathing drawers were compulsory.
I reach the porter’s lodge at Eton College where I’m asked to sit in a chair to have my photograph taken. ‘Bit royal all of this,’ smiles the porter as he makes my ID card and I turn to stare at a picture of Princes William and Harry on the wall. I walk into the college grounds; the schoolyard is surrounded on all sides by ancient buildings, making it feel a bit like an exclusive barracks. There is, as Henry Skrine wrote in 1801, ‘an air of superior grandeur and propriety’ about the cobbled square, deserted today because it’s half-term. I head under an archway and through a small wooden door pitted with iron studs. My destination is the college archives, which has manuscripts dating back to 1091. I produce my passport and driving licence (getting into the archives is no easy matter) and the archivist, Penny Hatfield, lets me into a compact, book-lined room. I am the only person there but for an elderly man who appears to be studying cloth scrolls.
I sit down at the wooden table, carefully pulling my chair across the parquet floor. Tall windows let in the midday sun, providing a glimpse of blue sky, Gothic spires and a distant flagpole. All I can hear is the soft breathing of my companion who then tells me quietly that he’s researching fifteenth-century Fellows of Eton College. I open the first book Penny has laid out for me on the table, The Eton Book of the River, published in 1935. It’s a weighty tome with pages that have turned a pale yellow over the years, and while its focus is the evolution of boat racing there are two chapters on bathing. The first, ‘Bathing up to 1840’, is significantly subtitled ‘a chapter of accidents’.
Despite ‘the insanitary state of the river’, bathing took place at Eton ‘from a very early date’, with one boy drowning in 1549 after he’d gone to bathe from the playing fields. By the 1770s the college had hired ‘watermen’ with boats and one pupil, writing to his father in 1796, offered the following reassurance: ‘I hope you will not make yourself the least uneasy about my going into the water, as I do really assure you that I never go in without proper people attending.’ Another pupil remembered his swimming experiences a decade later: ‘Sooner or later all swam. Men were stationed at particular bathing places, to prevent accidents (to bathe elsewhere was a flogging), and they taught swimming at a guinea a head.’ But when he wrote to his father asking for the guinea, he ‘received an angry answer that in his time boys taught themselves to swim, and I might do the same’. It took him three days, ‘terrible work it was’, but this was followed by ‘great fun by land and water’. Some ‘little fellows’ had an unusual way of drying themselves, ‘catching a cow by the tail, using the towel for a whip, and making the animal gallop them about the meadow till they were dry’.
Within a few years the arrangements for bathing at Eton had been further improved. One pupil recollected, ‘those boys who are not able to swim are debarred from ablution except at particular places, where it is almost an utter impossibility from the shallowness of the water, that an accident can possibly occur’. Excellent swimmers appointed by the headmaster were ‘regularly paid by the boys’ to prevent mishap, and by now there were seven bathing places along the Thames: Sandy Hole, Cuckow Ware, Head Pile, Pope’s Hole, Cotton’s Hole, South Hope and Dickson’s Hole. ‘This use of the word Hole has died out in England,’ explains The Eton Book of the River, ‘but a bathing hole is still a common name for a bathing place in the United States; it has no derogatory sense such as it now suggests to us.’
Eton was also the centre for a number of swimming societies. In 1828 the Philolutic Society was formed, with members from Cambridge, Windsor and Eton. It was divided into two sections, the Philolutes and the Psychrolutes, ‘lovers of bathing and lovers of cold water’. The latter bathed outdoors daily between November and March, while members of both societies were called the Philopsychrolutes.
The Philolutic Society’s accounts book from 1829 to 1833 includes weekly fines for ‘non-bathing’ at a cost of two shillings and sixpence. The group’s treasurer and first president was the Right Honourable Sir Lancelot Shadwell; then nearly fifty, the former barrister and MP had been educated at Eton. In 1827 he’d become the last Vice-Chancellor of England and was knighted soon after. He was known to bathe every day, whatever the weather, in a creek of the Thames near Barn Elms where he once apparently granted an injunction during a swim. The society certainly had some prominent members; the list begins with Queen Victoria’s husband, HRH Prince Albert, HRH Prince George of Cambridge, the Earl of Denbigh and HRH the Duke of Cambridge. In total there are 183 members, some resident near Eton and others occasional visitors, but after a few pages it descends into pencil-scribbled surnames.
Next I pick up the 1828 Book of the Society of Psychrolutes, a large publication with pages set out like a ledger, and I turn them until I come to a chart listing ‘Rivers, Lakes and Streams bathed in by this Society’. The page is divided into columns, giving the name of the river or lake, which members bathed there and what, if any, were the remarks. First is the Thames, frequented by ‘most of the Club’ and ‘In all parts Superb!’ The Cam, ‘passable at Granchester but elsewhere, vile’, is also used by ‘all of the Society’. The Medway was ‘fair’, the Cherwell ‘Better than nothing’, the Wandle, ‘Cold. Insipid. Small’, and the Clyde ‘uncomfortable’. Members swam in rivers abroad as well, including the Seine and the Rhine. The book also features a full-page hand-drawn human skeleton with the caption, ‘This gentleman was Not a psychrolute’ and on the facing page, a rugged mountain of a man somewhat resembling a Roman soldier: ‘This gentleman was a psychrolute’.
In the following decades swimming for Eton pupils became even more organised, thanks to William Evans and George Selwyn who introduced classes under Evans’ tuition. Evans was drawing master, while Selwyn was a private tutor and a keen swimmer who would become Bishop of New Zealand. His feats included diving 10 feet over a thorn bush overhanging the river above Windsor, and while ‘going down in a sinking boat’ standing up on his seat and taking ‘a dexterous header before the boat disappeared’.
Until 1839 there had been ‘no systematic attempt to teach swimming’ at Eton, according to The Badminton Library, but that year a boy named Montagu drowned after being ‘dragged out of his boat by a barge rope’. As a result, Selwyn and Evans ‘prevailed’ upon the then headmaster, Dr Hawtrey, that all boys should pass an examination before they were allowed to go out in a boat. Just as would happen later at Oxford, the impetus for learning to swim at Eton came from the need to improve the safety of rowers.
A ‘pass’ in progress at Eton, a regular summer event that included diving, swimming and treading water. In the 1890s around 200 boys passed each season.
The various tests, which became known as ‘passing’, or ‘the Eton pass’, included ‘a header’ (dive) from two or three feet above water, and a 100 yards swim, fifty with and fifty against a slow stream. Each boy also had to tread water and ‘while doing so, to keep his hands up to the level of his head or higher’, and to swim on his back. Only breaststroke was allowed, for the swimmer needed ‘a clear view all round him,’ explains The Eton Book of the River, ‘and this is in some circumstances essential for the avoidance of a blow on the head from the oar or scull of a passing coxswainless boat’.
Eton pupils became known as accomplished swimmers and the swimming school passing certificate from 1846 includes a quote from the eighteenth-century poet James Thomson, ‘This is the purest exercise of Health,/The kind refresher of the Summer heats’. The poet and novelist Algernon Charles Swinburne later wrote that his only ‘really and wholly delightful reco
llection’ of his time at Eton was ‘of the swimming lessons and play in the Thames’.
Over the years some of the old bathing places were abandoned, but Cuckow Ware – or Cuckoo Weir – and South Hope remained in use. In 1856 Evans was granted a land lease which stipulated he was to ‘permit and suffer the Masters and Schollars [sic] of Eton College to have free access through and over’ the land around Cuckoo Weir to the stream on the south side ‘for the purpose of bathing as heretofore accustomed’.
In 1860 Edmond Warre, an assistant master, took over from Evans and Selwyn, again improving Cuckoo Weir as well as two other swimming spots, Boveney and Athens. ‘Great credit is due to the authorities at Eton,’ wrote Henry Robertson in his 1875 book Life on the Upper Thames, where nearly every boy was a competent swimmer, ‘the result being that out of a school averaging eight hundred, not one case of drowning has occurred for many years; and this, at a place where everybody seeks the river as his natural out-of-doors home, makes Eton probably the first gymnasium for swimmers in the world.’
The next River Master was Walter Durnford, who reigned over the bathing places from 1885 to 1899, during which ‘trouble became rather acute with the Thames Conservancy owing to the objection of the innumerable Mrs. Grundies of those days to the sight of youth disporting itself naked and unashamed in the river and on the banks’. So bathing drawers were introduced and screens put up at Athens.
In the 1890s, ‘passing’ was held as soon as the water became warm enough, generally towards the end of May, at Cuckoo Weir. Much attention was paid to style, noted The Badminton Library, with the event repeated once or twice a week during the summer term, with 200 boys on average passing each season. The taking of ‘headers’ formed a characteristic feature of Eton swimming, with one ‘famous exponent of the art as a boy’ being the politician and cricketer Lord Harris, who was sent to Eton in 1864.
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