Once Edmond Warre left, a duumvirate was set up, the authors of The Eton Book of the River, L.S.R. Byrne and E.L. Churchill. Their first task was to try and restore ‘something approaching to the old proportion between the bathing accommodation and the number of boys in the school’. Cuckoo Weir had for years been used by Lower Boys and Non-nants (as non-swimmers were known), Athens by the 600–700 boys of the Fifth Form, while Boveney Weir stream was confined to a ‘select few’. It was then decided to widen Cuckoo Weir, which would later become known as Wards Mead Bathing Place.
The duumvirate ended shortly after the First World War, when Athens was bought for the college. Up to that point, the bathing spot had been rented from the Crown but in 1917 an Eton pupil, John Baker, was killed in a flying accident. The Commissioners for Crown Lands agreed to sell the land to his father, who gave it to the school in memory of his son, a ‘regular water baby’. Today there is still a stone tablet at Athens, opposite the Royal Windsor Race Course, in memory of young Baker, ‘a brilliant swimmer who spent here many of the happiest hours of his boyhood’. On one side of the stone is a sign outlining BATHING REGULATIONS AT ATHENS, as taken from the 1921 School Rules of the River. There was to be no bathing on Sundays after 8.30 a.m. and ‘boys who are undressed must either get at once into the water or get behind screens when boats containing ladies come in sight’. Boys were also not allowed to ‘land on the Windsor Bank or to swim out to launches and barges or to hang onto, or interfere with, boats of any kind’; anyone breaking the rule would be ‘severely punished’.
Swimming at Eton had certainly evolved over some 150 years, becoming safer, more skilled and far more regulated. Gone were the days of naked boys paying a guinea to learn how to swim; now pupils needed to obey rules restricting swimming to certain places at certain hours and to pass an exam, just as in other subjects.
By the 1920s Cuckoo Weir was used by other boys as well. A Pathé News clip shows ‘A Boys’ Camp at Cuckoo Weir’. It opens with camp leaders in pyjamas striding past a row of wigwam tents; they then burst into the tents, wake the boys, drag some of them out on their blankets, swing them by their hands and feet and toss them into the river. Later in the day there’s a swimming race, and after lunch the boys wash the dishes in the river.
By 1935 the Eton bathing spot at Boveney had been given up, although pupils still swam downstream from Boveney to Rafts, and the former ‘Masters’ Bathing Place’ at Romney Weir was used by both masters and the ‘more prominent boys in the school’. But the days of swimming in the Thames came to an end, at least officially, in the 1950s. Penny tells me this was partly because an outdoor pool was built, and also because of fears of pollution and polio. The highly infectious polio virus was a frequent cause of death and paralysis in the 1940s and 1950s, especially among children, who were warned to stay away from ponds and rivers.
I stack the old swimming society books into a neat pile and head back through Eton, stopping at an antique bookshop to ask the man behind the counter if he has any prints depicting bathing; he says someone came in the week before and bought them all. And would he ever swim in the Thames? He pulls a face: ‘I’ve seen the rats, and the current is really strong, especially around Windsor Bridge.’ He’s right; standing on the bridge a few minutes later I watch gulls floating speedily along like bath toys, the water rushing under the stone arches. Down on the Thames Path people are feeding the swans – throwing entire slices of bread – while others board a French Brothers’ boat. I walk along the path where the honking of geese is deafening, the landscape busy with bridges, a viaduct and various channels. There are plenty of signs: ‘river users’ are told to ‘take extreme care at all times’ particularly near the bridge, while danger signs warn of shallow water.
Under the viaduct bridge, and just before the modern Windsor Leisure Centre, is a sign to Baths Island & Pleasure Ground. A wooden bridge leads to the island, a wide stretch of grass deserted today but for a solitary man on a bike. It’s here that the town’s outdoor swimming baths were first built and on 1 May 1858 the press reported the opening of the Windsor Subscription Baths, ‘Season Tickets 8/-Gentlemen under 17 years of age 6/-. Great improvements have been made. An experienced Waterman with a punt will be in attendance and swimming taught. W.F. Taylor.’ Taylor had a shop opposite the parish church and was also known to run ‘peep shows’ of the Royal Apartments.
Then, in 1870, the baths were moved. ‘Queen Victoria was looking out of the castle windows one day and she saw all these half-naked men,’ explains long-time Windsor Swimming Club member Leslie Sturgess, ‘so it was moved to the other side of the railway bridge.’ The new site, between Jacobs Island and the riverbank, was known as Boddys Baths. It was home to the Windsor Swimming Club, founded in 1883, with a clubhouse on the island. There are earlier references to ‘the Windsor and Eton Swimming Club’, which had thirty-six members in 1881, but Leslie says this was a water polo club.
The Windsor Swimming Club, founded in 1883, held annual competitions which included Walking the Slippery Pole, with the winner receiving a butter dish.
The Windsor Club held annual competitions; with the winner of the 50 yards Novice Race being awarded a silver pencil case, and the winner of Walking the Slippery Pole receiving an ‘oak electro butter dish’. In July 1886 the press reported that the ‘first race for the championship of this rising Club came off in the river Thames early on Monday morning when, despite inclement weather a fair number of spectators assembled in the Eton Brocas to witness the event’. The course was from the Great Western Railway Bridge to the Swimming Baths, a distance of about 400 yards.
The club’s fourth annual competition included a 100 yards handicap final, a 50 yards handicap boys, running headers and Walking the Slippery Pole. This time there was a ‘numerous company of spectators present’ and Mayor Mr J. Lundy said he was ‘surprised and pleased to find ladies present’.
Sometime around 1896 the club was wound down, but was re-formed in 1909 at new baths built in 1904 and known as the Eastern Baths. This also appears to have been when a separate bath was created for women. In 1912 the Windsor Ladies Swimming Club was formed, one of many Thames-side clubs for women in the period. The press reported that within just a few months ‘its path has been paved with prosperity. The members have displayed the utmost enthusiasm, with the result the members have increased until at the present time it is a really healthy club doing an excellent work in the cultivation of the art of swimming.’ The year 1912 was a significant one for women: they were allowed for the first time to compete in Olympic swimming and diving events. Diving had become an Olympic sport for men in 1904, and swimming in 1908, but it was only at the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912 that women could take part and when Londoner Mary Belle White won bronze in the ten-metre platform event.
The object of the Windsor Club was ‘the encouragement of the art of swimming and life saving,’ explained its yearbook for 1923; fixtures included the mile, the half-mile and the 100 yards handicap, and any member found guilty of ‘regrettable behaviour’ would be expelled. While such behaviour isn’t defined, it may have had something to do with clothing, for the yearbook reminds members that at meetings of ‘both sexes’ and in all Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) championships competitors ‘must wear regulation bathing costumes and drawers’. By now there were numerous rules as to what women, and men, could wear while swimming at official events. The first ASA costume rule appeared in 1890, by which time costumes were being manufactured, but it applied only to men – the first ASA championships for women weren’t held until 1901. But already in 1899 rules on women’s costumes had been added; they were to have ‘a shaped arm, at least three inches long’ and the costume ‘shall be cut straight round the neck’. By the following year costumes could now only be black or dark blue, presumably because these were less transparent when wet. Men who didn’t wear the regulation costume when ‘ladies are present at Galas’ and who ‘swam without drawers’ were disqualified. Nine years later the r
ules were again revised, and now there was specific reference to ‘Ladies’ races in Public’. At competitions where ‘both sexes were admitted’ females over the age of fourteen had to wear ‘on leaving the dressing room, a long coat or bath gown before entering and immediately after leaving the water’, a rule that continued for decades. Women might now be competing publicly as amateurs and winning medals for Olympic diving, but social constraints meant they had to be appropriately dressed, the cut and length of their costume clearly defined, their bodies shielded from view until they got in the water and covered up again the moment they got out.
By 1930 things had changed somewhat and the Windsor Ladies’ life-saving competition now required competitors to swim 30 yards wearing clothes, ‘take off clothes in water. Dive for object 4ft, and bring same to bank on back.’ They also had to plunge in from the bank, save someone ‘by one release method and carry her 30 yards by one rescue method’. The women swam from Boveney Lock to Romney Lock, a distance of two miles and 572 yards, for which they received a lock-to-lock certificate.
Boys from Windsor Grammar School also took part in school swimming and diving sports at the public baths in the 1940s. By now mixed bathing had been introduced and diving boards installed, but the baths, like those at Reading, appear to have become derelict by the end of the war when they were full of rubbish. ‘Indoor pools were built around the area, at Slough and Maidenhead,’ explains Leslie Sturgess. ‘Our club had a hundred-year lease on the island but we were forced to close the clubhouse because of Health & Safety; the council said we had to do the place up and we couldn’t afford it.’
Windsor Swimming Club still exists, however, and its website explains that members have ‘achieved frequent success at County, Regional, National and International levels. Windsor has become one of the most admired clubs in the south of England, with a growing reputation.’ Their focus is ‘competitive development’, with training no longer held in the Thames but at various local indoor pools.
Human Race chose Windsor as the location for one of its annual swims, with the background of the iconic Windsor Castle.
But if swimming in the river at Eton and Windsor fell out of favour after the 1950s, today, as at Henley, Marlow and Maidenhead, it’s a popular place for mass-participation events. ‘Windsor is such an iconic centre,’ says John Lunt, founder of Human Race, ‘it has the castle and it’s great geographically and historically.’ When he launched the Windsor Triathlon in 1991, ‘we needed a place to swim; if there had been a lake in Windsor it would have been in a lake, but as the River Thames goes through the town it was perfect’. Places for the televised triathlon, named Event of the Year by the British Triathlon Foundation seven times, sell out in weeks.
Windsor has also been a memorable spot for those passing through the town after days submerged in the river. For Lewis Pugh arriving here in 2006, having swum from Lechlade, it was definitely a high point. ‘The Thames gradually descends; the source is only 110 metres above sea level and it has a long way to slowly descend across fields and meadows to the North Sea. It’s not like the Ganges, for example, which descends from high in the Himalayas and on either side there are valleys, glaciers and temples. I was struck by the sensory deprivation in the Thames, the water was mud-brown so I saw little underneath me and when I took a breath there was nothing except six foot of muddy banks on either side, that’s it . . . but then I hit Windsor and came round a bend in the river and saw the swans and there rising out of the mist was Windsor Castle! I told the Queen about that later, and her face lit up.’
Charlie Wittmack had a similar experience during his world triathlon in 2010: ‘when you swim your head is in the water, you can’t see anything all day, you can’t hear anything all day. All you’re left with is your thoughts and those thoughts can be really really tough, especially when the plan is to swim eighteen miles or more. There’s nothing to look at, listen to or smell all day long. One day I stopped and popped my head up out of the water and looked over and I was right outside of Windsor Castle! I hadn’t seen or heard anything all day and there it was, that was a fun surprise.’
9
Hampton Court–Molesey Lock–Sunbury–Kingston
‘Should you fall into the water, you will find swimming of more use than mathematics’
Revd Charles Haddon Spurgeon,
Baptist preacher, 1834–92
It’s a bitter April morning as I approach Hampton Court, on board the Richmond Royale. It’s the first time I’ve seen the Thames so uninviting; even the seagulls look frozen. Inside the boat the sides are lined with red leather seats, the floor covered in patterned carpet like an old-fashioned pub. It’s so cold I can see my breath in the air. I chat to a crewmember, a young man who lives locally but has never swum in the Thames. He knows of three people who ended up in hospital recently after jumping into the river. One incident happened downstream at around 8 p.m. on a hot day: ‘we saw a man in the middle of the river, with his mates outside a pub cheering him on, then on our way back we saw an ambulance and he was being given CPR. He died the next day. It’s the shock of the water when you’re drunk.’
Outside the snow-splattered window the river looks like dull scratched metal. I go up on the top deck, where there’s a bit of a blizzard blowing, just in time to see Henry VIII’s magnificent palace, originally built for Cardinal Wolsey. There’s a glint of gold at the grand Tudor gates and further on, beneath the turrets, a hand-painted sign that reads ‘No Mooring’. In the summer of 1718 three gentlemen arrived here from London on horseback and ‘it being excellent hot they went to bath themselves in the River of Thames. And not being skilled in Swimming, they were all drowned.’ But others found it a perfect spot. ‘If there be a situation on the whole river between Staines Bridge and Windsor Bridge pleasanter than another, it is this of Hampton,’ wrote Daniel Defoe in 1724. ‘The river is high enough to be navigable, and low enough to be a little pleasantly rapid; so that the stream looks always cheerful, not slow and sleeping, like a pond. This keeps the waters always clear and clean, the bottom in view, the fish playing and in sight.’ There is little cheerful about the scene today and no bottom in view as I step off the boat. There’s no sign of any fish playing either, although porpoises were recently reported downstream at Twickenham, where sightings go back to at least 1896, when the press warned it was illegal to shoot them and that ‘porpoise meat, though doubtless nourishing and perhaps toothsome, has long gone out of fashion’.
In the 1880s city holidaymakers enjoyed regattas at Hampton, just as they did at Henley, along with river festivals and other ‘primitive amusements’, while hustling photographers stood at vantage points to take pictures. In 1890 Henry Bran, ‘swimmer, waterman and ferryman at Hampton’, escorted the American Davis Dalton in his attempt to swim the Channel, accompanying him in a small punt. When Dalton arrived in England he fainted on the beach at Folkestone after a twenty-three-hour crossing, the British press disputed his swim and it was never officially recognised. The following summer, however, Dalton was in the Thames, this time swimming all the way from Blackwall to Gravesend on his back.
Today this part of the river is also the site of an annual mass swim, 2.25 miles from Hampton Court Palace to Kingston upon Thames, again staged by Human Race and described as one of the more challenging events in the open-water swim series. ‘It’s a linear course, the start and end points are in different places and we have to move people’s kit,’ explains John Lunt, ‘but for spectators they can walk along the towpath so there is the tourism element; if you were in the middle of a lake no one could see you.’ The first swim took place on 1 August 2010 with 1,200 swimmers, including Olympic silver medallist and open-water swimmer Keri-Anne Payne and Olympic rower Toby Garbett (who also swims the Henley Classic), and the race raised £10,000 for WaterAid. In 2011 it was renamed the Speedo Open Water Swim Series and the following year a non-wetsuit option was introduced (if the water is over 15 degrees). The event is now billed as the UK’s largest river swim, althou
gh, as with all Thames events, the actual dates are dependent on the weather.
Victorian holidaymakers enjoyed regattas at Hampton Court, while in the 1920s there was a resort for swimmers known as ‘London’s Palm Beach’.
In 2012 the race was postponed from July to October after heavy rainfall and flooding, and in a survey conducted after the event almost half of the 700 entrants reported falling ill. Public Health England concluded that poor hygiene and swallowing river water may have been to blame, but it also found that those who had previous recent experience in an open-water river event, and those over the age of forty, were less likely to get ill. It recommended cleaning wetsuits after swimming and so Human Race put new measures in place – including hygiene stations where participants can soak their wetsuits in sterilising Milton Dip, as well as gel pump dispensers. While most people don’t get sick from swimming in the Thames, in the modern world precautions are always being improved and refined.
I cross the handsome three-arched Hampton Bridge, where a sign tells me it’s 147 miles to the source of the Thames. As I turn right towards Molesey Lock I consider the distance I’ve come and how the landscape has changed over nearly seventy miles, from a waterlogged meadow in Gloucestershire, to a winding waterway through the city of Oxford, to the rowers’ delight that is Henley, the grandeur of the Thames overlooked by Windsor Castle, and now I’m here in Surrey, just entering Greater London.
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