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EXCERPTS - Swimming Against the Stream by Jean Perraton
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INTRODUCTION
(excerpt)
I was born by the sea. My
earliest memory is, as a two year old, crawling under the new barbed-wire
defences with my dad, and clinging to his back as he swam out to sea. That was
his last swim before the war took him away from us for five long years.
How we missed the sea in our
exile to the Midlands during the war. Among
the few pleasures that shine out from those grey sad years were summer
expeditions across the fields to Ditchford. There, on the little stony beach
below a handsome stone bridge, my sister and I would paddle and splash while my
mother swam in the brown, polluted waters of the river Nene - the same spot
where my father and grandfather learnt to swim. It wasn't the sea - but it was
the next best thing. On returning to Eastbourne,
we children revelled in long unsupervised summer days on the beach, and soon
discovered for ourselves how to stay afloat and swim doggy-paddle. It would
never have occurred to us, at that time, to seek out a pond or a river in which
to swim.
It was more than a decade
later that I began to discover the many different flavours of inland swimming.
First to be sampled were the relatively warm placid waters of the River Cam,
swimming lazily behind a punt and, once, by moonlight with a boyfriend in
Byron's Pool. Later, I discovered the icy pools in mountain streams of the Lake District and the delight of slithering over smooth
black rocks to the pool below, before drying in the sun on soft damp mossy
banks. I found, too, the shallow mountain tarns, which get surprisingly warm as
their dark peaty bottoms absorb the heat of the sun, where, if they were too
small to swim in, I could float on my back and feel part of the world of water
boatmen and dancing cotton grass. On returning to Cambridge
with a baby son, after a few years in London,
it was good to find that we could swim in a pond near the mill at Hinxton.
Later still, on warm summer evenings after the children came home from school,
we would swim in the Cam at one of the old
bathing places on Coe Fen and eat a picnic supper on the river bank.
Occasionally we would travel further afield to a picnic spot in the Fens with a
lake, the remains of old sand and gravel workings, where we could run down
steep sandy banks into the water.
We can still enjoy the
mountain streams and tarns, but by-laws prohibit swimming in the traditional
bathing places of the river Cam. Byron's Pool,
with the drone of nearby motorway traffic, is no longer a peaceful romantic
spot. 'No swimming' notices greet you on the approach to the pond at Hinxton
which, in any case, now looks weedy and uninviting, and we are no longer
allowed to swim in the fenland pool.
In recent decades, many
changes, not least in the attitude of public authorities, have discouraged
swimming in the lakes and rivers of England
and Wales.
Before the eighteenth
century, those who bathed did so mainly in inland waters. Then came the fashion
for sea bathing which has remained an important part of our leisure culture.
But now, in contrast to other European countries, many of our lakes and rivers
are no longer regarded as places to swim. This book examines why this is so and
why it is important that people who wish to swim in inland waters should be
able to do so.
Many writers have been
enthusiastic swimmers and the book begins by drawing upon their writings to
convey, far better than I could, the intensity of pleasure and the range of
emotions that swimming in lakes and rivers can evoke. Chapter 2 then takes a
brief look at the history of swimming in this country. The rise in popularity
of sea bathing and the development of competitive swimming in more recent years
is well chronicled, but we know little about the earlier history of swimming in
lakes and rivers simply for fun - and what we do know is largely limited to the
activities of the aristocracy and upper social classes. This chapter therefore
pieces together the few scraps we have in order to put into context the later
discussion of public policy. Also, as background, chapter 3 examines changes in
our environment, particularly the culverting and straightening of rivers and
the degradation of landscapes through intensive farming, as well as the
continuing constraints upon access to rivers and lakes and the lack of rights
to bathe in most of them, that make it difficult for people in many parts of
lowland England to find good places to swim.
The next two chapters look
at public policy about swimming. Various agencies influence the opportunities
for people to swim in lakes and rivers. Chapter 4 examines the main agencies
that control our water environment - the Environment Agency, British Waterways
and the water companies - whose duties include promoting the recreational use
of water and adjoining land. All of them are firmly opposed to swimming.
Chapter 5 looks at those agencies that influence the management of land and its
use for recreation - the Countryside Agencies, the Sports Council, the Forestry
Commission and, most importantly, local authorities. They too, with a few
notable exceptions, have in recent years ignored or discouraged swimming in
inland waters.
Why is this so? A large part
of the explanation lies, as we see in chapter 6, in the legislation relating to
the duty of care which owners and managers of sites owe to members of the
public who come on to their land, and in the way that this has been
interpreted, sometimes over-zealously, by organisations concerned with safety.
The Health and Safety Executive and the Royal Society for the Prevention of
Accidents give the impression that swimming in inland waters is a uniquely
dangerous activity. Their advice, together with fears of costly litigation,
have encouraged public authorities and other site operators to ban swimming in
the waters they control. Chapters 7 and 8 look at what the dangers really are,
examining the statistics on drowning and the risks of catching a disease from
swimming in untreated waters. The evidence indicates that the risks are
exaggerated, especially the health hazards, and do not appear to justify the
negative policies.
The next three chapters
discuss why public authorities should adopt a less restrictive attitude to
swimming in lakes and rivers. First, they ask whether there are still people
who want to immerse themselves in cool, often cold, untreated water when there
are now so many heated swimming pools. Since this is a neglected topic for
surveys, we just don't know: but chapter 9 finds indications of an unfulfilled
demand. Given the immense pleasure that such swimming can bring, this alone
would seem to be a good reason for swimming to be treated more sympathetically
by public policy-makers. But, there are other cogent arguments for widening the
opportunities for people to swim in lakes and rivers. They include the health
benefits of outdoor exercise and the low impact that swimming has upon the
environment. Measures that improve the conditions and opportunities for people
to swim would also improve the environment for wildlife and for other people
wishing to enjoy the countryside in environmentally friendly ways. And there
are some reasons to believe that people who enjoy the natural environment are
likely to be inspired to care for it. These questions are discussed in chapters
10 and 11.
The penultimate chapter
describes some of the many practical ways in which we could enable more people
to enjoy this immensely pleasurable and environmentally benign activity. They
depend, however, upon a change in attitude to swimming, and they require
measures that will relieve owners and managers of land of some of their
concerns about litigation. In the short term, some progress could be made by a
reappraisal of the safety guidelines that constrain managers of recreation
sites with swimmable lakes and rivers. More fundamentally, we need a more
comprehensive 'right to roam', one that will give us more widespread access to
the countryside and a right to swim in its lakes and rivers.
This book is a plea for
freedom: freedom to enjoy simple pleasures that do not harm the environment or
endanger other people, and to accept the risks of doing so.
CHAPTER 2: A QUICK DIP INTO
THE HISTORY OF SWIMMING
(excerpt)
if any scholar should go
into any river, pool or other water in the county of Cambridge,
by day or night, to swim or wash, he should ... be sharply and severely whipped
publicly ...
Pronouncement by the Vice
Chancellor of the University
of Cambridge 1571 (Cooper
1843: 277)
Eight hardy spirits took the
plunge at the Town Bathing Sheds though it took nearly half an hour to break
the ice. Many of them have hardly missed a day.
Cambridge News 16 February 1929
The threat of dire
punishment was needed to deter the scholars of Cambridge
University from swimming in the river Cam in 1571. Three centuries later the river had become a
popular bathing place for town and gown alike. Now, on a warm summer's day, one
might come across young boys jumping off the footbridge at Coe Fen and perhaps
one or two more swimming at the old bathing place, but it is the punts, not the
bathers, that throng the river. Drive north across the fens to the sea at
Hunstanton, however, and you would expect to see people of all ages paddling
and splashing and swimming in the brown peaty waters. Yet in Britain sea
bathing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the seventeenth century, the
scanty records suggest that those who washed, bathed or swam, did so in inland
waters. Here we take a brief look at the changing patterns of swimming in Britain before
exploring, in the next three chapters, some of the reasons why lakes and rivers
are now generally not regarded as places to swim.
Swimming in the Middle Ages
What little information
there is about swimming in Britain before the sixteenth century begins, when
records began, with the Romans. There is plenty of documentary evidence to show
that the ancient Romans, like the ancient Greeks, enjoyed swimming in seas,
rivers and purpose-built pools, and some evidence to show that when the Romans
arrived in this country they continued to swim for military purposes and later,
as occupiers, for pleasure (Orme 1983). But the Graeco-Roman delight in water
and bathing appears to have been stifled, after the collapse of the Roman
Empire, by the spread of Christianity with its very different attitudes to the
human body and to water. Even washing came under suspicion as dangerous to
health, enfeebling the body and spreading disease. The cold seas round our
shores - like the forests and mountains - were seen as threatening, untamed
nature. Here, in the great abyss, the humble fishermen would brave the elements
for a livelihood and, perhaps, the solitary devout sinner might mortify his
flesh, but, according to some accounts, not bathe for pleasure.1
However, Nicholas Orme, in
his history of early British swimming, cites evidence to suggest that swimming
did not altogether cease after the fall of Rome.2 Evidence from epic
poetry indicates that it remained a skill that was practised by the Anglo-Saxon
and Viking settlers and perhaps the unconquered Welsh. Being able to swim was
regarded as a useful military accomplishment and an indication of male prowess
rather than a recreation. It was after the Norman conquest, Orme suggests, that
swimming declined in status as a skill among the aristocracy and, with the
increasing weight of bodily armour, virtually disappeared as a military skill.
A renaissance in swimming
By the sixteenth century
there appears to have been a revival in interest in swimming which may, but we
cannot be sure, indicate an increase in the numbers of people who swam in lakes
and rivers. Swimming was still seen primarily as a useful survival skill, but
it was also recognised as a healthy and enjoyable activity in which even a
gentleman could now take part.3 Swimming techniques, however, were
poorly developed and, it seems, drownings were frequent. Concern about the
number of undergraduates drowning in the river Cam persuaded Everard Digby, a
fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, that an instruction manual was needed.
In 1587 Digby published De Arte Natandi,
the first British treatise on swimming, to raise the art of swimming ‘from the
depths of ignorance and the dust of oblivion’ (Orme 1983: 81). It was written
in Latin in order, Orme suggests, to give this neglected activity status and
dignity, but this limited its readership to the aristocracy, clergy and
scholars. A few years later, however, in 1595 Christopher Middleton, probably
also a Cambridge scholar, published a much shortened version of Digby's
pioneering work in English, for ‘the better understanding of those who
understand not the Latine (sic) tongue’
(Orme 1983: 94).
Digby's treatise is in two
volumes. The first discusses the theory of swimming and includes some sensible
practical advice on when and where to swim. He advises swimmers to choose clear
waters where they can see the bottom, to avoid stirring up the muddy sediments
and not to swim when the rain is bringing down dung, straw, leaves and ‘what
filth or unwholesome things else’ (Orme 1983: 120). He also warns his readers
not to immerse their hot sweaty bodies suddenly in cold water. The second
volume deals with how to swim, with brief instructions (much too brief to be
helpful) and line drawings indicating how to enter the water, including how to
dive, how to swim on one's front, back, side and under water, how to float and
tread water, together with some curious feats such as how to pare one's toe
nails while floating in the water. There is, however, no description of our
modern breaststroke or any overarm strokes such as the sidestroke and front
crawl, which were developed or introduced much later. The text and the illustrations
make it quite clear that Digby is assuming his readers would be swimming in a
river.
Orme concludes that, during
the period covered by his history, 55BC to AD1719, swimming was practised by a
smaller proportion of the population than today and was predominantly a male
activity. It has been suggested that it was confined to eccentric aristocrats,
but there are hints that perhaps it may have long been enjoyed by people of
lower social class.4 Women generally did not swim - or at least were
seldom recorded as doing so. But, again, we have hints from literature, such as
the early seventeenth-century poem by Thomas Randolph quoted in chapter 1,
suggesting that some females dared to swim, at least surreptitiously after
nightfall or in a secluded spot. And there are even earlier references, in
twelfth-century literature, to ‘nymphs who gently swim and naked bathe’
(Manning-Saunders 1951: 10).
Swimming for most of this
period, up to the early eighteenth century, appears to have been confined to
lakes, ponds and rivers, with few people, or at least few gentry, swimming in
the sea (Orme 1983: 107). But this was about to change.
The rise of sea swimming
In the late seventeenth
century people, affluent people, began to bathe in the sea - not for pleasure
but for therapeutic purposes. Maybe ordinary men, and perhaps women, living
near the coast had already been accustomed to swim in the sea for pleasure
(Corbin 1994: 39). But in 1667 Dr Wittie of Scarborough successfully persuaded
his patients of the value of drinking sea water and immersing themselves in the
sea. This was simply a continuation of the long tradition in Britain, and on
the continent, of visiting inland spas to drink and bathe in the mineral
waters, a tradition that had recently experienced a revival; Bath had been
rediscovered and Buxton and Harrogate were flourishing (Hern 1967: 3). Other
physicians soon seized upon the expanding economic opportunity: among them a Dr
Russell who sent his constipated patients to drink sea water at Southampton and
Brighthelmston, later to become known at Brighton (Lencek and Bosker 1998:
76-8). At first bathing was a winter activity and not all those early bathers
can have enjoyed the uncomfortable ritual of being pushed under water for the
sake of their health, particularly in the bracing resort of Scarborough at a
time when our climate was cooler than now.5 But the new health fad
gave those who tried it an opportunity to discover the joys of sea bathing and
seaside life. As the watering places of Weymouth, Brighton and South End
enjoyed the patronage of the royal family, holidays by the sea became
fashionable and the foundations were laid for the expansion of seaside resorts.
There appears to have been
something wonderfully liberating about this new pastime. Whereas bathing in
lakes and rivers in England in the eighteenth century, at least among the
leisured classes, remained a male preserve, sea bathing was practised by both
sexes. Men and women in England bathed naked at the same time and in the same
place, and would continue to do so in some resorts until well into the
nineteenth century (Lencek and Bosker 1998: 83). In his diary for 5 September
1872, the Reverend Francis Kilvert described an early morning bathe at
Weston-super-Mare: ‘here was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the
open air and running down naked to the sea, where the waves were curling white
with foam and the red morning sunshine glowing upon naked limbs of the bathers’
(Plomer 1969: 262). But not all resorts were as liberated and the freedom to
bathe naked would soon be lost in the others. Women had already started wearing
voluminous flannel costumes to bathe and, by about 1880, most men would be
wearing the ‘university costume’, a one piece garment that covered their chests
and down to their thighs (Hern 1967: 24). Apart from a few secluded places, the
freedom to bathe naked remains lost today - but sea bathing introduced a
permanent liberation for women.
The opportunity to enjoy sea
bathing was also becoming more widely shared across the social classes. With
the expansion of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, the introduction
of bank holidays in 1871, and rising incomes and holidays with pay in the
twentieth century, ordinary families could escape from the grim industrial
towns to enjoy bathing and the other pleasures of a seaside holiday. By the
early twentieth century trains were taking tens of thousands of working-class
families to the seaside for their week's holiday: to Skegness and Cleethorpes,
Margate and Southend and, above all, to Blackpool (Brailsford 1991: 124). And
the popularity of Britain's seaside resorts continued to rise throughout most
of the twentieth century - though more slowly in the second half of the century
as cheap package holidays enabled many to seek warmer seas and more predictable
sunshine.
CHAPTER 6: LITIGATION OR LIBERTY
(excerpt)
A changing legal landscape?
Two recent legal decisions
in relation to civil liability, however, indicate that safety organisations
have been interpreting the legal duty of care too onerously. In particular,
RoSPA's advice, that site operators must take steps to ensure that people do
not swim where 'no swimming' rules are in force, appears to go beyond the legal
requirements.
In the first case, damages
were awarded against the National Trust to a woman whose husband had drowned
while swimming in a lake which it owned. Swimming was forbidden in the lake,
but there was only an inconspicuous sign in the car park to this effect and,
though wardens would warn people from time to time that they might catch Weil's
disease if they swam, there were no systematic attempts to stop people from
doing so. In allowing an appeal by the National Trust, the Court of Appeal
ruled that there was no need to display warning signs next to the lake, as it
did not present any unusual risk. Lord Justice May pointed out that,
had the appeal been dismissed, warning notices would have to be put up beside
every beach in the country (Darby v. National Trust 2001).
In the other case, a young
man was injured when he dived in shallow water in the lake at Brereton Heath
Country Park (see box ‘Caring council or corporate vandal?). The country park
was owned by Congleton Borough Council, but managed by Cheshire County Council.
Swimming here was forbidden, and not only were there warning notices in place
but the borough council had been planning to block the entrance to the lake and
had even begun to destroy a popular beach to prevent people from swimming
there. The Court of Appeal awarded the young man (Tomlinson) partial damages,
but the case was taken to the House of Lords which upheld an appeal by the
councils. In doing so the Law Lords made it clear that land owners and
operators are not under a duty to take steps to prohibit or prevent people from
swimming where there is no unusual danger, over and above the danger inherent
in swimming in open waters. In Lord Hoffman's words: ‘it will be extremely rare
for an occupier of land to be under a duty to prevent people from taking risks
which are inherent in activities they freely choose to undertake on the land.’
(Tomlinson v. Congleton Borough Council 2003: para. 45)
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