A Brief and Selective History of Swimming!
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Anyway, now I've emerged into the daylight I see it is a beautiful hot sunny day so to get back
into the blogging I decided to post a piece about aspects of the history of swimming, some of which is taken from an article I read in the Daily Telegraph newspaper over the weekend and the rest from my own researches. When I was a child I used to go swimming in the open air at the Ilkley Lido. It was fabulous; very bracing! The popularity of lidos faded with the arrival of chlorinated indoor heated pools but outdoor and "wild" swimming still appeals. The Serpentine in Hyde Park in London is fed by a natural well which keeps the water fresh and one of the places I go to walk and take the dog swimming is the source of the River Lambourn which is fed by springs that rise in the chalk downland. The water is pure and clear and on a day like this you just want to jump straight in!
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Swimming is a natural human impulse; we have apparently been swimming for at least 10 000 years and babies are born knowing how to doggy paddle. (I never progressed much beyond that stage myself!) There is a rock painting in Wadi Sura, SW Egypt, showing swimmers 10 000 years ago and there are also depictions of swimming in art from the early Minoan, Incan and Babylonian empires. The Egyptians, Persians and Greeks were all keen swimmers with Plato going so far as to say that anyone who could not swim lacked a proper education. The Japanese were holding swimming competitions as early as 36BC. Medieval English knights used to swim in armour as one of the "seven agilities." (I'd love to know what the other six were and can't find any references - Can anyone help?) And Everard Digby, one of the Gunpowder Plotters wrote a book called: "A Short Introduction for the Learnne to Swimme" in 1595, a sort of self-help manual for anyone with access to a lake, river or pond who wanted to teach themselves the breast stroke.
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The resort and spa town of Brighton took off as a venue for both sea bathing and salt water
drinking (!) from about 1750. And Queen Victoria had this delightful bathing machine (picture above), now at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. By now the bathing machine looked like very comfy beach huts on wheels and they could be hired for half hour periods. And people no longer bathed in the nude. This was the Victorian period after all! The picture on the right is a Victorian child's bathing costume. Ladies tended to wear more clothes for bathing than they did for activities on dry land!
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Are you a swimmer or a paddler? Would you like your own bathing machine or plunge pool? I can't help thinking there was a lot of style in the way some of our ancestors bathed compared to today!
Comments
Loved your history of swimming too - I often have my characters taking a dip! Think my ideas are inspired by From Here to Eternity -oh so sexy.
Welcome back, you have been missed.
Swimming... I nearly grew chlorine gills as a child. Not a day went by that I wasn't in the back yard swimming round and round our 10" aboveground with my sibs. Then, at fourteen, I saw the movie Poltergeist. Haven't been a pool since. Funny, how powerful the mind can be.
Back home in New Zealand when I grew up most schools had pools and everyone learnt to swim. I was a fish, beach or swimming pool, it mattered not. Through the years there were family picnics, I'm talking cousins, aunties, uncles etc, we would all meet up at the beach and spend the day in the water, laying in the sun and BBQ-ing. They were happy carefree days.
I'm living in the Midwest in the States at the moment and missing the ocean dreadfully.
Thanks for the sympathy on the wip. It has been tough and I think it helps to share the problems as well as the really great things about being a writer.
Scottish Loch, love to do that one day, Nicola. I am off to Loch Awe first week in September, would it be too cold...I guess so.
Good luck with the edits!
I have been to the Lido in the Serpentine but I must admit the squishy bottom turned me off a bit!