Every week in the summer term at Berwick Grammar School, we had swimming lessons in the freezing North Sea.
This ritual began for me in the late 1950s, when I was 11. There were two beach pools that filled on the incoming tide, and our lesson timetable was arranged accordingly. One pool was for women, the other for men. They were about 50 yards apart, each with a changing area carved into the cliff.
Our Victorian ancestors believed men and women swimming together would lead to indecent behaviour. So separate bathing areas were established. This segregation was taken very seriously, and any transgressor would be fined.
In the 19th century, female bathing costumes weren’t the fashionable items they are today. A lady would wear a smock-like garment that concealed any possible glimpse of flesh or feminine curve. She would enter her bathing-hut carriage on dry land and the machine was pushed – or drawn by horse – into the sea, allowing her a discreet and private entry to the water.
Victorian men didn’t have such inhibitions. Some bathed in undergarments, but most men took advantage of the enforced privacy and would swim naked.
The segregation rules made it very awkward for family groups to enjoy time together at the seaside. In 1901, at Brighton, mixed bathing was allowed during specified daytime hours.
Ladies’ swimming costumes became more pyjama-like, and gentlemen wore vest-and-pants outfits we see in old photographs and postcards.
In 2017, Theresa May, the then Prime Minister, confessed in a TV interview that her major act of childhood mischief was to run through fields of wheat.
Sixty years earlier, in 1957, my wild act was to swim in the ladies’ pool with other boys. Contrary to folklore, none of us grew breasts, nor did we lose our paltry manhood symbols. We were, however, rebuked, after a diligent passer-by reported us to the headmaster. A half-hearted message about ‘respecting accepted conventions, even if you disagree with them’ was deemed enough punishment.
A decade later, in the late 1960s, we lived in a more relaxed era. Sea-swimming grew in popularity while costumes shrank in body coverage.
The crashing sea waves gave the perfect background for our skinny-dipping, taking mankind a giant leap beyond the small step our Victorian male ancestors had started.
The Oldie November 2024
