Want to go for a swim in the hot weather?

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Want to go for a swim in the hot weather? I read an article this morning about what it was like in the distant past. The year 1911 was an extremely hot year both in the U.S. and in Great Britain. Many people were driven from the cities to the beach to cool off. So what was it like in England during 1911?

Sun-darkened skin was still considered most undesirable, the give-away sign of an outside labourer, and special creams to counteract accidental tanning were advertised in the women’s magazines. The Lady helpfully advised the use of “Sulpholine” lotion, “a simple remedy for clearing the skin of eruptions, roughness and skin discoloration.”

A greater hazard even than sunburn was the risk of exposing naked flesh in public. On many bathing beaches the sexes were still segregated, although at Bexhill in Sussex the experiment of mixed bathing had attracted much excited comment.

A cautious entry from a bathing-machine was the recognised means of making bodily contact with the sea, though at a shilling a time it was not cheap. In the town hall at Broadstairs, Kent, a conservative-minded town (in 1911 it was still being promoted in the South Eastern and Chatham Railway Handbook as Charles Dickens’s favourite resort), a large unmissable notice in the hall cautioned that “No female over eight years shall bathe from any machine except within the bounds marked for females.” It hung next to a second poster warning that “Bathing dresses must extend from the neck to the knees.”

These rules were accepted unquestioningly and were clearly not seen as restrictions, for the editor of the Handbook felt able to boast that Broadstairs was “one of the freshest and freest little places in the world”.

The fully enclosed bathing machine was a sort of garden shed with wheels at one end, its walls and roof made either of wood or canvas. Men and women would enter the machine from the back, while it was parked high up from the water line on the gender-segregated beach.

In the pitch-black hut, windowless in order to discourage any peering in, bathers would remove their clothes and put them up high on a shelf inside the machine to keep them dry, before struggling in the dark with the elaborate costume required for swimming.

A sharp tap from inside was the agreed signal for a horse, a muscly man or even occasionally a mechanical pulley contraption to drag the whole machine and its human contents to a line just beyond the surf.

There the bather could slip discreetly into water up to the neck, with no chance of any part of the body being exposed to the view of those who remained on the beach. At the point of entry there was usually an attendant, irrationally sometimes of the opposite sex. Some ladies looked forward to the moment of being lifted into the sea by strong local arms more than any other part of their holiday.

The Great British Heatwave Of 1911

This is a link to photographs of bathing machines