Downstream by Caitlin Davies Page A

campaigner Bob O’Neill. ‘They will end up with a private diners’ club – fine while there are enough rich people to use it but when they move on, the pool as it has been proposed, will not be OK to cater for the needs of the “proletariat” in great numbers.’ Thecampaign has drawn a lot of support on the lost lidos website, with many saying the pool brought back happy memories. ‘I swam here as a small girl and would very much like to bring my grandchildren who live in Reading to swim here,’ wrote one woman, while another commented, ‘On the River Thames our Heritage [sic]! Beautiful river. We need to keep more Community Baths!’
    To those like Bob O’Neill the crucial thing is to preserve this heritage – in the shape of the actual building, but also to connect us to the way we used the Thames in the past, in a town that once had pools and lidos, galas and clubs, where a group of winter bathers could send a telegram to the King and fully expect a reply and where the authorities went to great lengths to provide safe, clean areas in which to swim.
    Campaigners have fought a determined battle to save King’s Meadow women’s pool, pictured today. It opened in 1903 and appears to have been the first women-only bathing spot on the Thames.
    When Gillian sends me photos of the old King’s Meadow women’s pool today I’m taken aback by the way it’s both beautiful and decrepit.By the side of the bath are green pillars topped with ornate wrought-iron leaves, but although it’s clearly being cared for the steps lead down into stagnant looking water where two ducks swim next to a cardboard box. The wooden changing rooms are missing doors; there are rubbish bins on the side and weeds around the edge. Yet there is something about the scene that makes me think of a stage set, as if it’s just crying out to be revived, longing to be filled once more with novice schoolgirls learning to swim and the sound of women’s laughter, this first ever pool that we were given on the River Thames in 1903.

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    Shiplake and Wargrave
    â€˜There is probably more than one Otter who harbours the idea of returning to the tideway for a repeat of the great races of Victorian and Edwardian times’
    Otter Swimming Club, 1990
    I n the summer of 1888, some six miles downstream from Reading at Shiplake, the Otter Swimming Club held its first annual ‘Up-River race’ on the Thames. This was a quarter-mile course with eighteen entrants, and for many years the village would remain central to the club’s illustrious history.
    Otter ranks among the earliest of British swimming clubs, formed in London in 1869 with a spirit that was ‘quite intangible and indefinable’, according to former president Dr Carmichael A. Young, with ‘fellowship and camaraderie’ cementing the members together. It’s not the oldest club – the London Swimming Club was formed in 1859 and the Brighton Swimming Club in 1860, while the Serpentine Swimming Club started in 1864, based on the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park with water originally pumped from the Thames. But it is Otter SC that is one of the few survivors of the dozens of clubs that once raced in the Thames, and still swims there today.
    I’m meeting current president James Stewart at the Lansdowne Club in west London, an ‘exclusive and traditional’ private members’ club, with a very specific dress code. ‘Ladies’ dress’ should be of ‘aconventional nature’ – smart trouser suit, jacket, skirt or dress, and definitely no leggings – and only when the ambient air temperature exceeds 24 degrees C are gentlemen allowed to remove their jackets, and even then they are not to be draped on chair backs.
    A busy Edwardian scene at Shiplake Lock, near where the Otter Swimming Club held its first annual ‘Up-River race’ in the summer of 1888.
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