Downstream
Victorian ‘swimming professors’ taught people how to swim as well as giving public displays at indoor baths and in the ...
Thames. The Romans, who built the first bridge over the Thames, enjoyed military training swims, and for hundreds ...
the Thames was so ‘clear and pure’ that ‘noblemen’ swam in it all the time. Jonathan Swift took regular dips ...
industrialised, as docks were built and warehouses lined its banks, people still swam. While history tells us t ...
sent his ‘supremest kiss/To thee, my silver-footed Thamesis’ where in the ‘summer sweeter evenings’ thousands ‘bat ...
letter writer to The Times, but to use the ‘great highway of the Thames’, when there were no baths in which ...
the fact that sewage pollution was so severe it would result in cholera outbreaks. Originally races were held ...
‘aquatic jockeys’ raced twice across the Thames near Battersea, naked. The one- mile amateur championships began ...
Captain Matthew Webb, the first man to swim across the Channel successfully and unaided in 1875 and whose feat ...
Girls and women often swam in the Thames in Victorian times, where they won numerous medals and trophies. ...
Yet, while some of these swimmers’ exploits have gone down in history, for others their adventures h ...
could successfully compete in a male arena. Thousands gathered on banks and bridges to watch teenage champions ...
Windsor, Kingston and Southend – with seventeen swimming clubs holding their captaincy races in the Tham ...
and establishing who won what at a time when swimmers frequently called themselves ‘champion of London’ or ‘ ...
swimmers: at Tumbling Bay in Oxford, King’s Meadow in Reading, Solomon’s Hatch in Henley and Cuckoo Weir in ...
carnivals. Jerome K. Jerome immortalised the boating trip in his 1889 book Three Men in a Boat in which ...
swim every morning’. But at once things begin to go wrong: the river is full of inept city boaters, ...
upstream to Oxford ‘on a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river, if it killed us’. By now the Thames was seen as ‘ ...
warned that ‘no person shall bathe without proper bathing dress or drawers, bathe or prepare to bathe between ...
was amended so that no one should bathe without proper dress or drawers ‘unless properly screened from view’, ...
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