Downstream

yellow over the years, and
while its focus is the
evolution of boat racing there
are two chapters on bathing.
The first, ‘Bathing up to
1840’, is significantly
subtitled ‘a chapter of
accidents’.
Despite ‘the insanitary state
of the river’, bathing took
place at Eton ‘from a very
early date’, with one boy
drowning in 1549 after he’d
gone to bathe from the