Swimming Lessons At Reedham

A Memory of Purley.

From 1959 to 1963 I went to school at Whyteleafe County Primary, Maple Road, whence the older boys and girls were taken by (very old) coaches to Reedham's pool for swimming lessons. It was a bit odd, because we never saw any of the pupils or staff actually attending that school. It was all very mysterious, and although I lived only a mile away from it, all my friends and I only knew that children were sent there if they had no parents to look after them. They were never let out of captivity, and in the locality, might as well have never existed. I envisaged it as a variety of child prison.

The pool was in a separate building, and had changing rooms for boys and girls beside the pool that were separated by a single, very cold, shower, operated by a treadplate, through which you had to pass before you got access to the poolside at one of its shorter sides. There was a walkway here and on one of the longer sides, but the other two sides formed part of the wall of the building. The only natural light was via skylights. The access to the shower was by an open gap about five feet in width at the rear of each changing room, so from part of each of them, boys could see girls and vice-versa. None of the boys (or, I think, the girls) were put out by this. The changing rooms were absolutely tiny, and could hold comfortably no more than 10 each, whereas we were close to 20 in number of each sex. The only feasible thing to do when changing was to strip naked, dump clothes on a bench fixed to each wall, then don your swimming costume having moved away to find some space. Afterwards, trunks came off, and we were shown how to dry co-operatively before waiting for a space to emerge near the bench where your clothes were. Both male and female teachers popped in and out of the boys' changing room when they felt like it.

We were all supposed to wear swimming costumes. However, two boys came from particularly poor families who could not afford them (or any underwear for that matter). [Girls, however poor, always got both.] These boys were very upset at being excluded unfairly, and couldn't see any good reason why a costume was needed, so the headmaster (an extremely nice Welshman) after some deliberation, allowed them to swim in the nude. Of course, this meant that there was no good reason why boys who had no costume for any other reason should have to sit out a swimming session, so whether a boy wore a costume or went naked effectively became their option, and generally, at each lesson, about half took it up. The girls certainly did not object. Two of them who were friends of mine said they would have liked all the boys naked, including me, so I obliged them. It did not bother me. What a couple of girl-lib types did object to was that the concession did not apply to them. When one of them actually did forget her costume, she forced the issue by turning out at the poolside in the nude without notice. When challenged, she just said that she had no costume with her, still wanted to swim, so the same rule that applied to the boys should apply to her. This was the soon-to-be-swinging 1960s, not the 1860s, so she got her way, and some of the girls also swam naked subsequently, though not in as great a number as the boys.

On reflection, the water was far too cold to learn to swim in, and I never did. I was just too cold to concentrate on trying to swim. However, it felt much better without a costume, so I did make some progress.