Adelaide - Beaches and Bathing

Mixed Bathing

An Essay on Mixed Bathing

Advertiser

During the first few decades of colonial settlement the men didn't trouble about wearing costumes but bathed in their birthday suits and, of course, were relegated to a position about a mile away from the jetties. The women folk, by payment, had the use of bathing machines. These were weird contrivances like a tiny room on wheels and the woman in charge would hitch a horse to this caravan after the ladies had clambered aboard and tow it into about two feet of water. Those inside the 'kennel' would doff the multitudinous garments then worn and then don the bathing suit.

More than once the finer feelings of gentlemen bathers were shocked and put to personal inconvenience from the thoughtlessness of many ladies intruding on the gentlemen's reserve:

Would, Sir, my troubles had been buried in the briny. But on returning from the delicious swim I felt a little chilled (it was a cool day) and longed for a scamper on the shore... Hopeless case. A governess and three biggish girls conchologising right opposite my clothes. I whistled, coo-eed; but bless their little hearts, the sun was in their eyes and they did not seem to hear or see me. I rose merman fashion, tore my hair and yelled. They, bless 'em, yelled and bolted.

[Two other] females ran to the spot expecting and looking for some sea monster on the sand. My clothes were evidently unseen by them... Another female was coming from the southward. They were friends; they stopped; they chatted; they seemed undecided.. At length the three came back between me and my clothes. Patience had its perfect work. Why, Sir, during the transit of these Venuses all sorts of manoeuvres to keep warm were resorted to by myself; and at last, with another female approaching in the middle distance, I bolted out as I bolted in, and left the beach in disgust. Oh! for a bathing company, thought I, so that one may swim in peace and dress and undress with decency.

One of the first advocates for mixed bathing in South Australia was a Governor, Sir James Fergusson, when, in the 1870s, he requested Thomas Bastard of the Adelaide City Baths to teach his son and two daughters to swim. The worthy tutor felt some scruples but Sir James pointed out that this was but false modesty and, further, added that in travels about the world he had observed in every place where bathing was practicable, the males and females bathed together in costumes and concluded with the remark that 'Evil be to him who evil thinks.' It was, however, many years before mixed bathing was permitted in South Australia.

By the turn of the 20th century the Adelaide press announced that:

At watering places in France and Spain whole families splashed around in the sea; the French father in his gay-striped swimming suit with an eye glass in one eye frolicked with his daughter in her carefully designed bathing costume. The Americans also had small regard for Mrs Grundy and engaged in Continental seaside customs and the beach at Atlantic City could be compared with the picturesque scenes of the yellow sands of Dieppe.

Neck to knee bathers were designated as an 'immoral atrocity' in Edwardian Adelaide and the introduction of mixed bathing is possibly explained by the fact the noted Australian swimmer, Miss Annette Kellerman, came to South Australia in 1904 and not only was she the first woman swimmer to appear in public here at the City Baths, but she discarded the conventional pantaloons for what approximated a neck-to-knee costume. Her visit was a great success and South Australians realised that the barbaric custom of mixed bathing as practised overseas might have had something in its favour.

Public opinion, by which the world was governed in those far off days, irrespective of parliaments, was a good servant, but tyrannical to those who dared not stir a hand or foot because of what their neighbours might say. There were many who considered that to introduce dancing classes for boys and girls from the slums under careful supervision, and in a well lighted room to enable them to get to know one another better, was to be preferred to scraping an acquaintance around dark street corners in an illicit, underhand manner. Surely, it was said, would not far less mischief eventuate from the former Mary Lee, the renowned feminist activist, was to say in 1906 in respect of teaching children to swim:

I wish Mrs Grundy would retire into comfortable seclusion... and leave us alone. Those youngsters - Heaven keep them - are enjoying their mixed 'splash' without a notion of harm. Why should they not? Some of them are from homes with floor too near the ceiling to be comfortable in weather like this - houses where the landlords should be compelled to live for a week before they 'Let'. But the bathers! I don't believe that Eve ever had any petticoats and if Adam had 'breeks' they left us no pattern - and they were both naked and not ashamed. Does not half the moral dirt of the world spring from dirty suggestion? Let our youngsters be taught to swim. Will our State schools look to this?

However, their were many dissenters in the community who contended that the old rule, namely, 'gentlemen bathers on one side and ladies on the other' was true to a profound ethical instinct that society would do well not to ignore:

It helps to conserve and to quicken the finer sense of modesty upon which all clean, healthy and vigorous domestic and national life is based. When on a holiday trip the other side of the world I saw bathing that filled me with disgust... Mixed bathing - so mixed that the strong arm of the law has sometimes to be called in to effect a separation.... Do not attempt to lower our moral ideals. The higher we keep them the better for our sons and daughters and for the State.

To this contention a young woman informed the disciples of Mrs Grundy that:

There is a feeling of security when bathing in company with the stronger sex, for we are confident that able assistance will rendered if necessary. If we adopt costumes similar to those worn at Manly or Bondi, they must naturally meet the requirements of the most exacting man or woman and if proper dressing rooms are erected surely there is no reason why mixed bathing should not be permitted on our beaches.

By way of explanation the term 'Mrs Grundy' relates to a name associated with an imaginary person proverbially referred to as a personification of the tyranny of social opinion in matters of conventional propriety. A humorous example of this indigent social malaise is to be found in the Advertiser on 14 January 1905:

A lady resident at a certain seaside resort objected to [scantily clad] people bathing from boats in the bay... When the corporation official remarked 'But, Madam, surely they are far enough out?', she replied, 'But you can see them quite plainly with field glasses.'

Finally, new bathing regulations permitting properly costumed persons to have their dip at any hour of the day, and from any wharf or jetty and in 'Nature's garb' from midnight until 6 am, were read a first time at a meeting of the Marine Board on 1 February 1910.

To this newly-found freedom a few citizens aired their respective views:

The practice of the two sexes bathing together, denounced by Archbishop Carr as fatal to feminine modesty, brutalising to men, and dangerous to public morals, has advocates who maintain it is not only quite harmless, but positively beneficial.

[Women] seem to spend most of their time making themselves attractive to mere man... Why do they so relentlessly tear down the veil of illusion at the seaside.

They would have you believe they're not daughters of Eve -
That the attraction's the charm of the water;
But everyone knows the magnets are beaus,
And the tights are the cause of the slaughter.

By 1914 it was evident Dan Cupid was alive and well upon our suburban beaches as evidenced by the following extracts from 'Letters to the Editor' columns of the morning press:

The seaside lover is a strange creature and the species is varied. There is the Sunday youth - the counter jumper or clerk who has smoked a cigarette for so long that he reckons himself a man of means and importance. His salary is not large, so he cannot be blamed for going to the beach 'on his own'. Yet when he dons his glad rags and sallies forth to the happy hunting grounds of the lovers his entire future may rest on the visit. Before he has made the last car he will probably have discovered a bliss hitherto undreamt of. He will have learned the manner in which she likes to be squeezed best. He will find his heart fluttering and before he has finished telling her that he has never loved before he will have made all sorts of rash resolutions

[Our beaches are] a fascinating study on Sundays and what tales the sands could tell if they could only speak and, similarly, young women robbed of their silence could tell many a tale of fickle youths and coquettes that would put Maupassant in the shade. If but one day's happenings could but be related many would at last believe that truth is stranger than fiction - all French and doubtful authors thrown in.

Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that dalliance in the sandhills was still a favoured pastime in the 1920s and evidence of a marked departure from the stern edicts of the Victorian and Edwardian eras:

Youths and maidens have a habit - often a most objectionable habit - of sprawling on the sand in close proximity to one another and in full view of not unduly sensitive folk, who would rather that they did that sort of thing less publicly; but who is to determine with the aid of a municipal handbook what constitutes an offence on the vague borderline between the innocent enthusiasm of love's young dream and conduct which a policeman might properly regard as 'offensive behaviour.'

Further, in February 1930 there were complaints about the mode of conduct on the beaches at night and, accordingly, a pair of women police were detailed to take action against more than 100 girls under the age of 17 years who had been found on the beaches with young men. Nude bathing parties at both West Beach and Glenelg were disturbed and in one case the men who had motored the girls to the beach were too intoxicated to drive home. Additional lights were placed on the beach at Glenelg and a vigilance committee was formed by owners of shacks and bathing boxes in the neighbourhood.

General Notes

"Mixed Bathing in Victorian Times" is in the Advertiser,
25 March 1925, page 9b.

On 28 February 1903, page 6f of the Register a correspondent ventures an opinion on "mixed bathing":

Women have everything to gain by the change; while men have a pleasant companionship to look forward to. Present methods being so greatly changed, fresh regulations would of course be necessary and would need to be rigorously enforced... The idea that taking a bath is a kind of a mysterious rite, to be conducted only in secret, is particularly British, and hardly worth continuing to hold.

A photograph is in the Chronicle,
3 February 1906, page 27,
"Bathing and Decency" is in the Register,
3 February 1910, page 5g.

"Mixed Bathing - By a Woman" is in the Register,
26 January 1906, page 7h,
1 February 1906, page 3g.
A photograph is in the Chronicle,
3 February 1906, page 27.

A controversy over mixed bathing at the Semaphore Public Baths is aired in the Advertiser, 24 and 25 January 1906, pages 4d and 6b.
Also see Semaphore.

"Mixed Bathing" is in the Register,
18, 22 and 24 January 1908, pages 9i, 9c and 7g.

"Mixed Bathing - What is the Objection?" is in the Register on 6 January 1910, page 7c:

The prim, proper, puritanical female who goes to the Art Gallery for the first time is usually shocked when she gazes at the statue of Venus. Then, again, some strictly proper people visiting the theatre for the first time and seeing the girls in tights are mildly horrified... Individuals of this school are the stumbling block to mixed bathing.

"Bathing and Decency" is in the Register,
3 February 1910, page 5g.

Also see Register, 8 and 21 January 1910, pages 6f and 10d:

I still cannot but think the practice of mixed bathing tends to relax the restraints of modesty that should exist between the sexes... I prefer to base my opinions on the statistics of illegitimacy, the birth and the marriage rates and the ever-increasing numbers and decreasing ages of the inmates of our rescue homes...

The following verse is taken from a poem which appears in the Register, 1 February 1910, page 5b:

"Bathing on the Beaches - Proposed New Regulations - Mixed Bathing Provided For" is in the Advertiser,
4 February 1910, page 8i.

Also see Register,
4, 15, 21 and 24 February 1910, pages 4e, 3d, 9c and 5a.
For its "legalisation" see
5 May 1910, page 6e and
4 February 1911, page 12g (area between Elizabeth and Kent Streets, Glenelg allotted).

Register

Also see Register,
30 November 1911, page 6f,
Observer,
10 February 1912, page 47d,
Register,
14, 16 and 22 February 1912, pages 3h, 9c and 8b - "Those who mix their bathing are in quite as bad a way as those who mix their drinks",
7 and 9 March 1912, page 14f,
The Mail,
12 October 1912, page 20d,
11 January 1913, page 9f,
15 February 1913, pages 9f and 9a,
Register,
20, 23 and 30 November 1912, pages 9e, 11g and 11b,
17 October 1913, page 3f,
21, 22 and 24 November 1913, pages 3h, 18c and 9g,
22 December 1913, page 6g.

The subject of mixed bathing is again the subject of lengthy debate during 1912:

Register

Also see Register,
15, 16, 19, 24, 26, 28 and 30 October 1912, pages 5d, 11e, 7b, 5h, 7a, 8g and 8f,
2, 6 and 16 November 1912, pages 11g, 7e and 11f.

They would have you believe they're not daughters of Eve -
That the attraction's the charm of the water;
But everyone knows the magnets are beaus,
And the tights are the cause of the slaughter.
(Register, 24 February 1913, page 9f.)

Now that the hot weather is approaching we shall no doubt witness that unseemly and degrading practice - mixed bathing... This evil has been permitted to continue quite long enough... it is no wonder that the standard of morality among the rising generation is not as high as it should be.
(Register,
9 November 1916, page 9h; also see
11 November 1916, page 5d.)

In spite of "wowsers", pulpit-bashers and referendums I fear it has come to a stop merely because woman says it is good to run thus, for it uplifts and brings to us that homage which the female has always demanded from a servile male opinion. In the meantime society pretends to be shocked...
(Register, 14 November 1916, page 9e.)

"A Lazy Evening at Glenelg - A Mixed Bathing Reverie" is in the Advertiser,
12 January 1914, page 15c.

"Building on the Beaches" is in the Register,
15 June 1914, page 9f.

"Mixed Bathing" is in the Register,
11 November 1916, page 5d.

"Backless Bathers" is in the Register,
27 November 1929, page 6c,
2 December 1929, page 7b.

"Mixed Bathing - Arcadian Innocence No Mere Dream" is in the Observer,
16 November 1929, page 47a.

Also see Semaphore for comment on mixed bathing at the civic baths.

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