ANTIQUE COLLECTING
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Extract from the July/August 2008 Magazine
July/August 2008 Magazine Pages 38-39 A MISCELLANY OF BATHING BYGONES

by Joan Gurney
Collecting sports memorabilia has become a driving passion for many people over the last few decades, with football, golf, cricket, angling and tennis leading the field. But dealers are often surprised by requests for swimming antiquities because this is an area which is certainly not widely collected; they cannot believe that such a variety of items - from costumes to ceramics, postcards to paintings, stamps to stereographs and fans to fabrics - can be found.
The obvious place to start a collection such as this is the costume itself. It is still possible to find men's, women's and children's costumes dating back as far as the 1890s and sometimes even with their accessories - boots, shoes, hats, stockings and primitive swimming aids such as cotton water wings for the learner.
Costumes are difficult to display and store because of the hazards of light and moths, but they do provide a very pleasing progressive social history from the time when men swam nude (and mixed bathing was forbidden), through to the great cover-up of the Victorian period, the heyday of the bathing machine, the flappers of the 1920s, the appearance of the bikini and finally the return to the near nudity of today.
Figure 8. Bicycle mascot with original nuts for attachment to the handlebars July / august 2008 Magazine
The search for costumes may take the keen collector to specialist antiques fairs, charity shops, jumble sales and boot fairs where old costumes are easily recognisable, but a knowledge of the history of swimming and its origins may be desirable to spot other items which may prove to be real gems, not, probably, identified by the dealer. And sometimes these turn up in the most unexpected places.
Marble tablets, circa 880 BC (which can be seen in the British Museum) show that centuries before it became a recreation for men, swimming was a masculine activity related to war and survival. Although it is often thought that women did not participate, or only dipped and bathed for pleasure, the excavation of a nude female wooden diving figure in Egypt (which dates from 1567-1320 BC) shows that women were more skilled at aquatics than was once believed.
One of these original figures can be seen in the Sportmuseum in Basel, Switzerland. Very occasionally, a more modern but exact replica turns up (figure 3). These are often thought to have been reproduced in the Egyptian Revival period which was given additional impetus by the great interest shown in the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter in 1922. Sometimes the image is used to create more sophisticated ceramic pieces in the form of candlesticks.
Myths of swimming feats abound - not least the legend of Leander nightly swimming the Hellespont to his lover Paris. Coins of AD 177-80 bearing this image can be viewed at the website of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
The 16th century saw the first book on swimming printed in England - De arte natandi by Everard Digby. Few copies have survived. One is held in the library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and another was sold at Sotheby's in 2007 for £74,000. For those whose budget does not extend so far, a little booklet, Routledge's Sixpenny Handbook on Swimming (circa 1890), is worth searching for.