Historical Swimming Tips

A couple of little historical beauties to put a smile on your face this week:

 “Health and beauty usually go hand in hand, and it is because so many ladies have realised that swimming beautifies not only the figure but the face also – that there is, in fact, more real and lasting loveliness to be had from a sixpenny visit to the baths than from a guinea’s-measure of costly ingenuities at Madame Seraphina’s “beauty parlour” – that swimming has won such enormous popularity among women during recent years.”

Quoted from page 176 of ‘The new magic of swimming’ 1934.

 And from the same Chapter 2 titled ‘How swimming instruction has failed hitherto’

  “In the nineteenth century the swimming-coach, as such, was almost unknown. Swimming-instructors there were, but these gentry were judged to have earned their fee when they had transformed a person who could not keep afloat in water into a person who could… and if the protege acquired good technique it was more by the grace of heaven than by any systematic instruction towards that end”

Happy swimming, Dan