by Roger Deakin
The river at Godrevy may have been chemically red and dead, but it was also alive with the energy and imagination of what amounts to the National Theatre of Cornwall. Camped on a wide level place beside the banks on the way down to the sea was the Kneehigh Theatre Company; two or three vans, a cooking tent, a trestle dining-table, and a scattering of tents in the shelter of steep dunes that rose up thirty or forty feet behind them. Their stage was the river and the dunescape around it, and it was elaborately set for something that could have been Day of the Triffids, Robinson Crusoe, The Tempest, The Adventures of Tintin, or all of them rolled into one, which is exactly what the Kneehigh open-air show turned out to be.
Down along the river, members of the company in ragged-trousered wetsuits were scurrying about like the crew of a big sailing ship, adjusting rigging, arranging the wings of a giant puppet, building cairns, setting a driftwood bonfire by the shore, swimming in the same pool as me, for their show turned out to be the most aquatic production since the waterfall sequence in Busby Berkeley’s 1933 film Footlight Parade. An upturned boat stood silhouetted against the sea on the pebble shoreline at the very mouth of the river. It was rigged with mast and flagpole, and curiously decorated with necklaces of big stones strung on lengths of flotsam rope, and the skeletons of fish delicately constructed from dozens of wire coathangers. Along the fringes of the dunes a string of tepees, improvised from torn scraps of washed-up black polythene and spars of timber, flapped in the breeze. Enormous triffids with yellow plastic-piping stalks and Coke-can stamens sprang out of the shale banks by the river bridge. All this junk, lovingly collected and re-worked by the sculptor David Kemp, cleverly evoked the dereliction behind the apparent idyll of the Red River.
A notice stuck on a pole in the sand announced the evening show: Ghost Nets. A chair and table were set up as the advance box-office at the head of the wooden steps down to the beach. Tonight’s show was sold out. I puzzled about this. How could a show in the open air on a river bank and a beach be sold out? How many does a valley hold? Returning from my swim, I met Bill Mitchell, Kneehigh’s joint artistic director, striding about the river bank in Doc Martens and a pair of bermudas rehearsing some of the actors in the water. He explained that they only sell 120 tickets a night because the audience has to move around following the action. Anything bigger would just slow things up too much. He called what Kneehigh Theatre do ‘landscape theatre’. Film is probably its nearest equivalent. You have long shots with actors very tiny on the horizon, then cut to something very intimate, a close-up, with the audience clustered round two actors only feet away and speaking quietly. There the comparison ends, because anything less like watching TV or sitting comfortably in the cinema would be hard to imagine. With Kneehigh, you’re on the move all the time. You’re part of the show.
They had a few hours to while away before the show, and invited me to tea round the trestle table. They had all fallen in love with the place. There were glow-worms at night, and they told me how they would swim in the evenings between the two winds, land and sea breeze, when the sea is like glass and the shore deserted. At dusk, they lit driftwood fires on the beach. Some days clouds of sea mist came right down to the sea and they lost all sense of direction, swimming blind in the still water. From their camp in the sand dunes, they watched people at play. The surfers came and went in their pick-up trucks and VWs, and parked up in odd corners in their camper vans. At six in the evening they noticed a distinct change of shifts on the beach. The holidaymakers went home for tea, and the Cornish came down to unwind after work.
The Kneehigh show was about a Cornwall that once boomed and is now bust, the ‘ghost nets’ belonging to the pilchard fishermen, who disappeared with their shoals of tea-time treats when the last pilchard swam out of St Ives Bay a few years after the war. There are still a few of the fishermen’s ‘huer’ poles left standing on the Cornish coast. I saw a couple on the cliffs at St Agnes and one in St Ives, and they used to stand in the dunes all round St Ives Bay. They are 30 feet high with steps cut in them. A lookout would be up there all day, as high as they could climb, scanning the bay for the glint of a pilchard shoal. When pilchard were spotted the cry would go up: ‘Hevver!’ It would run through the villages and into the fields, and the people would drop everything they were doing and race down to the sea, load their nets, tear out to sea in rowing boats, and haul in pilchards by the cartload.
Everybody round St Ives had a boat, and probably farmed as well, because the Cornish have always had about three or four jobs, depending on the season and the trade. But this pilchard industry was a community effort. The nets were hauled in and the catch was shared out. Even the huer, who was probably the last to actually hit the water, got a fair share. Now the big Russian and Spanish factory ships suck pilchards out of the Atlantic far away, long before they could ever reach their long-forgotten Cornish bays.
The actors dived, swam and splashed in the river and the sea all through the show. In the pilchard-netting scene, the audience was led down to the wide, glowing beach at sunset. The players strode far out into the sea with their nets, several of them swimming on into the evening waves to encircle the imaginary shoal. Then they began singing and hauling the wet and heavy nets up the beach, and everyone found themselves wading in and helping. Then, as the big sun swooped low, the actors lit a fire at the centre of a circle of stones, having manoeuvred their audience into a perfectly-timed line of sight for a tableau of fire, dark sea, horizon, and the sun, balancing itself on the horizon, poised to drown.
Bill Mitchell said he and the cast had been determined to get wet as early as possible in the show. He remembered seeing a theatre company come down to Penzance and take over the magnificent Jubilee outdoor tidal pool. To everyone’s astonishment they managed to do their entire show without a single one of them going into the water. All through the performance the audience had but a single thought: ‘When are they going in the water?’ People left shaking their heads in disbelief. So the Kneehigh approach was to go for total immersion very early on. By the end of the show they were diving in as mermaids, swimming underwater and popping up all over the place on cue to say a line, then ducking back under. They say the secret of acting is in the breathing, but this was something else. The National Trust, which owns the land here, made Kneehigh print a notice in their programme asking members of the audience not to drink from the river. You can’t be too careful.
After the show, and a pub fish dinner, I spent a blissful night in the back of the sometimes-reliable Citroën CX Safari down a farm track in a Dutch barn alongside a combine harvester. This is the beauty of the Citroën shooting brake. You can stretch right out and sleep in it, curl up and read in it, spread out your dinner in it, and carry a small library. Some people have prim little curtains in the back windows, but I carry a big air-force-surplus silk parachute with me and spread it over the car when I’m in residence. It works like net curtains in the suburbs; I can see out but people, or just as likely cows, can’t see in. It also diffuses the light beautifully, prolonging sleep by softening the intensity of sunrises. It’s the kind of parachute they use for dropping food parcels in emergencies. It is big enough to stretch out by the guy-ropes into an airy Bedouin tent, its brown, orange, green and white silk disguising the presence of a motor car, if not exactly unobtrusive. It keeps mosquitoes and midges out and means you can leave all the windows and the back door open on sultry nights. Even if it gets drenched, it dries out quickly in the sun. Once, when I was encamped inside it in the chestnut woods near Souseyrac in France, I heard some early walkers marvelling, ‘Mais alors, il est venu en parachute.’
Stimulated by Bill Mitchell’s mention of the great tidal Jubilee Pool, I drove across to Penzance in the morning for an early swim. The place might not be everybody’s idea of the perfect holiday resort, but it was at one time the capital of the Cornish Riviera. In some ways it resembles Calais or Dieppe; a perfectly good seaside town in its own right that is better known as a gateway. People pass stra
ight through Penzance to the Scillies, or to the Land’s End peninsula. What really propelled Penzance to fame in its own right was the Grand Opening in May 1935 of the Jubilee Bathing Pool, an enormous triangular open-air lido jutting out boldly from the seafront as if to emphasise its pre-eminent position as the southernmost pool in the British Isles. It opened in the same year as the magnificent Tinside Pool at Plymouth, another seafront lido which, to the sadness of that town’s many swimmers, now lies neglected and semi-derelict.
With its dramatic ocean-liner decks, stainless-steel fittings, steps and tubular railings, the Jubilee Pool is highly theatrical. I felt I was going on stage as I made my way down to the imposing million gallons of sea-water that flood into this artificial rock pool at high tide. There is no such thing as a width or length of a triangle, no clear bearings for conventional pool-swimming. I wanted to get in some sea-swimming practice in preparation for my attempt to cross the Fowey estuary, and I found myself reacting like a goldfish in a bowl, setting off on a long-distance swim round the triangular perimeter.
About halfway round, I met Madeleine, a painter, who swims here every day, gently breaststroking fifty metres back and forth across the pool. Three of us had the place to ourselves, and the buoyant water made up in clarity what it lacked in warmth. We each had over 300,000 gallons of it to swim in, so we couldn’t help falling into conversation; it was like running into another swimmer in the Atlantic. Now and again, as we swam and talked, a helicopter bound for the Scillies puttered past over the sea. Madeleine asserted confidently that swimming is better than sex, and that it is an invaluable inspiration to her painting. There was no arguing with that. Her comment was curiously in tune with the sensuous nature of these original lidos. Their emphasis was all on the sensual pleasures of water and sun, and many of them incorporated fountains as well as extensive sunbathing lawns or decks. The white-painted Jubilee Pool was designed as a suntrap as well as a pool. In this sense, it is a megalithic monument in the same sun-worshipping tradition as the Merry Maidens stone circle a few miles away on a hilltop near Lamorna.
Madeleine said the true Penzance swimmers go in the sea off the Battery Rocks over the swimming-pool wall. They’re in all the year round at eight o’clock in the morning, and scorn the pool-bathers. According to Madeleine, who clearly returned the disapproval, they’re always getting cramp and saving each other, and do an annual swim from Newlyn Harbour to the Jubilee Pool across Mount’s Bay, which as recently as 1994 could boast a level of pollution 240 times over the recommended safe limit.
The Penzance pool was very nearly lost in 1990, when the local council proposed to turn it into a modern ‘fun pool’ in an indoor leisure centre. It was saved largely by the imagination and determination of John Clarke, the retired Assistant County Architect for Cornwall. He had the pool listed as a Grade Two building, then raised enough money in grants for its repair and improvement. The freshly painted blue and white pool was literally dazzling. It is pure 1930s in its exuberant, extravagant use of concrete and in the flowing lines of its romantic, impractical shape. At first sight I thought it more fascist than anything I had ever seen, with its serried ranks of open-fronted changing cubicles surrounding the water like rows of soldiers. The removal of the cubicle doors from their fish-finger-shaped openings (to avoid vandalism or worse) was an inspired stroke of minimalism, the piano-key contrast between light and shade creating the effect of sarcophagi. The whole thing is massively fortified, of course, against the huge seas that did once succeed in breaching its walls during the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962. Swimming round in unaccustomed triangles, it dawned on me why I felt so overawed by the place. It was actually an Egyptian temple to the water gods. Its grandeur belonged with the Valley of the Kings as much as the films of Leni Riefenstahl. If they ever played muzak here (and they wouldn’t) it would have to be Wagner, or Verdi.
To my surprise, the architect of this modernist extravaganza was neither French, Italian nor Russian, but Captain Frank Latham, Penzance’s Borough Engineer. The pool had opened at the height of Britain’s interest in lidos and all they stood for: healthy urban living, sunshine and sunbathing, the new cult of the outdoor life. Many of these ideas had originated in the Weimar Republic of Germany, in the social ideas that produced the ‘Volksparks’, where outdoor swimming pools were not only part of the park, but very much its symbolic heart. As early as 1920, the Mayor of Berlin, Gustav Boss, had created the new people’s parks with ‘athletics fields, playgrounds and the free baths’. The new cult of the body in Germany found expression in Hans Suren’s Man and Sunlight, published in 1925. It went into multiple editions. The London County Council had led the way in the lido boom, with its open-air pools in Victoria Park, Hackney, Brockwell Park and Tooting Bec, and George Lansbury, the leader of the Labour Party, had opened the Serpentine for mixed bathing in Hyde Park in 1929. In the same year as the turnstiles began clicking at Penzance, lidos also opened at Ilkley, Norwich, Peterborough, Saltdean and Aylesbury.
When the Jubilee Pool opened, the mayor led a procession from the Sailors’ Institute and before cheering crowds Professor Hicks, the Cornish Veteran Champion, took the First Plunge, followed by a beauty parade of bathing belles, men’s and women’s hundred-yard races, an exhibition of trick and fancy diving by the Plymouth Divers, and a Grand Water Polo Match between Penzance, the reigning Cornish champions, and Plymouth. The Penzance Silver Band played, and the Cornishman judged the new pool ‘a work of art’.
Lidos were closed one by one in the 1960s and ’70s, usually filled in or turned into car parks. Some, like the Tinside Pool at Plymouth, have simply been left to fall into disrepair. In 1991, the Thirties Society published a booklet, ‘Farewell My Lido’, which reported that budget-cutting on lidos in the eighties had meant that ‘only a handful still survive, and . . . none is free from threat’. The lido movement was probably quite as strong in Britain as in Europe, yet we have almost written it out of our history. The collective primitivism it represented was a powerful force for good, not least in the nation’s standards of health.
By the time the Jubilee Pool was opened in the 1930s, lidos and pools all over the country were so packed with enthusiastic swimmers that the first rumblings of the serious lane swimmers began to be heard: ‘Couldn’t we have a roped-off lane for fellows to be able to train without fighting through a morass of people fooling about?’ wrote one correspondent to the Swimming Times. A dichotomy was beginning to emerge between those who simply swam for pleasure and those for whom swimming was a more serious business.
Every lido and pool had a club, and passions ran high in their rivalry. Nowhere were they more evident than in water-polo matches such as the annual fixture between Penzance and Plymouth. As early as 1926, the Olympic polo captain George Wilkinson wrote that ‘the process of degeneracy has gone so low in some cases as to include deliberate “digging” in the ribs, “thumping” the arms, and despicable practices underwater.’ By October 1929, Der Swimmer, reporting an international match in Germany, complained: ‘The water polo games were fights. Our men had to put on no less than seven fresh costumes during the game.’
Long before football, swimming was acquiring its own brand of partisanship, even nationalism. You can sense the pitch of excitement popular competitive swimming had reached by the early 1930s in the tone of this letter to the Swimming Times. It bears all the signs of the mental effects of too much cold water:
GO-GETTING HELL BUSTERS WANTED!
We want a leader in every club – a regular ‘go-getting, hell-busting’ leader. A man who will not take ‘no’ for an answer, who refuses to recognise the existence of the word ‘impossible’, a man who is not content with the ‘any time will do’ attitude which seems to be ingrained in so many people who are associated with swimming.
We can do it and we must DO IT NOW! I am not content to wait until I am an old man to see the West taking her proper place.
Ironically, it was to take Penzance another sixty years to find such a champion
of swimming as this in John Clarke, just in time to save its Jubilee Pool from the bulldozers.
The public lidos represented a modernising trend towards a democratic concern for a freely available, healthy, convivial environment, putting pleasure and health firmly at the centre of civic life. The writer and social policy analyst Ken Worpole has pointed out the significance of the decline of the lidos: ‘Their neglect in recent decades speaks volumes about our return to the private, the indoor and our retreat from collective provision.’ Perhaps the restoration of the Jubilee Pool, the reopening of Brockwell Park Lido, the saving of Tooting Bec Lido in London, and the recent renaissance of R. W. H. Jones’s streamlined, flowing Saltdean Lido near Brighton may point the way to healthier, happier, more sensual days.
I arrived a mile along the bay in Newlyn with the naive idea that I might actually go for a swim in the harbour, or off the beach. I was under the spell of a painting by Dame Laura Knight, one of the Newlyn School of painters, called simply The Boys. It is set in Newlyn harbour, with the sandy beach in the foreground, where a group of boys is dressing on an upturned boat after a bathe. Beyond them, dozens of other boys, most of them naked, are swimming in the turquoise waters of the harbour, and some are wading out to meet an incoming boat. Laura Knight had come to join the New Realist group of artists formed in Newlyn by Stanhope Forbes in 1899. Forbes and his friends had rebelled against what they saw as the sentimentality and romanticism of the Royal Academy, forming the New English Art Club in 1886. Their mission was to paint in the open air the real day-to-day lives of Newlyn and its ordinary working people. As Forbes said: ‘Every corner was a picture; the people seemed to fall naturally into place and harmonise with their surroundings.’ With Penzance railway station a mile or so away, the place became the focus of an artistic and social world; on the beach, in the harbour, and in and out of the converted fish-loft studios. It was at one of the parties given in Newlyn by Forbes and his wife, Elizabeth Armstrong, that Laura Knight and Alfred Munnings met, and became life-long friends, much attracted to one another.
