The nearest beach to Leicestershire and Birmingham

 Warning issued as beach closest to Leicestershire shuts amid health fears

So ran a headline in the Leicester Mercury. I wondered where the nearest beach to Leicestershire is. Hunstanton? Skegness? 

But it is, of course, on Rutland Water.

The story is about the brief closure (it was reopened this morning) of the beach at Sykes Lane there because of dangerous levels of blue-green algae.

I took these photos some years ago at Whitwell Harbour, which is just along the coast but lacks sand.

Secret Birmingham has worked out that Rutland Water has the nearest Blue Flag beach to them too.

The Joy of Six 1542

"Multiple sources inside the children’s home division said that, as they prepared for sale, they were pressed to rapidly open more homes and take on more children, even when they didn’t have the staff to keep up. They claim they were told this was so the company could be sold for the maximum amount of money." Jessica Murray says that when private equity takes over a UK care home it can mean the children are treated like cattle.

Ben Worthy argues that, if he is to succeed as a prime minister who takes over in mid-parliament, Andy Burnham will need to create a clear sense of change and offer new policy quickly.

"Surbiton itself is no longer a byword for Toryism. Each of its councillors is a Liberal Democrat, with only two Conservatives elected across the entire Royal Borough of Kingston. At a parliamentary level, the successor seat of Kingston and Surbiton has been Tory for just two years since 1997, that brief period of 2015-17 when the Lib Dems fell away. An area which was once considered a safe base for Conservatives with ministerial ambitions and ability is now the home seat of Sir Ed Davey." John Oxley mourns the Conservatives' loss of the Margot Leadbetter vote.

Danielle Williams on how the US lost its public swimming pools to racism: "When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the US."

Sintija Brence salutes the Queen Of Southern Gothic, Bobbie Gentry.

"About most of the rescues Gregory is brisk but particular. An elderly couple in a broken-down yacht press biscuits on the crew; a woman makes eyes at the coxswain ('the problem was an open seacock, swamping their bilge'); in failing light a small boy – 'my mum said I should stay with the boat' – is scooped from a flimsy inflatable dinghy just in time." Susannah Clapp meets a literary lifeboatman at Dungeness.

Another myth that should die: The Victorians covered table legs because they thought were indecent

I think this one is less widely believed than it was, but it never does any harm to give it a hoofing. No, the Victorians did not cover table legs and piano legs because they thought they were indecent.

For a witness let's summon Professor Strange, under whose name I contributed a few columns to Clinical Psychology Forum. This one was in the February 2004 issue:

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

The truth - and this is me, as Mike Yarwood used to say - is that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we moderns imagine. They were, for instance, much more relaxed about male nudity than we are. 

Here's Ronald Hyam writing in his Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience:

Not until 1890 did the Amateur Swimming Association rule that bathing drawers must be worn in competitive schoolboy racing. Cambridge and (even more successfully) Oxford were among the last pockets of resistance to swimming costumes.

Gwen Raverat's rhapsodies about nude swimming in the River Cam reflected a dying practice. It was frowned on by the city fathers after 1894 and finally banned from the town bathing sheds in 1910, although screened and segregated nude sunbathing survived until (ironically) the mid-1960s.

Politicians on children swimming in sewage

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Here's the latest from Tameside Radio:

A Tameside councillor married to disgraced MP Andrew Gwynne joked about youngsters swimming in human waste on the 'racist and sexist' Trigger Me Timbers WhatsApp group.

Allison Gwynne made the comments as members of the group joked about someone falling into filthy water.

She posted: "Kids in Denton have always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage'.

Allison Gwynne, as the Guardian has pointed out, is a significant local politician in her own right:

Allison Gwynne, who posted in the group about local children who have “always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage”, is understood to remain in her role as chair of the council’s overview panel – a position she is believed to have been awarded by Labour HQ.

When I heard that a Labour politician had talked of children swimming in sewage, my mind went back to a Conservative councillor from West Norfolk, Brian Long:

"When I spent my summers down at Northrepps and Cromer beach as a child, you could visibly see pipes that came out of the cliff side, staining all the way down and going straight into the sea," he said.

"Nobody was monitoring anything.

"We'd come out of the sea and have a cold shower to clean off before eating our sandwiches. I don't think anyone was harmed by it." 

Brian Long's remarks were silly rather than poisonous. He was looking back to a neverland where children had grazed knees, scrumped apples and got a clip round the ear from the local bobby. And, er, went swimming in sewage.

There was nothing in them of the contempt for people you see in Allison Gwynne. 

Class snobbery is alive and well on the right, but the left is more given to intellectual snobbery. Anyone who fails to share their political opinions is stupid. If you doubt me, just spend a few minutes browsing Bluesky or Twitter.

I'm reminded of the 1997 general election and the only time I have been canvassed by Labour here in Market Harborough. I said I didn't like the sound of their policies on workfare, at which I was told by the canvasser that she had a friend who was doing a PhD in the area and I was wrong.

My conclusion is that when a Conservative politician suggests it's OK for working-class children to swim in sewage, it may be out of a peculiar sense of nostalgia. When a Labour politician makes that suggestion, it's likely to be out of contempt.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

******

Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

******

Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

The Joy of Six 1225

Jamie Driscoll’s challenge to Labour in the North East mayoral contest may be a taste of things to come if a Starmer government disappoints, argue Joe Guinan and Martin O'Neill.

Martin Roche says Ofcom is not fit for purpose and must be replaced: "The entire entity is unfit for purpose. It must be replaced with a new body with a stiff backbone and sharp teeth, one that acts without fear or favour and is impervious to political pressure. This is about democracy and truth. Both those elements must be bigger than regulators and bigger than demagogue politicians."

Megan Kang shows that America's love affair with guns is a surprisingly recent phenomenon.

"As a child I used to swim in the River Wye and I remember the clouds of mayflies in the summer, as well as huge leaping salmon." Oliver Bullough on the Welsh government's lack of concern for the despoilation of this once-beautiful river.

"Women in philosophy​ have always needed a special stroke of luck. Like men, they have usually had to be well-born, well-off, talented and - in the European tradition at least - white. But most women philosophers before the late 20th century needed something more: access to a man who held the uncommon view that women - or at least certain women - could be serious thinkers too." Sophie Smith reviews two books on female philosophers.

Lindsay Anderson looked back over his career as a director in an he interview he gave in 1989.

Couple get payout after water buffaloes fall into Essex swimming pool

Congratulations to the Guardian on winning our Headline of the Day Award.

Little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough

Do the authors of this volume of the Cambridge Urban History know how gloomy a book they have written? Pessimism suffuses these pages from start almost to finish.

That was Andrew Saint, reviewing volume 3 in that series for the London Review of Books in 1981.

But things looked up later on:

It is often a corrective as well as a relief to read about local experience and activity. Thus Stephen Royle’s chapter on small towns, heavily based on Leicestershire, seems at first to paint a picture of stagnation (Hinckley’s ‘stinking state’ in 1840 etc) and cultural decline. 

Then abruptly he tells us that Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads' brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. 

I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

 I would only add that the swimming bath was given to the town by my hero J.W. Logan MP.

If we want better public health we must defend local sports facilities

In a recent The Rest is Politics podcast, Alastair Campbell talked about the way many countries see sport as responsibility of the health ministry. In Britain, however, it's lumped in with culture as one of those things that are nice to have but where government spending when can be cut when times are hard.

John Harris has an article in the Guardian today looking at the results of this mistaken policy:

Clearly, this is a country that needs to get better at looking after itself. But while glaring facts about the intersection of poverty and ill health are serially ignored, public health is also hindered and damaged by a dismal failure to join up one area of policy with another. 

If you want particularly vivid proof of that very British syndrome, try this: as hospitals break and buckle, local leisure centres and swimming pools are also in the midst of crisis.

Piece through the news archives, and there it all is: recent closures in such places as Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Rye in East Sussex, Coventry and Hull. In Gateshead, people are waiting for a council decision about two big leisure centres, which could spell the end of pools, gyms and squash courts. 

One high-profile local doctor recently nailed what is at stake: "Take a poor area with massive health inequalities. Remove the last remaining public exercise facilities from the poorest bits of said poor areas. Watch what happens to health. It’s an experiment that the people of Gateshead don’t deserve to be a part of."

It's already happened in Swindon, where there is a campaign to reopen the listed Oasis Leisure Centre, which has been closed since November 2020. The video above shows what the town has lost - it already feels like a relic of a lost civilisation.

Because it's Swindon, I thought of Richard Jefferies and a passage from Bevis that I have quoted before.

In it, an astounded farm labourer watches two boys swimming:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. ...

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

The increasing polarisation of incomes in Britain means Jefferies may here be giving us a picture, not of our past, but our future.

Diving board at Richard Jefferies' Coate Water to be restored

Swindon Borough Council is to spend close to £150,000 to restore the Art Deco diving platform at Coate Water.

Wiltshire Live reports the news, gleefully adding the detail that the board is "covered in bird poo".

At this point I can do no better than repeat a post from 12 years ago:

Richard Jefferies, who his best remembered as a nature essayist but, almost in passing, invented post-apocalyptic science fiction (in After London) and the children's holiday adventure (in Bevis), was the subject (or victim) of my Masters dissertation.

His birthplace near Swindon now houses a museum devoted to his life and works. New readers should start with this guest post on Jefferies and Coate by Rebecca Welshman.

The museum stands next to Coate Water, a reservoir constructed in 1822 to provide water for the Wilts & Berks Canal. In Bevis it features as a boyhood paradise and in After London is transformed into a vast inland sea.

When the canal closed in 1914 Coate Water was turned into a park to serve the town of Swindon. Memory Lane at Coate Water describes its use in the 20th century:

Visitors to the park were charged an entrance fee and a variety of small wooden buildings around the lake provided boating and changing facilities. A wooden diving platform was built in 1921 and there was wooden staging separating the swimming and diving areas of the lake. Later a full size swimming pool and a children's paddling pool were added although today the swimming pool has been filled in and changed to a children's paddling pool and the original paddling pool has been filled with sand and turned into a play area for children. 

By 1935, the 'Art Deco' Diving board provided a nationally renowned platform for diving competitions and the lake was also regularly used for regattas and water polo. 

Although swimming in the lake was stopped due to public health and safety concerns in 1958, the diving board can still be seen today and has become a local landmark associated with the park and its history.

The diving board, occupied by the lake's more daring waterfowl, is indeed the landmark that most strikes visitors to Coate today. The video above describes Sophie Hart's ambitions to see it preserved.

I had to use the Wayback Machine to find Memory Lane at Coate Water again, but Sophie Hart's video is still where it ever was.

Leisure in Market Harborough in 1906

Browsing behind the London Review of Books paywall, I came across a review of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950.

The reviewer, Andrew Saint, writes:

Stephen Royle’s chapter on small towns, heavily based on Leicestershire, seems at first to paint a picture of stagnation (Hinckley’s ‘stinking state’ in 1840 etc) and cultural decline. Then abruptly he tells us that Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling ‘society’, clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

The swimming baths, as longstanding readers will know, were given to the town by this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP.

Council backs Robbie Williams’ swimming pool plan despite Jimmy Page’s objection

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Our Headline of the Day comes from the Irish Independent, Kensington and the crazy world of rock and roll.

Parents of Olympic medalist Adam Peaty fly to Rio after washing machine breaks down

Headline of the Day has an Olympic theme. Congratulations to ITV News.

Happy 25th birthday to Market Harborough leisure centre

Market Harborough leisure centre opened 25 years ago today - thanks to the people on Twitter who have reminded me of this.

It was opened by Princess Anne and I was invited. I declined because I was already committed to some Liberator event.

There had been a call for a leisure centre in the town for many years before that, not least because the existing facilities were so poor.

I once blogged about the old swimming baths - and the campaign and the campaign to replace them - here:

I learned to swim in these original baths at evening classes in the 1970s. On the way home I had a spring roll and chips from Frank Taylor's chippy ... and the air was prickly with the smell of soup powder from Symington's factory - probably from the modern block, also in Northampton Road, which has since been demolished. 

By the time I was elected to the council in 1986, the baths were even more shabby. But the swimming club were not fools. Because they invited me, as a new councillor, to present the prizes at their junior swimming gala. If I remember rightly, this event took place the day after the close of the Liberal Assembly in Eastbourne, so I had been up selling Liberator songbooks until the small hours of that morning. 

It turned out that, though there were a lot of races, the club did not have many members. The result was that the same damp and increasingly tired children came up each time to collect their prizes. 

As guest of honour, I was given a seat by the side of the pool. The trouble was that the surround was not that wide, so I was sitting very near the edge. This did not matter when a backstroke or breaststroke race went past, but when it was the butterfly of the crawl I was soaked by the spray. And I had put a suit and tie on for the event. 

By the end of the gala I was very open to the club's argument that the club and the town needed a new pool. In fact I later seconded the motion that got it built.

Those original baths were given to town by our old friend J.W. Logan MP. The stone marking this was moved to the new leisure centre when they were demolished.

Six of the Best 596

The former chairman of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, makes the case for helicopter money.

David Boyle is characteristically illuminating: "I have no problem in principle with contracted out services, but note that the contracts tend to be won by companies whose main skill is the delivery of target data to their commissioners."

"Labour’s new members have arrived at the expense of the Greens and the assorted Judean People’s Front parties of the far left. Those new members are still fighting their #1 enemy, the 'Blairites', some of whom have decided, for various reasons, that enough is enough and have left." Jake Wilde dissects zombie Labour.

"Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations." Zadie Smith on her father and British comedy.

Rob Baker nominates his Top 8 Swinging Sixties London Films. Groovy!

Laura Reynolds maps London's lost lidos.

The 11-year-old who swam the English Channel

At the end of last year I blogged about five news stories you don't get any more.

One of them was ever younger children swimming the channel:

Once skinny little figures shivering in goose grease appeared regularly in the news. Today you never see them. 

It turns out that the Channel Swimming Association imposed a minimum age of 16 years in 2000, which means that the record is likely to stay with Thomas Gregory, who made the crossing in 1988 aged 11 years and 336 days.

The other day BBC News published a feature on Thomas Gregory and his feat.

You can see why the age limit was imposed:

"When I reached the shore, I was a few notches off compos mentis," he says. "I was dazed, confused. I'd been in cold water for 12 hours, with a high rate of exertion. I'd been told you had to take three unaided steps after reaching land, otherwise you hadn't made it. But I couldn't stand up. I was on my knees. 

"Those steps became massively important. It was a Neil Armstrong moment. Eventually I did three steps, and I sat down. I remember being surrounded by people cuddling me."

Yet the hero of the interview is Gregory's coach:

"If John Bullet was alive today, he'd be getting Unsung Hero Award at the Sports Personality of the Year," says Tom. "He did countless relays of the Channel, and broke two world records, all with kids from a two-mile radius of Eltham Baths. It was incredible. But when John died, the club sort of died. It lived on thanks to some very selfless people, but my connection went. 

"This isn't false modesty, but the Channel swim wasn't about me. It was about the club. I was part of a movement, and I represented all of us. It only happened because of the courage and vision of John. I guess I was the lucky one who got the challenge." 

The crack-of-dawn starts, the hours in the pool, the weeks in Windermere, the cold showers, the open windows, the burn, the pain, the tears. Could any child enjoy that? 

"Oh yeah," Tom says, surprised at the question. "I loved it. That club changed people's lives."

Artificial leg prompts ‘paedophile panic’ at swimming pool and evacuation of children

Metro wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Leicester lidos

Chris Ayriss, whose video this is, has left a comment on a post of mine on swimming and poverty.

The diving board at Coate Water

Richard Jefferies, who his best remembered as a nature essayist but, almost in passing, invented post-apocalyptic science fiction (in After London) and the children's holiday adventure (in Bevis), was the subject (or victim) of my Masters dissertation.

His birthplace near Swindon now houses a museum devoted to his life and works. New readers should start with this guest post on Jefferies and Coate by Rebecca Welshman.

The museum stands next to Coate Water, a reservoir constructed in 1822 to provide water for the Wilts & Berks Canal. In Bevis it features as a boyhood paradise and in After London is transformed into a vast inland sea.

When the canal closed in 1914 Coate Water was turned into a park to serve the town of Swindon. Memory Lane at Coate Water describes its use in the 20th century:

Visitors to the park were charged an entrance fee and a variety of small wooden buildings around the lake provided boating and changing facilities. A wooden diving platform was built in 1921 and there was wooden staging separating the swimming and diving areas of the lake. Later a full size swimming pool and a children's paddling pool were added although today the swimming pool has been filled in and changed to a children's paddling pool and the original paddling pool has been filled with sand and turned into a play area for children. 

By 1935, the 'Art Deco' Diving board provided a nationally renowned platform for diving competitions and the lake was also regularly used for regattas and water polo. 

Although swimming in the lake was stopped due to public health and safety concerns in 1958, the diving board can still be seen today and has become a local landmark associated with the park and its history.

The diving board, occupied by the lake's more daring waterfowl, is indeed the landmark that most strikes visitors to Coate today. The video above describes Sophie Hart's ambitions to see it preserved.

Swimming and poverty

A month ago, six African-American teenagers drowned in a single incident in Louisiana, prompting soul-searching about why so many young black Americans can't swim

reports BBC News. The article goes on to discuss the reason for black children's inability to swim, suggesting that poverty and historic segregation are to blame.

Which put me in mind of this passage from Bevis by Richard Jefferies (published in 1882):

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

I am not sure I believe the history here, though the parallels between black American slavery and the Norman yoke are enticing.

What I do believe is Jefferies' observations of life in 19th-century rural England. This is just the sort of unique insight - thrown out in an aside - that you get from his work.