The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain by Glen O'Hara

Author:Glen O'Hara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Water Safety: The Public Policy Response

In this post-Second World War era, anxieties about standing water, and an insistence on the teaching of swimming, reached ever higher peaks – developments that were connected to sporting nationalism, to concerns about aimless, unfocused youth, and to rising expectations of cleanliness and safety. Initiatives to popularise swimming were often advertised as boosting elite sport: the first months of the Sports Council and the initial work of a Minister for Sport, both announced by Labour in 1964, were dominated by publicity about the Tokyo Olympics and the subsequent World Cup.42 Participating in more sport was also supposed to discourage juvenile delinquency at sport’s ‘grass roots’. This was very much Labour’s approach, in policy statements such as Leisure for Living, approved by its Conference in autumn 1959.43 Physical recreation was still perceived as a way of participating in novel leisure time ‘enjoyably, beneficially and healthily – for our own sakes [and] for the sake of our children’, as a Labour flyer entitled A Sporting Chance had it during the 1970 election. On the flyer cover, Denis Howell, the Sports Minister, was shown sitting proudly by a swimming pool, surrounded by children.44

Between 1960 and 1970, 197 new public indoor pools were built; a further 450 opened their doors between 1970 and 1977.45 Relatively generous spending on public pools did undoubtedly raise the number of people engaging in organised swimming. At the end of the 1960s the government’s Social Survey found that 44% of teenage men and boys, and 31 per of girls and women, claimed to have been swimming in a pool at an average of once a month;46 7.5% of the population had been swimming indoors in just the four weeks before one 1977 Birmingham University study, a figure that was higher (at 10.2%) among 16- to 19-year olds. The annual average numbers for people who had been swimming in indoor pools had risen by 67% since similar figures were gathered in 1973. But the numbers for swimming outdoors, in lakes and the sea, were 7.3% among the populace as a whole, and 14.7% for older teenagers, during the hotter months between July and September. Clearly, more young people (though figures for children were not given) were still swimming in potentially dangerous waters than in municipal and private pools.47 By contrast, and in the more safety-conscious twenty-first century, not only do young people seem to swim rather less than in the 1970s (17% had been swimming anywhere in the lead-up to the 2002 General Household Survey), but the order of outdoor and indoor water popularity had been reversed. More respondents had been swimming in pools than had swum outdoors.48

Water safety conferences, publications, propaganda and resources for parents sprang up throughout the public sphere. The British Safety Council (BSC), in the 1960s a more radical rival of the RoSPA, issued a series of surveys that attracted a great deal of attention. RoSPA rather resented its much smaller competitor: they wrote to the BSC when the latter body

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