The Sussex Murder by Ian Sansom

Author:Ian Sansom [Ian Sansom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

PELLS POOL turned out to be one of those so-called ‘lidos’ that seemed to spring up everywhere during the 1930s. The lidos, many of them now fallen into disrepair, were intended by the noble and multitudinous Pleasure Grounds and Baths Committees of this country’s great local and borough councils to be necessary improvements upon and replacements for the old public baths and public park swimming lakes, many of which were themselves so far beyond disrepair at that time as to be most definitely unhygienic, if not entirely unusable. The lido craze had caught on everywhere: I remember back in London reading about the opening of a Tottenham Lido and a West Ham Lido, and I had myself on a number of occasions visited the famous Tooting Bathing Lake, which had been converted into a lido and become an unlikely south London tourist attraction.

Morley, perhaps surprisingly, was not a great fan of the lidos, believing them to be an example of the government interfering with and trying to control every Briton’s inalienable right to swim in unsafe, unfiltered and often stagnant water wheresoever, whensoever and howsoever they wished, entirely for free and at their own risk. In his essay ‘On Liberty and the Public Good’ (Amateur Philosopher, January 1936), which does not mention the lido, but which does worry about the public park, he argues that ‘To free individuals to act in accordance with their own best interests is a sure sign of a civilised society, just as to instruct individuals on how to use their freedom is a sure sign of the barbarous.’ His ideas on such matters were, admittedly, subject to change and often contradictory but fundamentally he believed that everyone should be left alone to take responsibility for their own lives, though he also believed that we should support and provide for those who were, for whatever reason, unable to take responsibility for themselves. Basically he believed in duty and in charity and in generosity and rather distrusted what he called ‘Bolshevik’ ideas about social justice and equality. Thus, he was generally anti things like the lidos – though at other times, he could be pro. He was the kind of liberal who no longer really exists in this country, or indeed in any other: he believed in the Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, yet he also believed that men were always unlikely to work in their own best interests, let alone the interests of others. His strongest and abiding belief was in the simple idea of Englishness. If only we could educate our fellow men in English habits of discipline, self-respect and good manners, then all would be well; and maybe, in his strange, complex, muddle-headed way, he was right.

Anyway, Pells Pool was a fine example of everything that Morley both hated and admired: a square-set, brick-built, municipal-type compound, provided for the public good, but which one had to pay for the privilege to enter.

A stone plaque on the wall outside stated that a freshwater swimming pool

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