Page 38 - Bulletin 22 2019

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for going there. Seaside towns competed for a share of the new tourist trade and bathing

machines and, later, beach huts proliferated in response to this.

During the nineteenth century men apparently insisted on the right to bath naked and this
precluded mixed bathing (men and women together.) In 1862 in the UK proper bathing attire

and segregated bathing were enforced by law and men and women bathers were not allowed
within 60 ft of one another. Bathing machines were well-suited to this imperative of enforced

decency and their use was made compulsory on the beaches of the main resorts. In Brighton

in the early 1870s twenty different proprietors operated 254 licensed bathing machines. As
they had to be hired this meant that people paid for access to the sea.

The bathing machine was usually a fully wooden structure, though some consisted of a
wooden frame with canvas cover. It ran on broad wheels to prevent sinking into the sand and

their diameter was large enough to place the hut above deep water and waves. Many had a
door at the rear through which a swimmer (or an ailing person) entered and a front one from

which they stepped into the sea; others had only a single door. The bather changed from
normal clothing into swimwear while the machine was dragged by horse or human power

across the beach into deep water. Some machines were equipped with a folding umbrella-like

canvas tent which spread over the water and hid the swimmer from view. Women were often
assisted to and from the water by another woman known as a dipper. When the swim was

over the process was reversed: the bather dressed while the machine was drawn back up the
beach.

Parallel developments were taking place at resorts on the Continent in France, Belgium,

Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Spain, and in the USA, Mexico, and Australia, and

bathing machines became part of the evolving beach scene at most resorts. (Figs. 2.1 – 2.10.)

In 1901 the legal segregation of men and women at beaches was abolished in Britain, partly

in response to their losing clientele to resorts across the Channel where more relaxed social
mores prevailed, and the popularity of bathing machines as mobile changing huts declined

steadily. They were either converted into stationary changing rooms parked along the
shoreline above the high water mark, or replaced by beach huts. In Britain by 1914 they had

all but disappeared and by 1920 were extinct.