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On
the 30th May 1896 that the Cirencester Urban District Council set
up a committee to consider the advisability of providing Public
Swimming Baths, and whether the present one was available and if
it could be repaired satisfactorily.
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| Other sites were discussed, but as the original shareholders were willing to wind up their affairs, it was decided to take over the existing baths in accordance with the Baths and Wash-houses Act. It was thought that the chief reason for the non-success of the baths was because the water was obtained from a well which was very cold, but the Surveyor had taken levels and thought that by raising the bottom of the baths eighteen inches it could be filled with warmer water from the Mill stream by gravitation. The cost of this, together with repairs to paving and the footbridge over the stream was estimated at about £700, which if taken up on loan over twenty years at 3 1/2% would represent an annual charge of about £50 a year which equalled three fifths of a penny rate. |  |
The Baths now in the hands of the Urban District Council were re-opened. Evidently they had trouble with youngsters misbehaving themselves, because the Council were forced to make a public statement pointing out that the baths were not a playground for boys, but to be used for bathing purposes only. Regulations were made which allowed a maximum of forty five minutes spent on the premises, and twenty minutes only in the dressing boxes. There was of course, no mixed bathing, a timetable showing when men could bathe and women could bathe being rigorously adhered to. In the mid-twenties when I first went to the pool, there was no chlorination or water circulation. Instead it was filled every Sunday morning and emptied every Saturday evening. At the beginning of the week the water would be clean, but the temperature painfully low, about fifty eight degrees if you were lucky, fifty five more likely. By the end-of the week, the water might have crept up to the early sixties if the weather had been warm, but it had got increasingly dirty, until on Saturday afternoon, covered with a green slime and full of leaves, bathing was free for those males who were not too fastidious. |
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