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The Cambridge Neo-Pagans about 1911
Woolf, Brooke, John Maynard Keynes, EM Forster.
Agnostic free thinkers; went for long unchaperoned walks and slept out under the stars. Predated their fame as writers.
Defined as a form of positive existentialism, a sensual well-meaning love for life in which one is immersed in the present.
t was the end of August. Virginia Stephen arrived at the Old Vicarage and occupied Ka’s bed on the other side of the house.
The garden room was strewn with scraps of Strindberg, pages of Bland Vassen and fragments of verse.
Probably the guest had brought with her an early chapter of The Voyage Out to revise while Brooke was reading or writing stretched out on the grass. One warm night there was a clear sky and a moon and they walked out to the shadowy waters of Byron’s Pool. ‘Let’s go swimming, quite naked,’ Brooke said, and they did.”
Brooke mentioned the pool a few years later in his poem “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”:
“Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.”
Emmanuel Pool: not clear whether it was originally for bathing or
swimming.No references to either in seventeenth century.
Eighteenth century fashion for country houses to build plunge pools,
either attached to the house, with a roof, or open in parkland.
Mostly just a few feet across – not suitable for swimming, but often
with a small portico or pavillion for dressing.
The fashion caught on in Cambridge colleges, and at Emmanuel
decided in 1745 that money given by Charles Barlow “for the use of
the Fellows’ Garden be applied to the making of a Bath and the
building of a House over it.”
1747 James Essex survey shows the pool as a neat rectangle,
about the size of the present pool.
1748 a new guide book, The Foreigner’s Companion, describes
“a bowling green and a Cold Bath...over which is a neat Brick
building, sash’d in Front, and containing also a commodious little
Room to dress in” - sounds like a plunge-bath adjacent to the pool.
Gwen Raverat “Period Piece”
“I can remember the smell very well, for all the sewage went into the (lower) river, till the
town was at last properly drained, when I was about 10 yrs old. There is a tale of Queen
Victoria being shown Trinity by the Master, Dr Whewell, and saying, as she looked down
over the bridge: ‘What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?’ To which,
with great presence of mind, he replied:�‘Those, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.’
‘All summer, Sheep’s Green and Coe Fen were pink with boys, as naked as God made them,
for bathing drawers did not exist then; or at least not on Sheep’s Green.’
Sometimes we went in the boats with the grown ups. And then I – but not Charles, which was so unfair – was given a parasol, and told to put it up, and not to look ‘because it was horrid’.
I obediently put up the parasol and carefully arranged it between myself and the ladies,
so that I could see comfortably, without hurting their feelings. For I thought the bathing place one of the most beautiful sights in the world: the thin naked boys dancing about in the sunlight on the bright green grass; the splashing, sparkling river; the reckless high dives, when the slim bodies shot down through the air like angels coming down from heaven:
it was splendid, glorious, noble; it wasn’t horrid at all.”
18th Century Bathing houses at Peterhouse, Pembroke, Emmanuel and Christs.
The age of heroic Augustan man – classical education, taste and refinement
Aspiring fellows in Camb colleges following the fashion of country houses –
4 appeared mid 18th century.
Hobson’s conduit made baths a practical possibility (before that stagnant
“King’s Dytch”)
Aristocrats going on Grand Tour of Italy saw bath houses and wanted to
recreate them at home
Building and maintaining a bath enabled scholars to show off their scientific
and technical prowess
Putting it in a Fellows’ garden made it satisfyingly elite – relativelycheap way
of attracting fellows to the college
Bath envy was at work!
18th Century medicine
Early 18th C idea that cold bathing beneficial in preventing and curing illnesses.
1707 Dr Oliver said a Cold Bath invigorates “the animal Deconomy”
Patrick Blair writing to Isaac Newton (president of Royal Society) in 1718
Claimed that:
”If too hot, children get rickets, distempers, asthma and bowel rickets”
�Blair claimed to have cured a 13 yr old, “seized with paraplagia” and a “man of raving mad”
“Taking the waters took the aristocracy by storm” - building “Il bagnio” in Palladian style.
Stowe, Carlton House, Rousham – all surrounded by lovely gardens – an Augustan landscape evoking ancient Rome.
Horace Walpole described the garden at Rousham as “Daphne in little, the sweetest little groves, streams, glades, porticoes, cascades, and river imaginable”�Walpole was a frequent guest at Christ’s, and his description is similar to how contemporaries described the Fellow’s Gardens at Christ’s, Emmanuel and Peterhouse mid 18th C – Augustan idylls.
Showing off scientific and technical prowess:��Taming large quantities of water, constructing channels & wells, inventing mechanical pumps -
Good showing off!
Royal society encouraged running water supplies to country houses – machines for
Pumping powered by steam, water or even gunpowder. Water closets and bathrooms
springing up (? date of Wimpole?)
Dr Roger Long, master of Pembroke 1733 to 1770 - “a great mechanic”
Driving force behind probably the earliest Cambridge college cold bath – built the engine
Also built another waterwork in his own garden where “he often diverts himself in a
machine of its own contrivance, to go with the foot as he rides within”
A kind of water-velocipede?
He thought everything could be solved by immutable scientific laws. (3 volumes of notebooks -
Issues of maths and astronomy – how to achieve perfect harmony in music and how
to extract the best perfume from flowers. “Camb common rooms would have abounded
with similar types, excited by the experimention possibilities presented by everything,
including water.)
Gratifyingly elitist
Surrounded by high walls; only those with keys could enter.
Christs 1646 each fellow paid a 10/- subscription for key to college garden
Means of attracting new students of the right sort:��EG Christ’s in 18th C had so little money that the walls “Had so ruinous and repulsive
appearance that persons were deterred from entering students therein”
Pembroke: nothing spent on buildings between 1690 & 1880 except £86 on Master’s
Lodge in 1745
An elegant classical bath might sound frivolous, but it was a relatively inexpensive way
of announcing how cultured and elitist this this establishment was.
Emmanuel: 1885 from ornamental pool to swimming pool
Bricked in 1855 – inscription to Rev W. Castlehow on bottom
Palladian changing room replaced by Gothic at same time with thatch roof – only one of
The 4 colleges to change with the tastes of the time (romantic poets etc)
1960 ceased to be fed by Hobson’s conduit – dark green with algae and one fellow
complained that he lost his way as he swam a length!
Pembroke:
Some believe a “waterwork and bath” as early as mid 17th C.
?In basement of Hichem building, built over the college branch of the conduit in 1633
Bushell thought bath in basement, with access through a trapdoor in one of the Fellow’s
Bedrooms!
(1709 5/- paid for “bricking up the cellar” - only evidence.)
Substantial cold bath built in Fellow’s Garden between 1737 & 1738 – recorded in college
treasury accounts
1st subscriber = Dr Jeremy Long, Master who also incurred the “charge of the mechanical
Engine” He also devised the engine
There was a painted wooden seat & fence, a stone terrace, a “brass-box” or brazier,
to create warmth after a cold dip, & an iron plug in the bath. No pictorial evidence
City map of 1798 doesn’t show the structure – it didn’t last long – less than 75 yrs.
May have suffered when Hobson’s conduit was diverted in 1820 for new museum area, but
records of it have disappeared earlier.
Pembroke: The pool’s demise
May have failed in 1820 when Hobson’s Con diverted for construction on museums site
But there are no records of its existence in the few years before this.
May have failed because it was closely associated with Dr Long, who was in perpetual
Dispute with the other Fellows over the “more than mathematical gloom” of studies at
Pembroke.
Only 2 people attended his funeral in 1770, & then he was buried in the waterlogged cellar
Of the chapel, known to have been flooded by the waterworks he had built in his own
Master’s Garden.
Antiquary Cole complained to Thomas Grey, poet and fellow of Pembroke, that, “They had
Brought the poor Mr from a warm Hall and noble fire & flung him into a Well or ditch half
Full with water.”
Was this seen as a fitting last burial place given he was so keen on constructing
Waterworks in his lifetime?��A revenge served v cold?! Helen Bradbury
Christ’s College
Bath built between ? 1713& 1748
Garden records purchase of flowers, “2 cypress trees, 5 apricot trees, holly trees, 8 laurel
Trees & 6 roots of rosemary”
Later accounts describe people tending “apple, quince trees and vines” and “beating ye
walnut trees” - a private & v beautiful walled garden.
One of 3 statues around the pool is Nicholas Sanderson, Lucasian prof of maths, 1711 – 1739
- could he have been inspired by the pool built by fellow mathematician, Roger Long, at
Pembroke?
Ceased being supplied by Hobson’s Conduit in 2009
Wimpole Hall
Bath into an existing courtyard 1793
Designed by Sir John Soame inspired by Roman baths he’d seen in Pompeii
Took almost 3,000 gallons to fill
Heated by boiler in nearby basement
Intended for group bathing
19th century shower added – filled from bath
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