There is a sound that has vanished from many swimming pools in recent years. It is the clank, clank, clank of the springboard as some brave or reckless person bounces higher and higher before diving into the water. My own children do not know that sound, but for us it was as much a part of going swimming as the smell of chlorine. There were three boards at our local pool: the 1m springboard, the 3m springboard and the 5m diving platform.
Both springboards had a big wheel thing at the side that you could turn to make it even more springy. Some people would spend ages adjusting the bounce. They would loosen it a bit, have a bounce, go back, loosen it again, bounce again, until they were bounding high into the air. Quite often the resulting dive would not be as spectacular as one might have hoped or expected from all the preparation, but instead a strange jagged leap into the water, or worst of all a painful bellyflop. On busy days there would be a queue of people waiting to have a go, and once you were on the board you had to be brave and take your turn before people got impatient and told you to hurry up. In those days, diving and jumping was as much a part of the swimming experience as ploughing up and down doing lengths is today.
Diving and jumping from these boards must have been dangerous. There was nothing to stop people from swimming underneath them. You just hoped that no one would misjudge it and dive in on top of you. Somehow – in my experience, anyway – they never did.
We saw all sorts of dives attempted, but by far the most graceful was the swallow dive.
A swallow dive, originally named the Swedish swallow, as it was the Swedes who invented it, has to be executed from a high board in order to give the diver time to open the arms out wide, like a swallow swooping down to its nest, arching the back, before bringing the arms together to enter the water. Done properly it is a most beautiful dive, as evidenced by the fact that there are so many photographs and posters of swallow divers in full flight. Many of these photos and posters are from the 20s and 30s, from what is sometimes called “the golden age of swimming”. This is when Hollywood was creating swimming film stars such as Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan). Both Williams and Weissmuller started out as competitive swimmers and both were accomplished and graceful divers. An incredible glamour surrounded certain swimmers in those days and somehow the swallow dive – or swan dive, as it was known in the States – represented the graceful elegance and freedom that these swimmers embodied. I have read that F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were fond of diving from high cliffs into the sea, Zelda sometimes naked. It must be significant that the main characters of Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night are Dick and Nicole Diver.
Our local pool was a typical 1930s lido, although we certainly never referred to it as a lido then. It is only now it has been demolished that it is called that. We didn’t think of it as being especially beautiful either, but looking back I can see that its art deco splendour chimed perfectly with the graceful form of the swallow dive. The pool was down by the river Thames and on one occasion as I left the pool I saw a man swallow diving from a bridge into the river itself. He came up, swam to the bank and asked to borrow my towel.
It was mostly men and boys who did the swallow dives, as far as I can remember. It was a way of showing off. The swallow dive was done to impress, and it usually did. There was one boy in our class at primary school who could do a swallow dive. He was quite small and unprepossessing, but when we saw him climb the steps to the 5m platform and without any hesitation execute a more or less perfect swallow dive, he earned our respect and awe. I don’t know where he learned it or who taught him. I am fairly sure he didn’t go to any kind of diving club or formal training. I believe in those days it was more a matter of plucking up courage and giving it a go.
Nowadays diving has become so complex, with twists and turns that seem at least to be out of reach for most of us. The dives are exciting and terrifying to watch, but they lack the simple elegance and the Peter-Pan-in-flight beauty of the swallow dive.
Source: Read Full Article