“The Baths”

“The Baths” (Photographs from UCC Gala 1966)

In the 1950’s & 60’s every kid in Cork City & suburbs learned to swim in The Baths – or if they didn’t, at least they had a bloody good wash there!

The Baths were the municipal swimming pools, situated in Eglantine Street at the back of the City Hall where the multi-story car park now stands and was a mecca for kids once the summer holidays began. Just wrap your togs in a towel, get a tanner (6p) from your Ma and you were away. (3p to get in & 3p for an ice cream & a cake in Cuthberts on the way home)

I had this image in my head of rows and rows of bath tubs containing people busy washing themselves away to their hearts’ content

There were two pools there, both about 25M long and the place was strictly segregated – boys in one and girls in the other – and God help anyone who ventured across for a ‘gawk’. Before I went to The Baths for the first time, I had this image in my head of rows and rows of bath tubs containing people busy washing themselves away to their hearts’ content.

To say that facilities were rudimentary is an understatement, but sure we didn’t know any better and we swam and played and were as happy there as if we were in Disneyland. The abiding memory is the smell of the chlorine in the water but one wag claimed the chlorine wasn’t necessary as they were the cleanest swimming pools in Europe: the leaks were so numerous the Corporation had to keep pumping water in to keep the levels up!

the best way to learn was just to jump in at the deep end and then you’d just have to swim to save yourself.

There were a few swimming clubs in the city in those days but Dolphin and Sundays Well are the only two that I can remember now. The Campion family were great swimmers in that era and ran classes on Wednesday afternoons for those learning the art, which – once learned – would never be forgotten. A school-mate of mine had a theory that the best way to learn was just to jump in at the deep end and then you’d just have to swim to save yourself. We had a few close calls trying that technique on some of our friends!

“Oh bliss it was in that age to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

Once a year the clubs – and some of the more progressive secondary schools – held ‘a gala’, when the pool was divided into lanes with the use of raggy ropes and races of various distances and styles were held. My gang used flock to the girls’ schools galas – I wonder why? – and pass the evening selecting our very own ‘Miss Cork’ from the teeming mass of ‘young wans’ in bathing costumes strutting around the place. “Oh bliss it was in that age to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

The Corporation (as the City Council used be called) then opened a pool in Gurranabraher and another in Douglas. Hotels began adding spas with their own pools and eventually The Baths went out of favour and were quietly closed down without any fuss, fanfare or, indeed, protests.

I walked past the site yesterday and imagined the queue of noisy kids, rolled towels under their arms, jostling to get through the turnstile at the entrance. And then, once inside, the shouts & screams of joy echoing off the glass roof overhead that was forever fogged up from the steamy, exotic atmosphere beneath.

Somehow a sterile, multi-story car-park will never have the same magic about it.