The Place to Be: a brief history of The Malvern Baths
Work on my “sport” chapter for the Glen Iris book Iris has now meandered past lawn bowls and croquet, taken a lob shot at tennis; hit cricket for six and marked football. There’s even a face-off with lacrosse and yes, I had to look up terms used in lacrosse because I know very little about it. Today, we butterfly our way to ‘swimming’.
The establishment of the St Kilda Sea Baths and the Melbourne City Baths in 1860 showed that custom built swimming facilities were one of the first sporting related institutions built in Melbourne. But they would take another 65 years to make it to Glen Iris and Malvern.
For this blog post, all you need to know is that before there was the iconic Harold Holt Swim Centre, there was the Malvern Baths. And before the Baths, there was a shocking number of children drowning in Gardiners Creek because they could not swim.
Let’s dive in.
Scrap that – let’s do a safety jump instead because we don’t know how deep this water goes.
Drowning for fun in Gardiners Creek
One scorching hot Cup Day in November 1887, a 13-year-old boy named William Coonay set off with four of his friends from his home in Hotham Street towards Gardiner’s Creek. Their intention was to visit a waterhole the boys called “The Crabhole”. The Crabhole was situated on vacant land belonging to the capitalist/land boomer/notorious rogue James Munro. It was probably around where the scrubby trees are between the Freeway and the High Street level crossing today.
William could not swim. Although the creek around The Crabhole was deep enough to wade in, his father had strictly forbidden him from entering the water. Despite his father’s warning, the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old boy in 1887 was not so different from a 13-year-old boy today. When three of William’s friends entered the Crabhole, William followed them in.
The Crabhole was later estimated to be 14 feet deep. William soon began to drown.
His friends made a valiant attempt to save him but not being strong swimmers themselves, they could do little. They quickly exited the water and ran as fast as they could to a nearby Sunday School picnic to raise the alarm.
Fortunately, a couple of teachers at the picnic knew how to swim.[1] It still took them well over an hour to salvage poor William Coonay’s body. The dead boy was loaded onto a cart and transported to the home of his shocked parents in Hotham Street.[2]
While there was an inquest into William Coonay’s death, if there was some kind of safety recommendation that came out of it, there is no mention of it in newspaper reports. Nearly ten years later, a near identical drowning occurred in a nearby waterhole at East Malvern. This time it was a 13-year-old boy called Henry Hutchins. Henry, like William, could not swim.[3] No safety recommendation; or even a lament at his fruitless death followed either.
In 1902 – it happened again. Four deaths by drowning in the space of a few days across Melbourne; including a ten-year-old boy called Reginald Day in the section of Gardiner’s Creek between Auburn and Tooronga Roads.[4] The Creek claimed Thomas Lyons a few months later;[5] Frank Maloney four years later.[6] In 1913, a horrific triple drowning tragedy near Glen Iris occurred with the deaths of William Johnson (13), Prescot Dyason (7) and his brother Malcolm Dyason (5). It was understood William died trying to save the younger boys; William’s father was the one who found them all.
These were just the local tragedies. One can only imagine that hundreds of people drowned in Victorian dams, lakes, beaches, Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra and its other tributaries. The inability of people to swim meant they had no chance of saving themselves; nor was there sufficient ability among bystanders to help them. Slowly, successive coroners began to lament this fact in their findings and the news media started taking notice.
By 1910, Frank Tate at the Education Department considered swimming to be an essential life skill for Australian children. He turned his mind to making swimming lessons compulsory in the Victorian primary school curriculum.[7]
A Swimming Lake for Glen Iris
The first inkling of a purpose-built swimming facility in the Malvern district emerged in 1914. It was a ‘swimming lake’. The original idea was to trap flood waters between Glen Iris and Glenferrie Road (this is before Kooyong Tennis Club existed there) and create an enormous lake that way. This scheme was quickly abandoned for being too ambitious. Next came a plan for a 26 acre lake between Darling and Glen Iris. This section of the creek contained gullies and rills, plus a large, uninhabitable bog. It stood in the borderlands between the City of Camberwell and the City of Malvern, although the bulk was in Malvern. Four acres would be converted to a public garden and the plan included a levee near Darling Station to help refresh the water.[8]
I would rather feed my kidney to a resident piranha than swim in that swamp. But apparently, I would have been the exception.
The East Malvern Progress Association and the Glen Iris Tramway League drove the idea and costed the plan at the alarmingly precise £5,767. They got the landowners onboard and even the notoriously contrary City of Camberwell Council agreed. Buoyed by this public support, the group took the idea to Malvern Council. They made a few positive comments about it and promised to look into it.
But then… nothing. Maybe it was the War, maybe the cost was too prohibitive, maybe the Creek dried up, who knows? The whole idea completely disappeared, never to be mentioned again.
Swimming Baths in Melbourne
Meanwhile, the State Government got behind Frank Tate’s plans for compulsory swimming lessons for all children. The effort coincided with the post-World War I immigration boom and the need to provide positive, community facilities for a population ravaged by war losses. To accomplish it, they began supporting the establishment of more rural and suburban public swimming pools. The Australian Native Association (named for white people born in Australia, not the indigenous people) sought a meeting with Malvern Council on the idea of a swimming pool for Malvern.[9]
The Council refused. Malvern was developing rapidly and they needed all the money they had to install infrastructure to support new housing. “It would require £2,000 to £3,000 to establish public swimming baths in Malvern,” Cr Wilks said in 1917. “As soon as the Council can borrow that they would require the money for underground drainage.”
The main barrier seemed to be that a swimming bath might be useful and fun for children, but it was not a profitable enterprise. Malvern Council tended to borrow money before it would raise rates on its wealthier residents. Its middle class residents were increasingly concerned about the amount of debt the Council incurred.
Meanwhile, every Victorian town of a reasonable size began installing public swimming baths, including Sale, Warragul, Bendigo, Ballarat, Penshurst, Morwell, Wonthaggi and Mildura. Country kids were learning how to swim and having fun in the summer sun. By 1923, the Education Department was actively checking whether teachers were teaching swimming in their schools. The lessons were working too: The Age reported 53 cases where a school pupil had successfully affected the rescue of another from drowning. A year later, there were public pools in Carlton, North Melbourne, Essendon, Hawthorn, Brunswick, and more, with riverside suburbs like Footscray and Coburg building swimming pools into sections of the Maribyrnong River and Merri Creek, respectively.[10]
With no pool nearby to learn to swim, Malvern’s school students were falling behind. Residents grew increasingly agitated at the Council’s refusal to consider a pool for Malvern.
Malvern Baths controversy
By March 1923, public pressure worked and the new mayor at Malvern Council announced swimming baths would be included in a large capital works improvement loan of £91,570. Council set aside £7,000 of this for the construction of the baths; far more than had been estimated only a few years earlier.[11] Yet some councillors still rejected the inclusion. A year after this announcement, there was no site selected or plans available. It eventually transpired the Council had spent the £7,000 on something else.
By February 1924, many residents were - to use a modern colloquial term - pissed off. They convened a large community meeting at Gardiner Central School of representatives from local schools, progress associations, church societies, returned soldiers associations, the ANA and the Royal Life Saving Society. The goal was to push the Council to build swimming baths in Malvern.
“The general feeling of the meeting,” wrote the Prahran Telegraph, “was that we, as ratepayers, and parents of children, consider that it is the duty of the men whom we put in to represent us at the council, to provide municipal baths in the City of Malvern.”[12]
The community pressure worked; the Malvern Council finally agreed to build the Baths. Yet, despite what seemed massive support for them, it turned out that NIMBYism was alive and well back then too.
Everyone liked the idea; but nobody wanted the baths situated near them.
This caused the abandonment of the initial proposed location on Council land on the corner of Viva Street and Tooronga Roads. The Tooronga Progress Association then suggested the baths be built in Tooronga Park. None of those nearby residents wanted it there either.[13]
An article from the time explained why with tact and diplomacy. “Many citizens had built houses near the Council’s block of land with the idea that it would be converted into a garden with walls. Boisterous children congregating was not conducive to peaceful citizenship.”[14]
The next option was the reserve on the corner of High Street and Edgar Street, a former tip site and situated near Gardiner Central School. 189 residents signed a petition protesting the building of the baths there. Their main protest point was that it would mean removing a children’s playground. On the surface, this seems another frustrating act of NIMBYism for the pool’s advocates; but in fact, the broader context of their anger was directed at how the Council had previously sold off two other blocks of land it had promised as children’s playgrounds to repay its debts.[15] Fed up councillors rejected the petition and the Edgar Street site was locked in.
Council then asked their City Engineer, Mr B M Coutie, to prepare plans for the swimming baths. Mr Coutie had recently returned from a Council-funded sojourn to Europe and America to see how they were building suburbs over there. He took design inspiration from baths at Harrow, England.
The pool would be fan-shaped, circular at the shallow end with a wedge-shaped basin at the apex. It would be 204 feet long (62 metres), a maximum of 8 feet deep with 50 square metres of actual swimming space. Showers and bathing boxes would be set well back, with ample office and store accommodation. There would be two fountains continually flowing and the whole pool would be surrounded by shrubs and gardens. There would also be a diving board.
Despite it sounding quite delightful, it was not the end of the dissent. Funding for the Baths (now budgeted at £10,000) would be included in yet another large loan; this time of £72,000.
Ratepayers were now vocally concerned about the level of debt Malvern Council incurred and the lack of transparency in how all the money was spent.
Another complaint was that they were unnecessary because children could easily learn to swim in the sea. “Swimming baths should not be erected where access to the sea is attainable,” wrote “Ratepayer” to the Argus in March 1926.[16] “The idea of spending so much on swimming baths in Malvern when people can so easily reach the sea is ridiculous,” wrote “Overtaxed”.
The ‘sea’ is a 45 minute tram ride away from Malvern today. I don’t imagine it was faster back then. But I digress…
“Have the opponents of this proposal young children?" wrote F Jenkins in protest. "Will they see with the eyes of those who have and who do not care for their little ones to be travelling by train and tram to the seaside without supervision? A modern suburb should have its baths, and those as central as possible.”
Malvern Council responded to the old 'won't someone think of the children so I don't have to supervise my kids on the tram' argument and pushed ahead. In September 1926, they awarded the building contract to Raymond V Ritchie. He proposed £6,478 for construction. The project went ahead without much (reported) incident and a year later, Lord Somers, the Victorian Governor visited the site and deemed the new baths “excellent” (according to the City of Malvern meeting minutes). The Malvern mayor, Cr Wilmott officially opened the Malvern Baths on Saturday, 12 November 1927.
They were a smash hit. “The new pool is a valuable addition to the training places for young swimmers,” wrote “Victor” to the Herald. “It is designed to give maximum value to the public as a bathing and paddling pool, a pleasure swimming basin, and a racing ‘water’ of Olympic distance measurements.”[17] The inaugural manager, Bob Edmonds was a Victorian champion swimmer and quickly stamped his authority over the children at the pool.
The Herald Learn to Swim Campaign
By the summer of 1928, despite the growing number of pools around Victoria, around 400 Australians were still drowning every year. “If half that number were lost in one dreadful mining disaster,” wrote world record holding, champion swimmer and Olympian Frank Beaurepaire,“what an outcry about safety devices there would be! Yet these precious lives are lost to Australia every year because we cannot, or do not, insist on everybody learning to swim.”[18]
In the article, Beaurepaire announced that he would be chairing the Herald Newspaper’s new Learn to Swim Campaign; a coordinated effort from 12 prominent organisations, including the Royal Life Saving Society, the Royal Humane Society, various swimming associations, the Returned Soldiers League, the Boy Scouts, and the Education Department to push a state-wide effort to ensure every person in Victoria learnt to swim.
This required support and guidance for grassroots community efforts to push for more pools in country areas; adequate changing rooms, especially for women; and training for new swimming teachers and coaches (men and women). There would be a tiered certificate system that would start with breaststroke and progress through crawl to life saving techniques.
“People like to be good swimmers,” wrote Beaurepaire. “There is no finer form of competitive sport than swimming races. I have spoken!”
Frank Beaurepaire was true to his word. Thanks to his dedicated stewardship, every summer for the next several decades, the Learn to Swim Campaign ensured tens of thousands of Victorian children and adults learnt to swim.
Including at the Malvern Baths.
A summers day at the Malvern Baths
The Malvern Baths quickly became a cornerstone of summers growing up in Glen Iris and the surrounding areas.
“I started going to the Baths in the forties. We did our Herald certificate after school from Gardiner Central. It was a great meeting place for the locals,” wrote one Facebook user when commenting on a photograph of the Baths.
“My brothers and I spent most summer holidays at the baths in the 50s and early 60s,” wrote another. “We would be given a season ticket and off we would go with a cut lunch to spend the day at the pool. We only lived at the top end of Aintree Rd so a quick walk through the laneways and we were there. Bob Edmonds ran the baths in those days. Awesome memories.”
“We would push bike it from Toorak Road every day in Summer. Got my Herald there as well. Great memories.”
“Got my Herald certificate for swimming across the pool. Then I was allowed to go up the deep end and the diving boards. It was a great place and so close to home. I remember it was 6 pence entry. Those were special days.”
“My home away from home for many years. I met my husband of over 50 years there. Many memories, all good.”
And yet the Pool still had its detractors. In 1949, the Town Clerk received several letters of complaint about “insanitary conditions and unseemly behaviour by teenagers, objectionable conveniences and out-moded cubicles,” at the Malvern Baths. The manager Bob Edmonds was personally offended. “There is far worse behaviour on the beaches than at Malvern baths,” he said in response. “I would not allow those attending the baths to behave in an unseemly way.”
“Unseemly” behaviour in Glen Iris in 1949 could be anything from any kind of public displays of affection, to chewing gum, to women showing too much “leg” (or any at all).[19] That said though, the heavily chlorinated environment meant the Baths aged quickly and the facilities did deteriorate.
By the early 1960s, Malvern Council turned its attention to replacing them with a state-of-the-art pool they would eventually name after the most famous drowning victim in Australian history: Prime Minister Harold Holt.
References
[1] "A Plucky Youth," The Herald, 3 November 1887.
[2] "Fatal Bathing Accident," The Age, 2 November 1887.
[3] "Sad Drowning Case," The Argus, 23 January 1896.
[4] "Drowning Fatalities," Grenville Standard, 25 October 1902.
[5] "Death by Drowning," Bendigo Advertiser, 6 February 1903.
[6] "Drowning Fatality," Geelong Advertise, 25 February 1907.
[7] "Swimming Lessons," Bendigo Independent, 8 February 1917.
[8] "East Malvern Lake," Herald, 26 February 1914.
[9] "Baths for Malvern," Malvern Standard, 6 October 1917.
[10] "Providing for Swimmers," Argus, 2 December 1924.
[11] "Good for Malvern," Herald, 20 March 1923.
[12] ""We Want Swimming Baths!"," Prahran Telegraph, 1 February 1924.
[13] "Malvern Swimming Baths," Prahran Telegraph, 11 April 1924.
[14] "Malvern Public Baths," Prahran Telegraph, 21 March 1924.
[15] "Malvern Swimming Baths," Prahran Telegraph, 7 August 1925.
[16] "Malvern Loan Project," Argus, 20 March 1926.
[17] "Victor", "Malvern's New Pool," Herald, 14 November 1927.
[18] Beaurepaire, Cr Frank, "Everybody Must Learn to Swim," Herald, 8 December 1928.
[19] "Council to Weigh Malvern Baths Complaints," Sun News-Pictorial, 11 January 1949.
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