DIVING TO KEEP YOUNG

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3262, 19 February 1931, Page 6

DIVING TO KEEP YOUNG

WINTER SPORTS FOR MIDDLEAGED WOMEN. Imagine your grandmother learning to swim—and in winter, too! I met a grandma to-day, Mrs I. Davis, of Hull, who is learning to swim for the first time. She is 56 (states a Sunday Chronicle correspondent). Her star turn is somersaulting in the water to pick things from the bottom of the bath whi'e her bathing friends tickle the soles of her feet.

Mrs Davis is only one of hundreds of women who have caught the winter swimming craze since the Hull Corporation decided as an experiment to keep open one swimming bath all the winter.

Many of these winter swimmers are middle aged. “I know of at least 50 women between 40 and 60 who have started swimming this winter,” said Mrs Herbert Simpson, who is instructing Mrs Davis, and who claims to have taught more than 6000 people to swim. “They take it up to keep young. I’m 43 myself.” “Swimming is good fun,” Mrs Davis told me enthusiastically. “She’s braver than I am. She dives in,” chipped in Mrs H. Rose, another winter swimming enthusiast, “and I’m only 39.” “I feel ten years younger for it,” continued Grandma Davis. “Yes, I can dive—can’t understand why folks will walk down the steps into the baths! I can swim the length of the baths breast stroke and the width of the baths on my back or side stroke. “I go to mixed bathing at half past seven some mornings.” Mr C. P. Walker, manager of the East Hull baths, told me, “grey haired women are'among the early morning swimmers. Some come long distances, too.”