Times Have Changed

From the age of 11 until I was 16 or 17, I spent every summer weekend and every day of the school summer holiday at Oulton Broad outdoor swimming pool. 

My friends and I were all members of the Oulton Broad Swimming and Diving Club.  Becoming a member meant that a five shilling (25p) fee was paid and then, admission was always free.  Not only that but members changed in a wooden hut at the pool’s edge and not in the cubicles used by the public and so we were not constrained by time restrictions or limitations.  

A member of the public was allowed 45 minutes whereas my friends and I could arrive at 10:30 in the morning and stay until 5 p.m.  Of course, we didn’t swim all day but once every hour or so, we would muck about doing “bombs” from the 10 foot diving board or retrieving objects thrown into the deep end.

I was reminded of those happy days while looking through archived copies of the weekly local paper - the Lowestoft Journal.  I was looking for press reports covering cricket matches I played for Lowestoft Town in the years from 1963 until 1972, the year when I left the town for ever.  

Times have changed.  My innings of 47 not out, at home in 1969 against Suffolk Club and Ground, was described in the Journal as “one of the gayest innings to be played on the Denes Oval for some years.”  It may well have been gay but no one at the time commented on it.

This feature from the middle of June 1964 under the headline “Weather”, is interesting:

“Temperatures in Lowestoft have been pleasantly warm this week reaching well into the sixties.” (16-20°C)

I can remember that the first thing I used to do on entering through the Oulton Broad pool gates was to look at the blackboard on which that day’s water temperature was written.  The pool was never heated. 

If the number was less than 60°F (15.5°C) and it often was, I knew that unless I dived straight in, I never would swim at all.  It was much too cold to enter the water gradually.  However, if the reading was more than 64°F (18°C), we could imagine that we were in the Caribbean.

Incidentally, my two grandsons aged 8 and 10 visited last us week.  They live in Honley in Yorkshire and we took them to the lido in Woburn where they moaned about the cold water.  The floating temperature gauge read 23.7°C  (75°F). Wimps!

Times have certainly changed.  The warmest temperature felt in Lowestoft in June 1964 was 76°F (24.5°C).  This year, the highest temperature in June in Lowestoft was 36.9°C or 98°F.  If it were still there, I wonder what the Oulton Broad pool temperature would have been in June this year. 

I remember that while studying ‘A’ level geography in the mid-sixties, being aware of a fuss in scientific and geographic circles because of something suggested by Nigel Calder, a science writer.  

He maintained that talk about man-made global warming was based on fallacious arguments and that the earth was in an interglacial period and we should actually be preparing for the return of the ice age.

In 1980, Calder predicted that by 2030, people will realise that heating of the earth by the man-made carbon-dioxide has failed to occur.  Instead, he predicted, there will be renewed concern about global cooling and an impending ice age.

That’s about as wrong as anyone could be about anything.