One summer’s day, three professors (or ‘dons’) from the University of Oxford lay sunbathing naked at a bend in the river called Parson’s Pleasure. Suddenly a punt came into sight, occupied by a group of students. Two of the dons panicked and covered their privates. The third calmly covered his face, commenting in the aftermath, ‘I don’t know about you, but in Oxford I’m known by my face’.
While the origins of this story are elusive, its setting is – or was – very much real. Situated between two branches of the River Cherwell (pronounced ‘Char-well’), Parson’s Pleasure was a popular swimming spot from as early as 1600 until its closure, demolition and redevelopment in 1992. During this time, it was enjoyed by many famous figures, from William Morris and Lawrence of Arabia, to C.S. Lewis and Oliver Sacks. And it enshrined habits that were once the norm across the UK: river swimming, mostly for men, conducted in the nude.
Duncan Montgomery, Ticket for One Swim, wood engraving, 2023
Today Parson’s Pleasure is a pleasant, open area of park, but it was once kitted out with changing cubicles and diving-boards rigged up in the trees, surrounded by screens and carefully planted foliage – a fig-leaf for the naked clientele. Women approaching by boat were supposed to alight and walk around the perimeter before returning to the water (a habit that fell out of favour in the 1960s). All of this was overseen by a professional attendant and swimming teachers, the most famous of whom was Charles Claude Cox.
Working first as an assistant to his father before becoming Head Attendant, Cox taught generations of boys to swim and occupied a little brick-built booth or ‘cottage’ beside the gate, taking payment for entry and the rental of towels. There was an open area of grass for sunbathing, snoozing and playing games, and, of course, a section of the river for swimming, shallow at one end, with a deep section at the other known ominously as the ‘Devil’s Eye’.
Who were the regulars? In the first half of the 1800s, Parson’s Pleasure was socially mixed, popular among doctors, hairdressers, hatmakers and boys from both private and charity schools. Students often took a dip here (bathing was believed to be an excellent hangover cure), but dons tended to be the exception, not the rule.
Parson’s Pleasure was part of an ecosystem of informal, freshwater bathing spots all over the UK. Others around Oxford had similarly curious, poetic names, such as Deep Martin, Black Jack’s Hole, Footman’s Bath, Sheepwash, Kite Pool, Stump Pool and Dog Kennel.
Swimming wasn’t yet a centralised, certified or regulated sport. Strokes, dives and swimming tricks varied from place to place. Shoemaker and swimming coach Samuel Hounslow was particularly creative on this front. An ‘amphibious individual’ displaying feats ‘worthy of a human salmon’, Hounslow won swimming competitions and was compared to Captain Matthew Webb – first to swim the English Channel – for his ability to stay in the water for long hours. ‘Hounslow used to rush steadily onwards,’ recalled one contemporary, ‘just as the porpoise does, with a perfectly uniform motion, sending the ripples curling ahead of him, his round, jovial, red face lying nearly flat on the surface.’
John Whessell, 'The Bathing Place', 1830s.
In the mid-Victorian years, everything changed. Water pollution, the policing of nudity and enclosure of land blocked off many traditional bathing spots. Swimmers were forced to stray further afield – posting look-outs and risking arrest – or settle for the bathing spots sanctioned by public authorities.
Things took a different turn at Parson’s Pleasure. Charles Cox’s father, John Cox, began charging a nominal fee to bathers in the 1830s – a penny per swim. But the University then started to reshape the surrounding meadows and, in 1865, added a new footpath. Allowing nude bathing to continue so close to pedestrians was unthinkable. Perhaps cutting a deal with the University authorities, John responded by enclosing the site with high screens and a locked gate. He also hiked up the entry fee overnight, turning many poorer swimmers away in the process.
Parson’s Pleasure became, from this point on, much more closely affiliated with students. At the time, much of Oxford’s economy revolved around servicing academia. ‘Without its two thousand undergraduates and the herd of hangers-on,’ wrote one visitor from France in 1886, ‘the town would resemble a desert and grass would grow in its streets.’ The Cox family spotted an opportunity to position themselves as custodians of this historic haunt, gatekeepers of the Cherwell for an increasingly affluent clientele.
Parson’s Pleasure nonetheless remained at arm’s length from University authorities, even as they provided the majority of its custom. After an elderly Charles Cox was pressed into retirement in 1914 (his lifesaving skills at 87 were not what they had been), he lived in relative poverty despite his celebrity status among the great and the good.
Obituaries describe Cox as a great storyteller with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Cherwell, who had been on friendly terms with a host of famous former customers – among them the publisher Basil Blackwell, the Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and even King Edward VII. ‘It is claimed,’ one writer adds, ‘that [Cox] rescued over a hundred bathers, and all by means of the punt as, strangely enough, he never learned to swim.’
Cox was also the first to enable women to swim in the rivers around Oxford. In the 1880s and 90s, he opened Parson’s Pleasure to women at lunchtimes. ‘Any day during the summer,’ noted a correspondent in the Daily News, ‘ladies may be seen waiting about … until the men have been turned out and they may be admitted … to one of the most delicious inland bathing places … I am assured that swimming as an accomplishment for ladies is rapidly becoming popular.’
Charles Cox at Parson's Pleasure, 1913
It wasn’t until the late 1920s that Parson’s Pleasure was taken over as an official University site. Enter Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton. An austere anthropologist and former British intelligence agent, Buxton was nicknamed ‘Bones’ by his students, due to his interest in anthropometry – measuring and comparing human bodies along lines of ‘race’, long since understood as pseudo-scientific.
After carrying out fieldwork across the British Empire, Buxton took up a post at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, where he became an active member of several University committees – among them, the ‘Curators’ of the University Parks. In this role, ‘Bones’ overhauled Parson’s Pleasure, taking the site under direct control. He reduced the entry fee, relaxing the emphasis on a University-only clientele. He quadrupled the size of the bathing enclosure to make room for more sunbathing and arranged for everything to be given a fresh lick of green paint. Driven perhaps by his fascination with human bodies, Buxton was crucial to the survival of the bathing place into the mid-1900s.
Buxton also oversaw the construction of a new counterpart to Parson’s Pleasure, which quickly became known as Dame’s Delight. While producing an exhibition at the Museum of Oxford, I was sent a series of photographs of Thelma Townsend (no relation) by Thelma’s daughter, Elizabeth. Pictured at Dame’s Delight, Thelma shows off a stripy new costume that bares her neck and shoulders. For Thelma’s parents’ generation, such an outfit would have been outrageous, while Elizabeth recalls her own childhood memories of swimming at Dame’s Delight, wearing a costume that was ‘ruched up and bubbly’, made from ‘a sort of satin’ – ‘gold and lovely when it was dry. Oh, I felt very glamorous in it!’ Elizabeth took her own children to swim at Port Meadow in later years.
Dame’s Delight was run by women, for women, for a very short period of time – perhaps as little as six months. Following a tragic accident, Buxton decided it was essential to have a male attendant – and so Dame’s Delight morphed into a clothed, family-oriented space until it closed for the final time in 1969 due to severe flood damage.
Thelma Townsend at Dame's Delight
Returning to Parson’s Pleasure, it was during the interwar years that C.S. Lewis became hooked on swimming. Like many who came of age in the 1910s, Lewis was profoundly affected by his experience of the First World War. After a short spell at Oxford, Lewis arrived in the Somme Valley on his 19th birthday where he experienced horrors that never left him, witnessed, in his own words, wounded men still moving like half-crushed beetles. In the following years, Lewis interlaced his reflections on war with natural idylls, a rural heaven beyond the hell of battle. ‘The heat and pain together suddenly fall away,’ he wrote in one poem, ‘All’s cool and green.’
These lines echo throughout Lewis’s writings about Parson’s Pleasure. ‘Another exquisite day,’ he told a friend, ‘We walked to Parson’s Pleasure to bathe … all was cool and green and lovely beyond everything’. For Lewis, the river was a quasi-magical place, a place of nourishment, recovery and imaginative inspiration.
Parson's Pleasure drawn by Lancelot Speed, 1894
‘I would not use the word “gay” of Parson’s Pleasure when I knew it in the early 1970s,’ reflected one contributor to Historic England’s Pride of Place project, ‘even though a lot of the students who used it were affected by the stirrings of gay lib. And even though you could often find a companion to take home with you. It was homo-social. It was a kind of anachronism. I spent many a sunny afternoon there, sometimes studying, sometimes staring at the other men, taking a swim, sometimes chatting with friends.’
The idea that Parson’s Pleasure was an ‘anachronism’ – a place which had somehow survived beyond its natural lifespan – loomed large when it closed in 1992, shaping the narrative in the local and national press. ‘The watery bend of the River Cherwell known as Parson’s Pleasure,’ announced a presenter on BBC Newsnight, ‘has been the scene of topless, bottomless, boys-only bathing for at least three hundred years, but today that’s all passed into history.’ Daniel Rees, a servant at Keble College, wrote in to Gay Times to voice a rare alternative view: ‘The excuse [for the closure],’ Rees told readers, ‘was that Oxford University … might be liable for swimming accidents … [but] this unique place used mainly by gay men has been taken away from us.’
The tale of sunbathing dons is, as we’ve seen, only a small part of the story. At various times, Parson’s Pleasure provided a much-loved spot for people from many walks of life – even, in the late 1800s, for women – and this equally applied to gay men. In the new Millennium, years after its disappearance, Parson’s Pleasure has emerged more proudly than ever as a place of queer connections. Daniel Rees told me about a picnic he attended at Parson’s Pleasure alongside members of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality – ‘most of us without any clothes on’.
This queer history has resurfaced through writing, too. ‘One unusually sunny afternoon,’ narrates Arthur Motyer in his semi-autobiographical novel, What’s Remembered, ‘we went … across the Parks to Parson’s Pleasure, where we swam in the nude and lay together afterwards in the sun, although I had to roll over onto my stomach so Clifford wouldn’t see what was happening. After a little while, I noticed he had rolled over too.’
Parson’s Pleasure gives us an unusually rich and longstanding insight into the evolution of freshwater swimming in the UK. It reveals the significance of swimming places to queer communities, artists and writers alike. It shows us the double standards swimmers faced around gender and class. And it highlights the importance of ‘mediator’ figures like Charles Cox and Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton. Perhaps most of all, it draws attention to the deep, intergenerational importance of place itself – swimmers past and present linked by special open-water swimming spots, the stories of many of which remain to be told.
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