The Dippers Are Back: Britain’s Three Hundred-Year Love Affair With Cold Water

The Dipper is a strong local woman dressed in a full bathing suit and hat whose job is to get nervous bathers into the water. She takes the woman by the hand, leads her down the steps and, if necessary, gives her a good shove into the waves.

Now picture Scarborough today. Someone has changed in the car park, pulled on neoprene 🛍️ gloves and 🛍️ boots, wrapped themselves in a changing robe and is standing on the same beach trying to persuade themselves that getting into freezing water was a good idea.

Britain has been getting excited about cold water for hundreds of years. We’ve drunk seawater because a doctor said it was good for us, paid people to dunk us into the sea, built hundreds of outdoor swimming pools and then destroyed many of them, and produced people willing to swim across the English Channel. I’m not sure why, but it sounds exhausting.

We stopped for a while. Now we’re doing it again.

British sea swimming history is full of these reversals. A fashion appears, everyone gets excited, another fashion replaces it, and a generation later someone rediscovers cold water and says it makes them feel wonderful.

And then it happens all over again.

A spring, a doctor and a good book

The story started underground.

In 1626, workers near Scarborough discovered a mineral spring bubbling out from beneath the cliffs. The water was rich in iron and locals began drinking it for various ailments. People came to try it, more people followed, and Scarborough began developing into a seaside resort.

Once people were travelling to the coast to drink strange-tasting water, swimming in the sea wasn’t such a great leap.

The doctor who really got the fashion moving was Richard Russell, a physician from Lewes. In 1750, he published a dissertation on using seawater for glandular diseases.

Russell was really enthusiastic.

He believed seawater could help with scrofula, jaundice, tumours and infertility. His patients were expected not only to swim but to drink it too. His instructions included half a jug before bed and another half jug the following morning.

This was medicine.

Russell recorded several patients who believed in the seawater cure. His book went through six editions and helped turn Brighton into a fashionable resort.

Russell moved there himself and became wealthy enough to build a grand house on the site of what is now the Royal Albion Hotel. Wealthy Londoners followed him to Brighton to take his cure.

Other doctors jumped on board.

Jane Austen and her family visited Ramsgate and Margate. Samuel Taylor Coleridge went to the coast too, as did the Prince Regent and Princess Victoria.

Sea bathing had become respectable, fashionable and, rather, medical.

Machines, modesty and the Dippers

The problem was that people had to get into the sea.

Undressing on an open beach was considered very improper, especially for the ladies. The solution was the bathing machine, generally credited to Benjamin Beale, a Margate Quaker. It was basically a wooden changing hut on wheels.

The bather climbed inside fully dressed and a horse then dragged the machine down the beach and into the water.

Once inside, she changed into a loose gown, went down a small set of steps and jumped in the sea from the other end of the machine.

Some machines even had canvas screens or umbrellas to hide the swimmer as she went into the water.

It sounds silly now, but it protected dignity while allowing for fun and medical benefits. Most Georgian swimmers couldn’t actually swim. That was where the Dippers came in.

Dippers were usually strapping local women employed to help bathers into the water. They could hold someone, help them through the waves and, if necessary, push them into the water while standing by.

At Scarborough in the 1780s, two Dippers helped a lady swimmer. Men only got one.

A young lad also looked after the horse.

So the Georgian seaside experience could involve a horse, a wooden hut, two strong women and a dunking in the North Sea.

The 🛍️ changing robe has replaced the bathing machine, though thankfully the horse has gone.

The poet, the captain and some greece.

Showing off was another reason for swimming in the sea. In May 1810, twenty-two-year-old Lord Byron decided to swim the Hellespont, the four-mile stretch now known as the Dardanelles, between Europe and Asia.

He was recreating Leander’s feat from Greek mythology, who supposedly swam the strait every night to visit his lover Hero. Byron made the crossing in one hour and ten minutes, accompanied by Lieutenant Ekenhead. He was very chuffed with himself.

Later he told his mother that the achievement meant more to him than any political, poetic or rhetorical glory.

On 25 August 1875, Matthew Webb, a navy captain, dived from Dover Pier and began swimming towards France.

He had failed before, when a storm forced him to turn back. This time he came prepared. He trained at Lambeth Baths, took three support boats with him, and covered himself in porpoise oil to keep out the cold. He swam all through the night.

Jellyfish stung him all over, and he treated the stings with swigs of brandy.

Twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes later, he staggered onto the shore near Calais.

Webb became the first person recorded to swim the English Channel without flotation assistance and became an instant national hero. It took another fifty one years for someone to beat his time.

In 1926, twenty year old Gertrude Ederle swam from France to England in fourteen hours and thirty nine minutes. She was the first lady to complete the crossing and was faster than all five men who had previously managed it. The newspapers labelled her Queen of the Waves. When she reached the Kent shore, an immigration official apparently wanted to see her passport.

The lido

By the 1890s, bathing machines were beginning to disappear.

Some were left at the top of the beach as changing huts. Others eventually lost their wheels altogether and became the beach huts we see today. Then Britain got excited about something new.

The lido.

The golden age arrived in the 1930s. Local councils built hundreds of outdoor pools around the country. They were smart, spacious and designed to make swimming feel like a proper day out. The posters promised sunshine, fresh air and healthy exercise.

Outdoor swimming pools were extremely popular and looked like the future. But cheap package holidays changed the picture.

From the 1950s onwards, and especially during the 1970s, British holidaymakers discovered Spain, Portugal and Greece. A guaranteed week of sunshine began to look far more appealing than hoping for one in Bournemouth. Seaside resorts became less popular.

Piers closed. Lidos were expensive to maintain and less fashionable. Some were destroyed; others were left to decay.

Cold water swimming didn’t disappear completely, though. One group carried on regardless.

The club that never stopped

The Serpentine Swimming Club has held its Christmas Day race in Hyde Park every year since 1864. The first winner was H Coulter, who received a gold medal.

In 1904, J M Barrie donated a trophy for the winner. It became known as the Peter Pan Cup.

The race has continued through two world wars, changing fashions and several generations of people getting into freezing water on Christmas morning.

In 1935, the lake froze over hard enough that the race was nearly cancelled. Instead, the members broke through the ice and swam anyway.

Water temperatures on Christmas can fall below four degrees. But they still turned up.

While lidos disappeared and bathing machines became beach huts, the Serpentine swimmers never stopped.

Cold And The Body

The old seawater cures weren’t based on good evidence. Cold water itself, however, does produce some very real effects on the body.

The moment your skin hits cold water, your body reacts. It’s called a cold shock response. You gasp. Your breathing speeds up. Your heart rate rises, and your blood pressure shoots up.

This is why cold water can be dangerous, especially for someone who isn’t used to it. The involuntary gasp can make you inhale water, and rapid breathing makes it difficult to swim properly.

Frank Golden and Michael Tipton have researched the response extensively, and Tipton’s work at the University of Portsmouth’s Extreme Environments Laboratory helps explain what happens in those first few minutes.

Responses become smaller with repeated exposure.

Experienced cold water swimmers still feel the cold, obviously, but their bodies react less as they learn.

Cold exposure also releases noradrenaline and dopamine, which may help explain why swimmers often report feeling alert and unusually good after getting out.

Research also looks at brown fat, which produces heat when cold activates it. In 2018, researchers including Tipton published a case report in BMJ Case Reports about a young woman with depression and anxiety who began open water swimming. She reported feeling better after her swims and gradually saw her symptoms improve.

Although interesting, it isn’t proof that cold water cures depression. More research is needed, and several explanations remain, including exercise, cold exposure, being outdoors, and the social side of swimming.

For many swimmers, the swim is only half the experience. The rest is standing on the beach afterwards in several layers of clothing, drinking something hot and socialising; the thrill and the chill leave you feeling relaxed, and the company always feels good.

The man who started it again

If one person deserves credit for the modern British wild swimming revival, it’s probably Roger Deakin. In 1996, aged fifty-three, recently separated and missing his son, Deakin went swimming in the moat around his Elizabethan farmhouse in the rain. He loved it. It made him feel good, so he started swimming elsewhere.

Over the next two years, he travelled around Britain, swimming in rivers, lakes, lochs, flooded quarries, fens, and old swimming pools. He wrote about it in📖 Waterlog, published in 1999.

The book became an unexpected bestseller. People wrote to Deakin about their own swimming places and what the book meant to them. He apparently replied to every letter.

Waterlog is now regarded as one of the books that helped start the modern wild swimming movement. Deakin died in 2006, but the book never really went away, and swimming became popular everywhere.

The revival

Kate Rew founded the Outdoor Swimming Society in 2006 and published 📖 Wild Swim soon afterwards. The society began mapping swimming spots around Britain and brought together people who preferred rivers, lakes, and the sea to chlorinated pools.

Then came COVID.

Swimming pools closed. People were stuck at home and getting outside suddenly became much more important. Groups of outdoor swimmers grew quickly.

The Bluetits Chill Swimmers had started even earlier. In 2014, Sian Richardson began swimming regularly off the Pembrokeshire coast and other people started joining her. The group grew.

After the pandemic, the numbers exploded. The Bluetits now have more than 120,000 members across around 200 groups worldwide.

Other figures echo the same story. Sport England surveys show that regular swimming in lakes, rivers and the sea more than doubled between 2016 and 2024, from around 266,000 adults to 543,000.

More than four million adults now swim outdoors occasionally. Women also make up a growing share of those swimmers.

The reasons aren’t all that different from the reasons people gave hundreds of years ago. They want to feel better, get outside, do something difficult and then feel good about having done it.

They want company and sometimes, just like swimming.

If the cold water calls

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

One part of this history is worth taking seriously.

Cold water is cold water.

The fact that people have been jumping into it for hundreds of years doesn’t make it harmless. If you’re new to open water swimming, going with a group is a much better idea than wandering down to a deserted beach alone. Don’t try to be a hero.

Get in slowly. Let your breathing settle. Don’t swim farther than you can comfortably. A 🛍️ floatie helps with visibility and gives you something to hold onto if you need a rest. 🛍️ Wetsuits help, especially in winter, and if you are not into the cold-plunge vibe. And take warm clothes for after.

Your body can continue cooling after you’ve climbed out of the water. Swimmers call this afterdrop. Having dry clothes and a 🛍️ hot drink waiting on the beach is a good idea.

The Georgian Dippers understood something that modern swimmers have rediscovered. You don’t have to throw yourself into the cold all at once.

Take it slowly.

There is no prize, and no one is watching.

The Dippers are back

What I like about this particular piece of British history is that nobody ever seems to have quite finished with cold water. We drink it, bathe in it, build pools to avoid the waves, and then complain when the pools close. We swim through seasons. We write books about swimming in muddy rivers and flooded quarries, join clubs, buy neoprene 🛍️ gloves, and stand shivering on beaches while telling ourselves we’re enjoying ourselves. Then we go home and do it again.

The Dippers have gone, the bathing machines have mostly become beach huts, and the lidos have come and gone.

But the strange British habit of looking at a freezing stretch of water and thinking,

“Yes, I’ll get in there,” seems to be a habit that’s, well, very British.

CJ Lindy