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  Sick or unhappy people used to come in their thousands to Malvern and its springs seeking a cure. Tennyson came, after a nervous breakdown, and said he was ‘half cured, half destroyed’ by the place. Florence Nightingale stayed in August 1897, and Charles Darwin arrived depressed and unable to write, but was so convinced by the effects of his treatment that he returned three more times. Visitors to the spa walked all round the Malvern Hills sampling water at the springs. It was famous for its healing powers, but low in minerals, so another form of water cure was also developed here. In 1842, two doctors, Wilson and Gully, introduced hydrotherapy to Malvern. Their methods were based on the work of the son of a peasant farmer in a remote corner of Austrian Silesia: Vincent Priessnitz.

  Hydrotherapy goes back to classical times, but it was Priessnitz who had revived it and made it popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. He founded the first water cure establishment at the family farmhouse in Grafenberg, 600 feet up in the mountains, 160 miles north of Prague. Like Malvern, the village is surrounded by springs low in mineral salts, and offers strenuous hill walking as additional stimulation. Priessnitz had been run over by a cart when he was eighteen and suffered a great many broken bones. He was treated in a way that was locally traditional: strips of wet linen were wrapped about his broken body, and continually reapplied, soaked in cold springwater. Within a fortnight, so the story goes, Priessnitz was up and walking again, and he was back at work within a year.

  Apart from the difficulty of the journey itself to Grafenberg, close to the Polish border, patients at Priessnitz’s new establishment were subjected to spartan bedrooms whose windows were kept wide open to the winter night. You were woken at four o’clock in the morning and wrapped from neck to toe in wet linen. Thus mummified, you were left to sweat for an hour or so, then introduced to a thirty-foot cold bath, with water at forty-three to fifty degrees, for two or three minutes. By six o’clock, you were out walking in the forest, returning to a breakfast of brown bread and strawberries, followed by a rest. You were roused later for an uphill walk some way into the forest to the open-air douche. This was a natural mountain stream diverted into a pipe supported on a wooden gantry, spouting a waterfall from a height of twenty feet. You stood underneath, and the icy pummelling it gave you was a kind of cold-water massage. On the walk back, you would drink water at the springs. Priessnitz liked his patients to drink twenty or thirty glasses a day. The rest of the morning was your own to while away with a spot of wood-cutting in your bedroom, or snow-clearing. Then, shortly before lunch, you would spend a quarter of an hour sitting in a shallow, cold bath. Lunch was cabbage, gherkins and springwater, then a rest, followed by a four o’clock douche in the woods, a seven o’clock cold bath, supper of bread, butter and milk, and bed at half-past nine. On top of all this, there was a hefty bill to pay on your release, but Priessnitz claimed to be able to cure gout pains within a day. The sanatorium, known as ‘the Water University’, still exists at Grafenberg, with a statue representing Priessnitz and the spirit of cold water outside. In 1997, one of the patients attempted to blow it up.

  The account of the Grafenberg daily regime comes from a Captain Richard Claridge, who stayed there in 1841, having spent two months in Florence unable to move with some kind of arthritic ailment. During his three-month stay, he drank 1,500 tumblers of springwater, walked 1,000 miles, and went away a new man. That year, more than 1,500 patients came to Grafenberg, and the year after Drs Wilson and Gully brought their own version of this treatment to Malvern, with equal success. Darwin was so impressed, he had his own cold water douche bath built at home, and immersed himself in cold water every day. George Bernard Shaw and Benjamin Britten also took daily cold baths throughout their lives.

  The effects of cold water on the body have recently been re-examined by Dr Murray Epstein in clinical trials at the University of Miami School of Medicine as part of the NASA research programme, and by Dr Vijay Kakkar, Director of the Thrombosis Research Institute for the British Heart Foundation. The fact that some of us live in the Sahara and some in Siberia suggests that human beings have a great capacity for adapting to cold climates as well as hot. The temperature of your body is regulated in the brain by the hypothalamus. When you put your foot in cold water, the variation in temperature is transmitted via the cold sensors in your skin. There are more cold sensors in your feet than anywhere else, which is probably why people instinctively tend to use them to test the water before bathing. Thus stimulated, the hypothalamus reacts by causing the constriction of certain blood vessels to divert the blood flow away from skin, fat and muscle to the internal organs to conserve heat. It also sends hormones to the pituitary gland, which in turn controls the activity of the thyroid gland, pancreas, kidneys, testes or ovaries. When you immerse yourself completely in cold water, your hypothalamus sends out signals all over your body to modify its metabolism in preparation for dealing with an emergency, which would, primitively speaking, be flight or fight.

  In the clinical experiment on ‘cold pre-adapted humans’, volunteers began a twelve-week course of daily cold baths, graduating from five to twenty minutes at a time. In one trial, they acclimatised themselves by beginning in bathwater at, say, seventy-five degrees and reducing the temperature day by day to sixty degrees, which was considered adequately cold for the scientific observation. During the twelve weeks, cardio-graphs were taken, and blood pressure measured. Blood quality was also assessed. The findings were that in every case blood pressure and cholesterol decreased. People lost weight, reducing both fat and muscle, and the researchers were surprised to discover that whereas it had been thought that cold water must increase the predisposition of the blood to clot, the opposite was the case. The viscosity of the blood plasma was reduced, and there was an increase in other anticoagulants. Perhaps most interesting of all, there was an increase in the numbers of lymphocytes and white cells in the blood after leaving the water. This would increase the strength of the immune system. An increase in the production of thyroxine helped increase the oxygen capacity of the blood, and there was a beneficial increase in the thickness of heart muscle, together with a lowering of the pulse rate. Cold water, it was found, also dramatically stimulates the production of plasmin, a powerful enzyme which dissolves blood clots before they can build up to cause heart-attacks or strokes. As a further bonus, it was discovered to enhance the production of testosterone in men, and oestrogen and progesterone in women, improving fertility and stimulating the libido.

  Such results may lend some credence to the claims made for cold bathing by certain English public schools, along the lines of ‘mens sana, in corpore sano’, although not the supposed bromide effect on the libido. It is ironic to consider that all those cold showers, at school or in the army, were actually heightening desire and increasing fertility amongst the nation’s youth.

  The fashion for hydrotherapy spread all across Europe, and by the 1850s the American Water Cure Journal had over 180,000 subscribers. In the same year as the two doctors arrived in Malvern, two more grand, elaborate hydrotherapy spas were built by entrepreneurs in Ilkley and Matlock. This was big business. Six years earlier, the St Andrews Brine Baths had been opened in a magnificent half-timbered barn of a building twelve miles from Malvern in Droitwich. A great many of the patients were referred by their doctors, and were actually suffering from depression (as in the cases of Darwin and Tennyson). After the Asylums Acts of 1828 and 1845, people could no longer enter asylums for voluntary psychiatric treatment without being certified, so they turned to the spas, and water cures.

  In the old Malvern winter gardens, I found a disused drinking fountain with four bronze water sprites seated disconsolately around its dry marble basin. The council had demolished an elaborate Victorian memorial fountain to Dr Wilson, so it was a pretty good bet that the sprites had long since abandoned the town and its phantom pools, unwilling to be bottled by Schweppes. The following afternoon I decided to follow George Bernard Shaw’s example and drive over to Droitwich
for a warm salt dip.

  Droitwich is next door to Bromsgrove and the well-to-do suburbs of Birmingham, and I passed the gothic spires of the splendid Impney Hotel, where Mr and Mrs Shaw once stayed, on the way in. The Brine Baths are in the centre of town in a new building next to the private hospital. The original St Andrew’s Brine Baths next door, with their magnificent mock-Tudor entrance, have been turned into the Tourist Information Centre. The town has the prosperous air of an ex-spa; Georgian and mock-Tudor houses, and the half-timbered Worcestershire Brine Baths Hotel, suggest former glories. The main street was clearly once grander than it now is and probably had one of the original Sainsbury’s grocery shops, with proper marble counters and tiled walls, butchers in ties with aprons and grey Brylcreemed hair, and no plastic pork-pie hats.

  There is still something of that atmosphere when you go into the Brine Baths. Friendly, efficient women in crisp white aprons welcome you and there is an endless supply of generous white bath towels and gowns. Having slipped one on over my trunks, I entered the warm and slightly theatrical surroundings of the baths. Here I was met by Suzannah, one of the white-clad assistants, who offered me a table at the poolside and a cup of tea. Under the bright lights, it could have been a film set. Suzannah explained that to get the best from the brine bath I should stay in for at least forty minutes. Apart from the physiological benefits to the joints and spine through the total weightlessness you experience, immersion in the brine also lowers your blood pressure, and the effects last several days. You certainly do feel wonderful afterwards.

  The brine bath is about forty feet by twenty, and raised three feet off the floor, so you make a regal entrance up some steps, then along a bridge, then down into the pool. When I entered the amazingly dense water, I had to plant my feet into it really hard to stop them popping straight out again, like plastic ducks. They still keep it at the same temperature they always have since the spa began: ninety-two degrees fahrenheit. The pool is from three to six feet deep, and it is impossible to sink. Spending forty minutes in this was going to be no problem at all. When I floated on my back and stretched out my arms, I could lift my hands right up off the water. When I floated upright, my plimsoll line was across my chest, level with my armpits. I found I could propel myself around the pool with my head and shoulders clean out of the water, like Neptune. You can lean your head back in the buoyant salt and bob about like an astronaut, in an entirely weightless state. Your legs tend to pop above the surface, and your feet stick up absurdly. If you could walk on water, this would be the stuff to do it on.

  The salt finds its way straight to even the tiniest abrasions, as I found out. I had a two-day-old bee sting on my thigh, and it began to itch deliciously. This was definitely bathing, not swimming. All my attempts at breaststroke ended in embarrassing capsizes. You tend to paddle yourself round the pool like a human lilo, eavesdropping on the small talk. There are jugs of fresh water and glasses at the poolside, in case you get salt-water in your eye or on your face. You have to be careful not to splash. Diving, I imagine, would be out of the question. You might break a bone.

  In the early morning, before the doors open to the public at ten o’clock, patients from the private hospital next door use the baths to work with physiotherapists. Many will be recovering from operations on their backs or knees, and the hospital is popular with BUPA because of the accelerated rate of recovery from the use of the baths. Amazingly, the original NHS hospital had a hydrotherapy pool, but didn’t use the brine, so its patients had to use rubber rings to keep themselves afloat instead. The salt-water does useful things to the crystals that form in arthritic joints, so there are a lot of regulars who come in twice a week, or even more, and experience genuine benefits. But at least as many people come here for the pure pleasure of it. I met a mother and daughter taking the afternoon off together, and you can quite happily spend all day in here if you like, reading the papers, drinking coffee, popping in and out of the sauna, shower or baths. All the other bathers were little groups of women in their sixties enjoying a good gossip and looking thoroughly at home.

  The salt is entirely natural; indeed the original source of Droitwich’s prosperity was from mining it, and much of the original investment in the spa came from John Corbett, the mine owner. The spa water is pumped up from a well halfway along the high street, and these days it is purified. But in the old pool, with its fine wooden beamed ceiling, teak-walled baths and corrugated iron walls, the water was its natural murky brown; ‘the colour of the canal’, according to Sylvia, the receptionist, who bathed in it before it closed in 1972. The water was kept at ninety-two degrees by steam from a coal boiler. Bathers were segregated, and allowed twenty minutes in the pool, then wrapped all over in hot towels like papooses and sat in a cubicle for twenty minutes.

  German and Japanese tourists are puzzled when they visit our former spa towns, Bath, Leamington or Cheltenham. There are about 1,000 spas in Europe, and 320 in Germany alone, where 40 per cent of all hotel ‘bed-nights’ are sold in spas. In the nineteenth century there were some 200 spas in Britain, and even in 1946 there were 10. Now there are none, except for the limited medical use of Droitwich and Buxton. So it would be more truthful to say that on the following morning I woke up in plain Cheltenham, not Cheltenham Spa.

  I began the day with about the nearest thing to a spa experience still available in the town, apart from a glass of San Pellegrino in a café; an early dip at the classic Sandford Lido, opened in 1935 when open-air swimming was at its height. Its fountain, and the white colonnaded symmetry of its pavilion, were reflected in the still blue water as I filed into the pool with several early-morning season ticket holders. I had the satisfying experience of being first in, diving into the perfect smoothness and swimming a whole length alone.

  As I swam, I thought of a story my Norfolk friend Oliver Bernard told me. One warm afternoon in a school, he set a class to write the seventeen syllables of a haiku, and noticed one boy still chewing his pencil, unable to begin. He said he was ‘no good at writing’. Oliver asked him what he liked, and he said ‘swimming’. Then he wrote this:

  Water calm and clear

  I dive in, disturbing it.

  Bubbles rise and break.

  The proceedings in the Cheltenham pool were regulated by the superintendent’s white Jack Russell terrier whose single ginger spot gave him the air of a clown. However, he made it immediately clear that he was a deeply serious dog, and would take no nonsense from any of us swimmers. A plaque on the wall celebrated the pool’s first sixty years, and named the guest of honour at the Diamond Anniversary celebrations in 1995 as Mr Raymond Green, who found his place in history by being the very first swimmer to buy an admission ticket here. There was also an interesting chart recording the number of swimmers each year. They had 76,816 swimmers in 1988, but 201,000 people bathed here in the hot summer of 1959.

  Before the arrival of the spa boom, the entire population of Cheltenham in 1800 was hardly more than 3,000. By 1821 the town had a theatre, assembly rooms, a busy main street, and four times the population. It was in hot competition with Leamington, another drinking spa, which offered similar attractions and had grown from being a small village in the 1780s. Bath was the third largest town in England in 1810, with a population of nearly 40,000, and had three coffee houses to Cheltenham’s two (one for ladies, one for gentlemen). The middle classes were becoming residents rather than visitors. ‘Watering places’, as William Cobbett called them, were run in a highly enterprising spirit by Improvement Commissions – and what he called ‘silently laughing quacks’. Cheltenham was notably competitive. It engaged a Master of Ceremonies, who arranged and publicised the balls and a hyperactive social scene. There were clubs, subscription libraries, a social register, hotels, street lighting, schools like the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, new churches and well-to-do doctors. The spa was continually unveiling new attractions like the ‘Montpelier Pump Room’, the ‘Imperial Sulphurious Ladies’ Marble Font’, and, in 1818, the Chel
tenham Races. Cobbett preferred to avoid spas on his rural rides. To him, they were the resorts of ‘all that is knavish and all that is foolish and all that is base’. ‘When I enter a place like this,’ he said of Cheltenham, ‘I always feel disposed to squeeze up my nose with my fingers.’

  Still questing for the authentic naiads of the spa, I ventured over to Bath for the afternoon. During my map-swimming sessions in the University Library at Cambridge, I had originally intended beginning my journey in the Roman Baths themselves. To have begun in the national capital of bathing seemed logical at the time. Bath has been the Mecca of bathers since at least the first century. But when I telephoned to enquire about swimming in the ancient baths, I was told it was out of the question. The spring was apparently contaminated with a bacterium that enjoyed sulphur, and no one was allowed near the water. It seemed a fitting fate for the city Alexander Pope called ‘a sulphurous pit’, and Cobbett regarded as a ‘wen’. As at Malvern, there was only an indoor leisure pool, and even that had been shut all through the previous summer because the council had privatised it, and the new swimming pool company had promptly gone bankrupt. Bathonians, faced with the sudden liquidisation of their public baths, had been forced to go to Bristol or Chippenham, unless they swam in the river pool at Claverton at the confluence of the Avon and the Frome, or even in the middle of the city beside the Pulteney Bridge. Members of the university, meanwhile, could use their new fifty-metre Olympic pool, but the pattern of dereliction followed by renewal of the city’s bathing facilities seems to be historical, going back at least as far as the Romans, and, with the help of the National Lottery and the Millennium Commission, the city is poised to relaunch itself as a modern spa.