Kingstanding Baths

On 31 March 1938 Kingstanding got its swimming baths. They stood on Warren Farm Road, set well back behind a turfed forecourt, with a main pool 100 feet long and 35 feet wide, running from 3 feet 3 inches deep to 10 feet 2 inches, and a learners’ pool 36 feet by 18. The city’s Baths Department called them the second of its baths built for the new estates, equipped “similar in every respect” to Northfield’s. They were the last baths Birmingham opened before the Second World War.

For the next half-century, just about every child on the estate learned to swim there, or tried to.

A penny, a pass and George

It cost one penny on weekdays and threepence on Saturdays, Wes Howard remembered. The real prize was the free pass. To earn one you had to prove you could swim: a width, or a couple of lengths against the clock, and the test got harder every year. George Mellar, born in Danesbury Crescent in 1938, “always had a free pass and went swimming every day until I left school.” Harry Felton remembered that a pass bought a 20-minute session, and that if you hid in the toilets at changeover and George the attendant did not find you, you could sneak another. At ten he swam a mile and got a certificate: “Plunged in and swam one mile.”

Getting in meant the kiosk, then girls to the right and boys to the left, a cubicle, and remembering its number so the lady with the key could let you back in. Roy Cook remembered scrubbing his feet with a long-handled brush until they were red and then having them inspected. Chris Wood learned in the small pool with the attendant holding him up on a long pole with a loop round his waist.

Above the ten-foot deep end stood the diving boards. Wes Howard went off the top one, at 16 feet 3 inches, “just the once”. Clement Watts was sure it was the highest board in England. To a child, it was.

Oxo, cobs and chips

What people remember almost as clearly is what came after. Upstairs, a café overlooked the little pool, where a penny bought a hot Oxo; later generations had hot chocolate and a Wagon Wheel. Along the little parade next door was a fish and chip shop. Harry Felton’s favourite was its fish cake, a slice of fish between two slices of potato, battered and fried, for 4d. Others walked home with a halfpenny cob from the bakery, or a penny toffee lick from a house on the way.

Schools brought whole classes from all over: Cranbourne Road, Dulwich Road, Kingsland, Great Barr Juniors and Cardinal Wiseman all appear in the memories. Tony Woodward learned in 1974, “taught by the legendary Mrs George”, head of Warren Farm infants and juniors. Lesley Harper never learned at all. Mrs George gave her certificates anyway, marked “With aids”.

Dances over the water

The baths were more than a pool. In the 1940s, Charles Southam recalled, the big pool was boarded over for dance nights; Shirley Thain remembered one, spent trying to avoid the young man her mother had in mind for her. During the war, George Mellar and another George both said, the small pool was not used for swimming but as a medical or ambulance room.

Don Hallett’s father helped to build the baths. Don hated swimming and went only for “my penny oxo and a crusty cob”.

Where the water was

Nobody on Voices of Kingstanding could say exactly when the baths closed or came down; guesses run from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. David Mitchell placed them next to the ex-servicemen’s club, with “a space beside it which was the swimming baths”. George Mellar wrote in 2020 that he did not know why they knocked it down, and had never been to the new one. Kingstanding’s pool today is at the leisure centre on Dulwich Road.

Stand by the club on Warren Farm Road now and there is still a chip shop on the parade. The water has gone. But ask anyone over sixty about the free pass and the Oxo, and the baths come straight back.