Chlorine and spirits - a ramble around Spring Hill

As it looked as if a storm might be on the way this afternoon, and the normal Council pools are not good places to be when lightning is around, I took the kids to the Spring Hill Baths in Brisbane today.

I hadn't been there for nearly 30 years, I reckon.  Built in 1886 and (seemingly) not changed much since, it's a good little bit of history tucked away in the inner Brisbane suburb which I have always liked.  Here's a photo of the interior, with the changing booths lined around the perimeter.  You can't see the "women only this side" and "men must not loiter at the end of the pool" warning signs, but they are there:

That photo, incidentally, is courtesy of a rather distinctive looking fashion blog, presumably run by a Brisbane woman.  Not my cup of tea, but worth a quick look.

Now that I look at other, older photos, I see that it has changed quite a bit inside:

The photo is from 1910, and one suspects that life preservers were necessary at pools at the time due to women being pulled under by the weight of their wet bathing suits.

More about the history of the pool is found at the Queensland Heritage website, and I see it did have a very practical aspect:

Constructed for the Corporation of Brisbane in 1886 at a cost of £2,526, the Spring Hill Municipal Baths provided the city with its first inground public baths. They replaced in popularity the older floating baths in the Brisbane River, and provided an important hygiene/sanitation facility in Spring Hill....

On the evening of 9 December 1886 and amid great ceremony, the baths were opened by the Mayor of Brisbane, James Hipwood, who took the first plunge.

One of the principal reasons for establishing the Torrington (Arthur) Street bath was its location above the Spring Hollow (Water Street) drain, installed in 1884, the waste water from the baths providing a daily cleanse. River water from Petrie's Bight was pumped to a small reservoir at the top end of Albert Street, then gravity fed down Spring Hill to the Hollow, where it was stored in holding tanks (now boarded over) at the far end of the baths. Each evening the pool was drained and every morning the water was replenished in a process lasting several hours. This system of flushing the Spring Hill drain was employed for three-quarters of a century. Not until 1914 did the city council install a salt water supply scheme to which the baths were linked. As the Brisbane River grew more polluted, chemicals were added to the pool water, and finally a filtration system was installed in 1961.

Interestingly, when you look at the history of swimming pools at Wikipedia, it seems pools only really started being built in England around the late 1830's, with swimming clubs taking off about 30 years later.  Brisbane was relatively quick to get into the act.

The pool was also socially advanced: the Queensland Heritage article I linked to before notes that in 1927 it was one of the first pools in Australia to allow mixed bathing.

Given the age of the pool, it did get me thinking about when they might have started chlorinating it.  As you can see from the above extract about its history, the answer is not readily available; but then again, when did any pools start getting chlorinated?  The answer has not been so easy to find.

According to a brief article from America (which, incidentally, notes that the first American swimming pool was built in 1887 -  a year after the Spring Hill Baths opened):

....the first attempt to sterilize a pool in the United States using chlorine was at Brown University in 1910.  The 70,000-gallon Colgate Hoyt Pool was chlorinated by graduate student John Wymond Miller Bunker.

But it doesn't then go on to explain when it started being used more widely.  It does note, though, that:

Prior to the introduction of sterilization technologies most swimming pools were filtered to keep them somewhat clean and the water was changed frequently.

Given that the Spring Hill Baths were used as a daily iant flush of the Spring Hollow drain, this is obviously the way it was kept partially clean.

Oh, here we go:  I've found the full length article on the history of chlorination in pools that my earlier link only summarised:  it would appear that in the US, chlorination was introduced commercially in the 1920's, and by 1930, most high school pools used chlorine in one form or another.

So there's another small gap in my knowledge filled.

Anyway, after the swim and an ice cream, I took the kids down the road to the Spring Hill Spiritual Church.  Why would I do that?   Well, because (as mentioned at this very blog in 2006, but you probably weren't paying close attention), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited it in 1921.  I was hoping that the plaque recording this was on the outside of the Church, but it doesn't seem to be.  Oh well.

I can't find any photo of his visit either.  The best I can come up with of his trip to Brisbane is a photo of him visiting a Goodna bee farm.    The John Oxley Library blog entry on the visit notes that not only was Brisbane pretty fast at building a bathing pool, it had some surprisingly early enthusiasts for spiritualism too:

In closing Conan Doyle observed that he’d been told he could expect only “one person” at his Brisbane lectures.  In fact the city had a strong core of devotees and one of Conan Doyle’s special honours during his visit was to lay the foundation stone for the Brisbane Spiritualist Church. Already in the early 1880s a weekly magazine The Australian Spiritualist was being published in Brisbane and there were practitioners like the daughters of German-born musician Professor A. Seal who recorded musical scripts transmitted to them by their father from the grave.

This reminds me:  I think it was on a tour of the Noosa River many years ago, that I heard there was a historic house on it which was famous for its owners being heavily into spiritualism.

Oh.  It would appear to be on the island that Richard Branson built his mini resort.   Maybe it's haunted.

So, that's it for now.  I was going to mention my long time admiration of the Queensland Transport building at Spring Hill, but that will have to wait for another day.