John Davis

Swimming into Retirement
with John Davis

This is an abridged article. The full article is published in Watermarks, Volume 1, Number 5, dated June 2000, available from our Order page.

In my late fifties I began to realise that I was rapidly approaching retirement age and was grossly unfit. At that time I was a heavy smoker, enjoyed a pint ot two with my friends, and the most exercise I did was my weekly roung of golf. Something had to be done!

An advert in the Birmingham Evening Mail attracted my attention. The council was promoting early bird swimming at a number of local swimming pools. From 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. the pools would be for adult swimmers only - with something about lane swimming, which I didn't understand. It must have been at least 20 years since I had been in a swimming bath as we called them. I didn't even know where the baths were, not originating from Birmingham. Anyway, I decided to give it a go, and found that there was a pool called Monument Road on my way to work . . .

My first morning there was to me a revelation. I found some swimmers wearing funny goggles. I had never seen them before and thought they were posers! I used to swim in my younger days so off I went, remembering what I had been taught but forgetting that you needed energy to swim: four lengths and I was exhausted. But just being in the water was enjoyable and I went back for more, the next day, and the next, remembering more and more how I used to enjoy swimming in my younger days.

I was born in 1924 and was taught to swim by my father when I was about 7 years of age. On a Sunday morning we would leave home at about 6 a.m. and walk 3 miles to the baths, do our swimming and then walk back in time for church. By the time I was 12 and going to Hanley High School I was a fairly competent swimmer. From a swimming point of view I was lucky going to Hanley High School because we had a weekly swimming session at Hanley Baths where the Baths Superintendent was a man named Wainwright whose son Norman was a British record holder in all freestyle events from I think 440 yards to a mile. He was of course my hero and we used to marvel at him training. A spin off for us was that his trainer Harry Koskie, who later became A.S.A. President, spared the time to give us some instruction.

After leaving school my swimming was all recreational with a spell of teaching my own son to swim in the early fifties and a few swimming galas arranged by the sports club at work.

And so to Monument Road where once again I was fortunate enough to swim in a session following the Birmingham Squad who trained there. There I was able to watch international swimmers like Nick Gillingham, Tim Jones, and Roland Lee doing their training and chatting to them in the changing room. As the weeks rolled by I increased my daily swim to 10 lengths, then 20 and settled for 40 lengths a day. On my 60th birthday I decided to do 60 lengths and that became the daily stint. By now I was one of a group of regulars and when they decided to enter the Swimathon (I think it was the first) I had to go along with them. So just before my 66th birthday there I was swimming 5000 metres in a respectable time to me of 1 hour 46 minutes.

I carried on with my daily freestyle swim until one day that well-known masters swimmer Pauline Cooke, who had the misfortune of having to train in the same lane as me, suggested I enter some masters competitions, explaining to me all the ins and outs. She persuaded me to join a club and there I was competing in my first ever swimming competition - the European Masters Championships at Coventry in September 1991 at 67 years of age. I entered the 400m and 800m freestyle finishing 8th and 4th on my debut and I was hooked. I also met my friend to this day Jim Masterson, the first of many friends I have made through Masters swimming.

This was an extract from the article by John Davis published in Watermarks, Volume 1, Number 5. Click as indicated for extracts from the interviews with Lesley Wilde and John Harrison.