Caroline Roope dives into the rich history of beach huts and bathing machines
This year make up your mind to bring your beach house up to date, for a few shillings will work wonders,” recommended the Hawick News and Border Chroniclein the summer of 1934. “Cover the floor with attractive coloured matting and have a rubber mat to keep in front of the portable methylated spirit stove or cooking apparatus,” the writer suggested. “Then a couple of comfortable wicker chairs with gay cushions, and several deck chairs,
one table for meals and perhaps a small wooden chest for keeping eatables and odds and ends, and your hut is completely furnished.”
For our forebears, the iconic beach hut was synonymous with seaside fun. These humble little constructions, in their bright and breezy colours, have been part of the seaside landscape since the late 19th century. But their origins date back much further to when taking a dip was more about modesty and medicine than leisure and picnics on the sand.
The static structures that we recognise today owe their existence to their four-wheeled 18th-century forebears – the bathing machine. Sea bathing was often prescribed as a cure for various ailments. One Sussex doctor, Richard Russell, claimed in his book A Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea Water in Diseases of the Glands(1753, available in the Internet Archive at archive.org/details/dissertationconc00russ) that he had seen spectacular improvements in his patients’ health after they bathed in the sea at Brighton, including a farmer’s wife with colic who had “voided 300 stones”.
But the fashion for ‘sea cures’ posed a dilemma. Firstly, the patient needed to be mobile enough to walk to the water, and secondly, propriety had to be maintained in public.
An Ingenious Invention
A Quaker named Benjamin Beale proposed the ideal solution in 1753 – a horse-drawn box that the patient could board from a ‘bathing room’ at the top of the beach. Once inside the machine, the female patient could change into a loose smock, assisted by a guide or ‘dipper’, while males would remove all their clothes, since at this time men tended to bathe naked. Once the box was positioned in deep water, a sophisticated hood was unfurled into the sea using a system of lines operated by the driver, giving the occupant complete privacy while ‘dipping’. “Its structure is simple, but perfectly convenient,” wrote one customer in a contemporary document in the Wellcome
