Crewe
- Crewe Swimming Baths – An Architectural and Social History
- Crewe Swimming Pool – Modern Images
- The New Swimming Baths at Crewe 1938
Mill Street, Crewe
The Victorian Turkish Baths web site owned by Malcolm Shifrin states ‘It is not known who the three people standing outside the baths are, but they do not look like casual bystanders. The most likely possibility is that William Gawthorne, long-time Manager of the baths, is in the middle, with his female and male attendants on either side. Although male and female bathers used the Turkish baths at different times, there are separate entrances for men (on the right) and women (on the left). There was also an outdoor swimming pool.’
Additional material can be found at Malcolm Shifrin’s site www.turkishbaths.org in particular the façade of the Public Baths in Mill Street Crewe and Crewe Public Baths
The First Crewe Baths 1845
A record of the first Crewe baths is provided in The Social and Economic Development of Crewe 1780 – 1923 W. H. Chaloner (1950 p.53 – 54) Augustus M. Kelley Publishers Manchester University Press.
The first Crewe public baths, built in 1845, were under the care of a sub-committee of the council of the Mechanics’ Institution until 1862. They consisted of “eight common baths, with hot, cold and shower to each, and one vapour bath.” Sir F. B. Head has left us an interesting and amusing description of them as they appeared on his visit in 1848. The charge for a bath was only 11/2d., but the council of the Institution complained in 1850 and 1851 that they “continued deficient of that support expected from a population 5,000 in Crewe.” Doubtless many of the artisans possessed private tin baths and wooden tubs which they used in preference, especially when water began to be laid on by tap.
By 1857 the works had expanded until the baths were nearly in the centre of them and “almost inaccessible to the public.” The company accordingly built a second suite of public baths in Mill Street. These were opened in 1866 and contained a swimming-pool. From 1899 onwards it became apparent that they were quite inadequate for a town of over 40,000 inhabitants. In that year Crewe Town Council was told, in reply to a request that they should be enlarged, that the directors “thought the time had arrived when the Corporation should themselves provide the necessary bath accommodation.” The question continued to be considered half-heartedly until 1919, when C. J. Bowen Cooke, Chief Mechanical Engineer, London and North Western Railway, 1909-20, and Mayor of Crewe, 1918-193 brought forward a scheme for the erection of a combined social centre and public baths by the company as Crewe’s War Memorial. Owing to post-war economic conditions, and their effect on the railways, this scheme was abandoned.
Meanwhile, the old baths continued to be used until March 31, 1936, and from that time until November 6, 1937, when the Corporation’s public baths in Flag Lane were opened, Crewe presented the unusual spectacle of a modern community containing nearly 50,000 souls, but without public baths within its boundaries. Many Crewe people, even before 1914, used the baths in Nantwich, Winsford and the Potteries.
