Before the 20th century, those who could shunned the sun. The fashion was for delicately pale, nearly translucent skin; anything darker was decidedly déclassé. Only the poor were tanned. A bronzed skin betokened lives spent toiling under the elements. Their betters covered their bodies, pulled the curtains and hid behind parasols and wide-brimmed hats. Like modern-day Goths, they even used cosmetics to make their skin look or remain lighter.

By the mid-1920s this had changed. By then the poor had largely forsaken the fields for sunless factories and mines, allowing the genteel to do a complete volte-face. The great outdoors called and, if you were out in the sun, you were going to get tanned. But that was OK. Legend gives the credit for this to Coco Chanel, telling how she accidentally got tanned on a yacht and started a craze overnight.

Coco may have turned tanned skin into a fashion statement, but sunbathing and tanning had been practised and talked about for a good 30 years before that - just not in a form that was appropriate for the pages of Vogue, nor quite how we would recognise it today. The only vestige of this prehistory survives in the phrase “a healthy tan”, which is now considered to be a contradiction in terms. But 100 years ago sunbathing and tanning were only indulged in for health reasons, to cure or prevent diseases.

Dr Sol and the first sun clinic

In 1903 Dr Auguste Rollier opened the world's first dedicated sun clinic, at Leysin, high in the Swiss Alps. He was convinced that the pure air and bright sunlight could cure diseases, most particularly forms of external (that is, nonpulmonary) tuberculosis, which were usually treated, often unsuccessfully, with surgery.

His book Heliotherapy offers photographic evidence that dramatically proves his point. Pale, pigeon-chested specimens with horrific skin lesions are transformed by a few months of surgical sunning. On arrival, Rollier's patients didn't just strip off and dive in like so many sun-starved Brits on the first day abroad. “During the first few days, rest in bed indoors is imperative and only gradually is the patient allowed to get accustomed to the open air through judicious use of fan-lights, windows and doors.” This gradual process of acclimatisation takes about two weeks and only then were his patients allowed to dip their toes into the “sun baths”. The process was rarefied into a therapeutic mystery of extraordinary complexity.

A “healthy” tan meant exactly that: proof that the rays had worked their curative magic. Health appeared to radiate from these rejuvenated bodies, and after a while these rays extended their influence beyond the sanatorium. A new ideal rose with the dawn of the 20th century. A new age of bronze had arrived.

Rollier was not alone in espousing the therapeutic or hygienic properties of sunlight. As the new advocates often pointed out, the benefits of sunlight and air had been a central part of Hippocrates' theories (4th to 5th century BC), but had to be rediscovered in the 19th century, when nature worship and industrial pollution encouraged a re-examination of these resources. In 1903, the Danish physician Niels Ryburg Finsen was awarded the Nobel prize for his use of artificial sunlight to cure lupus vulgaris (tuberculosis of the skin). And John Harvey Kellogg (of breakfast cereal and Road to Wellville fame) claims to have employed sun baths “under medical supervision” at his famous Battle Creek Sanitarium as early as 1876. According to Kellogg, sun baths work “wonders” for gout, rheumatism and certain forms of tuberculosis, and can effect cures on patients with eczema in “cases which seemed quite hopeless”.

Beside the seaside

Sunbathing started to emerge as a health fad and leisure pursuit in Britain in the mid-1920s. A run of hot summers must have played its part in the new solar awareness. If nothing else, the summers of 1922, 1928, 1929 and 1930 ensured that people acquired new habits, experimented with new freedoms and ultimately got a taste for it. The fashionable were, of course, enthusiastic early adopters. If medicine claimed it did you good, the smart set decided you looked good, too. As Britain sweltered in the summer of 1928, a Daily Mail society piece of July 16 remarked how a crowd including royalty, actresses and aristocrats had turned Bray-on-Thames into “an amazing reproduction of Deauville”.

This popular fixation with the seaside as the exclusive site for sunbathing caused concern among its more evangelical exponents. In the Evening Standard of July 27, 1928, Philip Page claimed that because Britain is an island “we tend to associate bathing with salt water and don't really go elsewhere”, and then only on the annual holiday. “Thus for 14 days only are English bodies exposed to the rays of the sun. Probably for less, for with the English climate it is likely that some or even all of those days are sunless.”

Page pointed out that the “sun bath” after the dip was as important as the swim itself, and contrasted the cautious Brits with the fervent Germans. There the “sun bath is not just an incidental episode in a short summer vacation”. They knew how to make the most of the sun, even using their lunch hours to catch some rays. In Britain, where “we do not see enough of the sun...We do not make enough of the sun when we do see him”.

This was cause for concern. From the perspective of some 80 years this is a revelation. If the Germans started the trend, the British have learnt to catch up, and are now neck-and-neck, towel-to-towel the Med over.

We display a near-demented devotion to sunshine and an heroic determination to make the most of it every time it appears. “Phew, what a scorcher!” declares the tabloid, and devotes at least a spread to recording a nation determined not to waste a drop. But, outside nudist and fashionable circles, it looks as though this is an attitude we had to learn, and were actively encouraged to adopt. Health experts displayed an extraordinary faith in the virtues of sunshine and made it a popular propagandist cause.

They looked enviously and then nervously at German pre-eminence in sport, health and sun-worship, and called on us to emulate them.

The sunbathing society

The nudists were the first modern sun-worshippers, the first to embrace sunshine out of choice rather than medical necessity. For a long time “sunbather” was a euphemism for nudist. One of the first British societies for social nudity was called the Sun Bathing Society, and there was also a British Sunbathing Association and a National Sun and Air Society.

Most of the private grounds dedicated to clothes-free living were called “sun clubs”, clearly indicating the ideal around which their activities revolved; 1931 was an important year for the movement, with a number of these clubs opening in the South East. That was the plan. But, as so often happens in the UK, the weather had other ideas. That year turned out to be a particularly abysmal summer and, as a visitor to one of the “sun” clubs recorded: “Members of this colony sat in vain through all of June and most of July waiting for the sun to shine. They were rewarded with heavy mists, fogs and torrents of rain, which made only the briefest exercise possible ...”

But we Brits are a plucky lot and hope must spring eternal in the nudist breast. It is easy to snigger at the stodgy earnestness of these early sun-worshippers, but by fighting for their own freedoms they made possible a lot that we take for granted in our relationship with the sun. Their tireless propaganda for clothes-free sun exposure helped to make bathing machines and woollen one-pieces a thing of the past.

In fact, before the 1930s, there was no real distinction between “sunbathing” and “nudism”. Given what constituted acceptable and even “legal” beachwear at the time, complete nudity and what is nowadays standard beachwear might just as well have been one and the same thing. For many it was. A newspaper from May 1925 reports how Bournemouth was strenuously objecting to sunbathing on its beach. It pointed out how beach attendants had powers to prevent anyone sitting on the beach in their bathing costumes. Bathers must “walk straight into the sea and straight back to their bathing tents”. The Twenties were not yet Roaring down in Bournemouth, evidently.

© Robert Mighall 2008. Extracted from Sunshine: One Man's Search for Happiness (John Murray, £16.99), which is published on May 1 and is available from Times BooksFirst for £15.29, p&p free: 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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