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
