HOW BABS’ POPPING BIKINI TOP HELPED TURN NUDISM INTO ANCIENT HISTORY
Nudism In A Cold Climate
Annebella Pollen
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★★★★☆
Isuppose it all started with Adam and Eve, happy to walk around the Garden of Eden with nothing on. But then they ate from the tree of knowledge, realised their own nakedness and were overcome with shame. Wisely, Annebella Pollen starts her fascinating history of nudism many thousands of years later, with the creation of the first British nudist camp in a private garden in Essex, back in 1924.
These pioneering nudists were idealistic types, dedicated to improving their minds and bodies with a bracing mixture of vegetarianism, yoga, push-ups, left-wing politics and handicrafts. Turning their backs on the world beyond, they preferred to address each other with unlikely pseudonyms like Flang and Thwang, which conjure up saucy visions of naked trampolining in the mind of the distracted reader.
Their preferred reading was Health And Efficiency, then a worthy periodical that earnestly described itself as ‘The National Magazine of Health, Physical Culture, Sociology, Hygiene, Natural Healing, Reformed Diet’.
Before long, other nudist clubs and associations had sprung up. Needless to say, their neighbours greeted most of them with alarm. For instance, the upstanding members of the Sun Ray Club in London were accused of being sex maniacs. ‘Even cannibals wear loincloths,’ screamed the neighbourhood hecklers.
They, in turn, protested that sex was the last thing on their minds. The nudist magazine, Gymnos (‘For Nudists who Think’) argued sternly that ‘nudism must be practised under proper conditions and under the guidance of men and women whose character is beyond reproach’.
In his book Nudism In England, the Rev Clarence Norwood, veteran stalwart of many a German nudist colony, argued not only that nakedness was next to Godliness – ‘Nudist truth… is His truth’ – but also that the bathing costume was ‘a satanic invention’ which, by concealing key parts of the human
body, made them all the more titillating.
Small wonder that a movement formed by the unconventional should soon be riddled with dissent. They may have dropped their trousers, but they held tight to their opinions. Breakaway groups ensured that quibbling overtook pingpong and barbecuing as their preferred diversion. In the topsy-turvy world of nudism, the prigs were those who abominated any form of clothing. One contributor to Sun Bathing Review argued, for instance, that jewellery should be outlawed, writing: ‘Women were not made by God to stick jewels on their necks or bosoms.’
The extremists looked forward to a time when workers in offices and factories would be naked, and even called for a nationwide ban on trousers. And what of the cold? As if to prove their hardiness, nudists loved to scythe and chop and dig, regardless of mud, chills and splinters. In a later age, they might have earned an award, if only they had somewhere to pin it. This movement founded on purity soon became a magnet for the impure. From the start, many more men than women had been attracted by the idea of the nudist camp, and quite a few of them turned out to be peeping toms. To counter this, some clubs stipulated that men must be accompanied by women or children; others offered cheaper membership for women. Cameras were banned. Conventional nudists feared that cranks and fanatics were
‘Looked forward to a time all workers would be naked, even calling for a ban on trousers’
taking over their movement. George C Foster, author of articles such as Nudism Is Not A Cult, argued that nudism needed stuffier types, ‘people with jobs in the City and a proper pride in “keeping up appearances”’. He wanted nudism to become more mainstream, like golf or tennis. The nudist ‘should be prepared to talk about nudism in railway carriages, in the office, and at his club’.
But, despite such evangelism, nudism never really entered into the mainstream. At its height, in the late 1930s, there were still only 40,000 registered nudists in Britain. Far more successful were the nudist magazines, which started with high intentions, but soon attracted fully clothed readers who wanted to gawp at naked bodies for all the wrong reasons. Until the 1960s, strict laws prohibited pornography, but by marketing their wares as healthy, outdoorsy magazines for nudists, pornographers realised they could sneak through the back door. Many more people wanted to look at pictures of young ladies in the nude than wanted to be nudists themselves. By the end of the 1940s, the top nudist magazine was selling 100,000 copies per issue, yet Britain’s 35 nudist camps had a combined membership of just 3,000.
By the 1950s, Health And Efficiency magazine had progressed into an uneasy mixture of high-minded articles on replanting rhododendrons and eye-popping photographs of buxom beauties polishing cars or pushing wheelbarrows, to appear industrious.
Annebella Pollen has found an article in one issue of the magazine, from 1955, in which the writer huffs that ‘naturists are clean-minded people. In a world of smutty jokes, sordid themes for novels, plays and music-hall acts, and every kind of suggestive exploitation of sex, a sun club stands as a kind of oasis’.
All very well, but the rest of the magazine is largely filled with provocative photographs of naked young ladies, many taken by the photographer who later launched the lewd magazines Knave and Fiesta. Nudism
In A Cold Climate exhibits something of the same tension. On the one hand, it is an erudite, crisply written and intelligent survey of nudism in 20th Century Britain, and on the other it is a feast of black-and-white shots of naked beauties, drawn from the archives of all these questionable magazines. As the pages and the decades roll on, up pop one or two photos of near-naked men, pictured amid bracken, brandishing spears or flexing their muscles. These come from ‘body-building’ magazines, which attracted a predominantly gay readership.
One of the models pictured is, it turns out, the young Sean Connery, posing in Vigour
magazine, wearing skimpy Y-fronts, gazing soulfully at the floor and clenching his fists to emphasise his muscles. The nudist magazines grew more and more overtly sexual, while the nudist camps that had inspired them remained prim and puritanical. In the late 1950s, the average age of active nudists in Britain was 40. Members could be ousted from nudist clubs for divorcing or swearing or taking photographs. Naked dancing was not permitted, as were piggybacks in swimming pools. Meanwhile, the outside world was growing steadily more and more liberated. Saucy film-makers in search of nudity had begun to realise that they could bypass the censors by pretending that they were making documentaries about nudist camps.
But the times were changing. By the late 1960s, hippies were stripping off in public without feeling obliged to take out memberships of nudist clubs. The film Carry On Camping, with its famous scene of Barbara Windsor’s bikini-top popping off during a keep-fit class, became the highest-grossing film of 1969. That same year, Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun printed its first-ever Page Three Girl. The world had gone brassy, and organised nudism, for all its hopes and high ideals, its rules and regulations, had grown as old-fashioned as a penny-farthing.