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| 1989 | 2001 | |
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Half the changing huts have blown away |
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The queue was for this cafe |
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Jasper aged one |
Jasper aged 13 |
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If I were to haunt anywhere, it would be here |
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I received this email from Mike Ghirelli, who used to work there. Fascinating!
Gosh. Memories. Saw something by chance on the internet that you published about the Deer Leap Pool at Little Gaddesden. So it's going to be developed as a small housing estate, you say. I was manager of the Dear Leap for two years in 1965 - 1966 or thereabouts (during what would now be called my gap year between uni and school). The owner then was John Constantine who lived in Little Gaddesden. Made his money as a builder getting fat contracts in the 40s andf 50s building estates in the new town at Hemel. He purchased the pool in the late 50s I think, hoping it would be a moneyspinner. It wasn't. It had been built in the late 30s on the edge of the Ashridge estate - do you remember the old estate gatehouse lodge on the corner at Ringshall next door to the pool - looked like a bit of a castle? During the war, the Canadian army used the pool as an ammo store and so for five years it never had water in it. The result was that it cracked up, and always afterwards leaked like a sieve. There was no heating, so the only time people came to the place was when there was a long hot spell. Otherwise, the water was arctic. Local primary schools came during term time to use it for swimming lessons and the poor kids froze and shivered and turned blue trying to master the crawl or breaststroke. In hot weather, the water turned to a kind of bacterial soup brewed up from a combination of algae and body wastes leaked out by the crowds of obliviously happy swimmers from Hemel and Berko and Tring and Dunstable. Costantine used to get concerned about what he innocently termed the "orgasms" (ie organisms) in the water. We used to have to do a backwash on the filter system to clear out the accumulated gunge - the water was pumped out into the lower grounds at the back of the pool and emerged a thick evil grey-black smelly fluid. I did a backwash once that lasted so long it comletely drained the reservoir that the village drew its water from. For a day, Little Gaddesden was without water and I wasnot the most popular idividual in the locality. Several times I saw people having a vomit in the pool and once we fished out some suspiciously brown floaters....... There was a primitive system for storing clothes - the swimmer was given a long box with a loose lid - all made up of the sort of cardboard they used to make cheap suitcases - and these were stored in a large room with racks. No security - stuff often got nicked: I remember one bloke finding all his clothes got taken - he had to walk home to Berko or somewhere in his trunks. There were no lifeguards. There was simply a long bamboo cane lodged on hooks above the changing cubicles that we were supposed to poke out to a floundering drowning individual. Not surprisingly, a year or two after I relinquished my post of responsibility at the Dear Leap, I believe someone got drowned there. After that, they tightened up the surveillance a bit. Constantine must be dead by now. Presumably he sold the place, to whom I do not know; I believe it was still operating into the nineties. Needless to say, I have never used swimming pools since my days at the Deer Leap! You must have been a customer while I was manager. Unlikely you would recall the staff from so long ago - but perhaps you remember a young man in his twenties always wearing wellies', operating the box office turnstile or tipping carboys of chlorine solution into the shallow end or sluicing down the pool surround at the end of the day, and of course, chatting up all the local totty in their bikinis. God - it's a long time ago. Mike Ghirelli | ||