Dundee Memories - The Shivery Bite and The Old Swimming Baths

I remember a few years back I had been to Lochee Swimming Pool with my son and he asked me what a shivery bite was. The man getting changed next to us started to giggle because he hadn't heard that phrase in years and I imagine it's not one that children use now. I was at Lochee Pool with my daughter the other week and she has certainly never used that phrase even though she did actually have a shivery bite when she came out!

What's a shivery bite? Well it was something you used to eat after going to the swimming baths (pool). It was supposed to calm the cold feeling coming out of the pool after you had showered which implies that it should be something hot but it didn't have to be hot it could be anything such as a pack of sweets.

When I was younger I my granddad used to take me to the "swimming baths". At that time it was the old baths roughly where the Olympia is now. I remember there were two polls - a normal unisex pool and a separate ladies pool. I can still remember the cartoon posters with rules in the pool such as "no petting". There were no back room lockers at the time, just wooden cubicles next to the pool and you took your chance leaving your clothes in a cubicle or at least you kept an eye on them.

I was telling my daughter this and asked if there were chutes. No chutes, just a rectangular pool which I think in the earlier years had hoops suspended from the ceiling that you jumped up and held onto with your arms but they were long gone by the time I learned to swim which must have been around the late 1960s.

One thing you could obtain was swimming certificates with your name on them in beautiful hand-written calligraphy. I don't now how my granddad knew this but all you needed to do was ask the pool assistant and he watched you while you swam, say 10 lengths of the pool and you later got your certificate saying - "on such and such a date, so and so completed ten lengths of the pool in good style".