CLEVER WOMEN SWIMMERS.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 599, 30 August 1909, Page 3

CLEVER WOMEN SWIMMERS.

The competition for the King's Cup fox life-saving at the Bath Club last week affords an opportunity for ..recalling how popular swimming has.: now become among London society' women , (says an* English writer), Tho Bath Club is, of course, "the centre of the swimming world from the feminine point of view. The lady members number. 500;' and thdro •. are a hundred children who are also privileged to use the Dover Street bath. 'No one could wish for more delightful surroundings. The green and' white tiles and the hanging, ferns make the Bath Club one of. the prottiest haunts in' London on- a, .wirm ; July ' Last , week, after the King's Cup was. won, and the usual water polo game was.finished, the lady members of the club "kindly obliged" with" a display of swimming and diving. If grace and neatness established a standard of comparison, the girls proved their superiority even': over' the English" and , Swedish divers who had gone before. The "waters wheel," the "torpedo," the "corkscrew," even the swallow dive from .the seventeenfeet board, were carried through with ' a quickness and deftness which called forth rounds of applause. The ladies, of course,' all wore the tighf>fitting skirtless combinations of silk and stockinet, which is de rigueur at the Bath Club. liven more charming than this diving was a display of fancy swimming and floating by Miss Vera Usher, "youngest member.of the Royal Life-saving • Society." Miss.' / Vera was a little ringleted girl of, perhaps, seven .summers. There seemed to be nothing'which she could hot do in tho water, froffl waltzing, imitating a crab, to swimming on her back "with both legs out of .the water." When she finally rescued a groat burly swimmer of fifteen stone or more in the ap-proved'"life-saving" style, the crowded galleries laughed with mingled glee and astonishment. Bath .Club functions always attract a fashionable audience. Last week H.11.H. the Princess Louise (Duchess of Argyll) was present to haiidover the King's Cup to the winner.