‘I still get excited when I talk about it’

Janet Cocks, 84, nurses her tea as she sits in the clubhouse with fans blowing heat around the room on a chilly spring day.

The sun is breaking through the clouds, snapping the cold spring air and warming the banks of Henleaze Lake for the first time this year.

The swimming club isn’t quite ready for the summer season when the lake will be rammed with families sunning themselves and cooling off in the old quarry, hidden in deepest Bristol.

The strip of sunlit blue water “as soft as milk to the skin”, according to a fading newspaper cutting on the wall, remains one of the city’s best kept secrets 80-odd years since Janet was here with her parents for the first time.

Now she sits recalling what it was like in her day as the club nears its 100th birthday. “I remember the first time I realised it was a special place,” she says at our interview set up to help the club jog people’s memories for their centenary celebrations planned in 2019 (we’ve been asked to delay publication for the announcement).

Janet adds: “At school we’d come back and they’d say to us all ‘what did you do in the summer holidays? Well, I’d say I went to the lake, and they’d say ‘what lake?’ They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about half the time because it’s odd to talk about swimming in a lake in Bristol, because, well, where is there a lake in the middle of Bristol – apart from Henleaze?”

The club was formed in 1919 as an answer to a spate of drownings at the newly-flooded limestone quarry known then as Henleaze Bathing Pool.

Part of the reason the secret of Henleaze Lake hasn’t got out 100 years on from its formation is the trust which runs the members only club. It’s a case of join the queue for a membership or be introduced by family (and then best keep it quiet after that). As one of the club’s founding members at the lake, Janet’s mother helped lay the foundations of this legacy.

“My parents used to come down every day as I was a small child,” Janet continues as we look at the noticeboard of pictures in the clubhouse, one of which shows perhaps the club’s most famous member, Darth Vader actor David Prowse (from nearby Southmead).

“My father was the superintendent of the lake and my mum would come down to make the tea. That’s how I got to know it.

“After the First World War, in the summer holidays in the mid-30s it was just a place we took for granted. But we used to keep away from the side of the water because you couldn’t go in if you couldn’t swim.”

To this day the club still operates a policy of swimmers only and all new members have to pass a proficiency test.

“Of course I did learn to swim in the end so I could go in,” Janet says. “At the time they had the learners session at Bristol North Baths and that’s where I started.

“I then had to take my test and that’s a good memory, because the day I took the test you then have to get in and swim this end 60 metres up to the raft, a pontoon that went across.

“I remember the day. I was petrified. My mother and father were both side of me and my brother was there and I must have been about 11 and they said you can do it keep going you know you can keep going.”

Looking back, Janet says things aren’t so different now from back then, apart from a small sauna tucked away behind the changing rooms next to the relatively untouched lake – a contentious issue among die-hard members.

“To be truthful it’s not all that different at all,” she says. “It had the willow trees and it had the fish and the anglers were there too.

“Now, the distance has been extended. There was always water polo every weekend in the old days. The atmosphere is very much as it was.”

So what’s made her keep coming back over the years and passing the membership down the family to her grandchildren too?

“I think it’s not the same as anywhere else, is it? Swimming in the sea is different from swimming in the lake. The atmosphere is totally different,” she says, pausing as she looks over the lake.

“I mean, I still get excited when I talk about it. The setting when I’m in that water and the sun is shining and you look around and there are trees and you look around and it’s surreal, still.

“Whenever I’m in I look around and I think this is just unbelievable. I mean, where am I? I could be anywhere and I’m in the middle of Bristol.”

Henleaze Swimming Club celebrates 100 years in 2019. The club is asking for former members to contribute their memories in time for the anniversary. Please contact alison@henleazeswimmingclub.org for further details.

Read more: Photo gallery: World Naked Bike Ride 2016