Many people will have seen old photographs and postcards of ladies using the bathing machines at Brighton and Margate. What is less well known is that Wales was also at the vanguard of this fashion, not only in North Wales resorts such as Llandudno and Rhyl, but also in Tenby in the South West of the Principality. Tenby had been an important market town in medieval times and an important port during the early Tudor era. In 1471, Henry Tudor had fled imprisonment and probable death using the tunnels at Tenby port, only to return 14 from France years later and defeat Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, becoming King Henry VII in the process. However, Elizabeth I’s wars against France and Spain followed by an outbreak of plague in 1650 that killed over half the population meant that the port had dwindled to insignificance by the end of the 18th century. The harbour is small and ships became larger so that trade moved to larger ports such as Bristol. Instead of being at the centre of trade across the Irish Sea, Tenby found itself at the fringes of the early British Empire, remote from the centres of power in England.

Then in 1802 Sir William Paxton bought his first property in Tenby and started to invest in its development as a holiday resort. Coming from a well to do family of Scottish wine merchants, Paxton started as a cabin boy in the Royal Navy at the age of 12. He was promoted to Midshipman before being made redundant at the end of the 7 Years War and joining the East India Company as a privateer.. In 1778 he was made Master of the Mint of Bengal, responsible for coining the silver rupees (Sicca) that were used by expatriates to transfer their funds back to England. Paxton also claimed a commission for facilitating the currency exchange from India to London and started a trading company and returned to Britain a fabulously wealthy man in 1785.

His first investment was at Middleton Hall in Carmarthenshire, now the site of the National Botanical Gardens of Wales. He also built a prominent folly (Paxton’s Tower) at Llanarthne, some say in memory of Lord Nelson who he had met. His greatest investment, however, was in property in Tenby.

As has been mentioned, Tenby had dwindles into insignificance. The Methodist John Wesley had written that “Two-thirds of the old town is in ruins or has entirely vanished. Pigs roam among the abandoned houses and Tenby presents a dismal spectacle”. Shortly after this the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars restricted wealthy tourists from visiting Europe and the need for home based activities grew. The Lake District and the Wye Valley had both benefitted from this trend towards the Hanoverian “staycation”. Paxton hired an architect (Samuel Pepys Cockerell) and an engineer (James Grier) to create a “fashionable bathing establishment suitable for the highest society”. Thus came into being the Bath House and the Assembly Rooms.

Health cures and spas became big business in Georgian England, with sea bathing one of the most popular of these activities. Tenby, with its magnificent North Beach, intimate Harbour Beach and the vast expanse of South Beach was ideally placed to take advantage of this trend and Paxton seized the opportunity. One of his first projects was to build an opulent bathing house (1805) with adjoining Assembly Rooms for social activities such as billiards or lavish balls. The bath house was a place where rich visitors to the town could pay to have private baths in hot or cold sea water, showers, steam treatments and sea water treatments for health. Sea water could be taken externally or internally (mixed with alcohol and other flavours to mask the saltiness. There was even a coffee room, coffee being the latest fashionable drink in London and other cities.
Gentlemen could also bathe in the sea off North Beach. A law of 1832 meant that ladies were not separated by aty least 18m (60ft) on the beach. To circumvent the social mores of the time a Quaker called Benjamin Beale invented the “bathing machine”. This was a small hut on wheels where society women could change into a voluminous bathing costume before a donkey would tow the contraption into the sea, together with its passenger who could emerge from the other end down steps leading to the water. A female assistant known as a “dipper” would help the ladies change and also get in and out of the water. The faint hearted might be given a firm shove to help them go in, while the weight of the sodden bathing costume meant that many women needed to be pulled out at the end of their dip.

One of the most famous dippers was a local lady called Peggy Davies. Born around 1727, she plied her trade for over 50 years before collapsing in the sea and dying at the age of 82 – a very respectable age for the time, showing the benefits of taking the waters. She is buried at St Mary’s Church in Tenby where a memorial can be seen to this day.

The roads connecting Tenby with the rest of Britain were notoriously bad, but The coming of the train in 1863 (Pembroke) and 1868 (Carmarthen) meant that the popularity of seaside holidays at Tenby never wanes and today the town sees over 2 million visitors a year and its population increases from around 5,000 in winter to over 65,000 in August. The hotels built by William Paxton and his Victorian successors still accommodate some of this large population, but caravan parks and chalets have also become increasingly popular. Young boys still like to dive off the harbour walls to an extent that this has been banned and patrols oversee the small port. Sun umbrellas and windscreens may have replaced the bathing machines, but Tenby remains one of the “go to” resorts in South Wales, helped by the Blue Flag status of its beaches and the civic pride that maintains the pastel shades of beachfront bulidings.