The Wye, a river to be cherished

Back in the day, there was no need to head for Weston-super-Mare or Barry Island when Hereford had its own beach. There isn’t much left of it now, but it was there, a sweeping stretch of shingle, opposite the old General Hospital. Today, all that’s left is a thicket of withy trees. But, on a summer’s day, this was the place to be and, of course, it was where photographer Derek Evans would go too. Many of his images of a time gone by evoke strong memories for Herefordians. He captured the post-war period on Hereford beach perfectly, with families of harassed mums in cotton frocks, dads, braces pulled down, open neck shirts, ciggie in mouth, pulling along excitable children, all flocking to the ‘beach’ to claim their spots on the bank for the afternoon.

Laid out on plaid rugs were wicker baskets of greaseproof-wrapped sandwiches of egg, ham or cucumber, pork pies, squash, and flasked tea, stewed to within an inch of its life. Stretchy, neoprene swimsuits were still decades away. Then, it was all about the woolen bathing costumes (patterns can be seen at HARC in case anyone is interested), often knitted by granny or a great aunt. These most unsuitable bathing garments caused acute and maximum embarrassment and lasting psychological harm for some! Della, 93, recalled her woolen onesie ‘stretching and drooping beyond belief’ after one dipping and never wore it again, while Tom, 80, improvised: ‘I got an old pullover, tied it up with a piece of string, and sewed up the middle! It did the job,’ he recalls with admirable pragmatism.

The more adventurous, or stronger swimmers, would swim upstream to the Iron Bridge ‘and float down because the river was coming down then’ remembers one swimmer. ‘Up past the Wheatfield stream there’s like a pool. We used to swim in there. Before you got to Belmont there was a farm, Walls Farm, and I used to take our Alsatian and swim across the river with him and back. And don’t forget about the Bassom. They used to have changing huts along there and opposite the Bassom there was a big hole, I knew where it was. You would know not to swim over there by it. Well it would sort of swirl, the river would come round like that and suck you in.’ A reminder, if one was ever needed, that the river does have it dangers, and caution should always be observed. In the words of Herefordian folklorist, Ella Mary Leather, ‘the river takes one year, then leaves for the next’.

Nonetheless, at least one interviewee for ‘River Voices: Extraordinary Stories from the Wye’ remembers, it was a childhood utopia:

‘We had jam jars of minnows, with a piece of string round the top as handles, which we took hours trying to get the knots right on before we headed off. And off we’d go, with a net. Our parents didn’t worry, nobody worried, and, going away from the river, we used to cycle to the top of Dinedor Hill on three wheel bikes and we’d take cold tea in a bottle and off we’d go and we had a drink and came back down eventually. We would take toast down to the river as well. I couldn’t swim initially when I first went down there. We were all about the same age the boys, and there was one older boy, who could swim and I suppose he was nominally in charge; we all survived.

‘There were about six or seven of us lived in the road and we were friends and a lot of these friendships went on for decades. We used to walk down to the river through the Hinton estate. At that time, where the King George’s playing fields used to be, there was a farm and there were cows in the field, we used to climb over a style and walk down to the beach opposite the old General Hospital. We went there and caught minnows and got wet and had a really good time. The river was our life really.’

The pre-vaccination polio outbreaks across the country in the mid-1950s brought an end to this sort of river bathing, for a few years at least, as the nation was held in a fearful grip to this terrible infectious disease, and parents withdrew their children from the river banks.

Today, the River Wye remains a gorgeous backdrop to the city and the county, as it meanders its way from its source in mid-Wales, before spilling out into the Severn estuary at Chepstow over 134 miles later. There have been changes – the salmon and eel stocks have experienced worrying drops in numbers – but coarse fish are thriving. We should care for and cherish this river.

Marsha O’Mahony