AS we consider the advent of a new sports centre just off the Huddersfield ring road, former Greenhead High School girl Becca Thackray has revisited some fond, and some not-so-fond, memories of Cambridge Road baths.

Cambridge Road Baths (1929-2003) were the pride and joy of the town, superseding the rather more elderly Ramsden Street Baths. The main pool was 33yards long.

Before long, the centre was taking annual swimming galas from a dozen schools, and was the base of operations for the Huddersfield Schools’ Swimming Association.

Soon it was drawing county, national and occasionally international swimming events.

Covered over in winter, the pool area became the venue for dances and balls, boxing and wrestling matches and brass band concerts.

“Huddersfield reminiscences on Facebook recently have been about Cambridge Road,” reader Becca Thackray says.

She includes a few comments:

SS wrote: “Cambridge Road Baths, the smell of chlorine, the dread of the high diving board, the communal changing rooms.”

NM wrote: “Cambridge Road, where I got my phobia of big pools with nasty grates at the deep end, and small pools with creepy wooden steps and beetles in the water.

“And what were the ‘gentlemen’s slipper baths’? It was never explained to me.

“Still a hot chocolate was always to be looked forward to, and I once got pushed on a lilo in a lilo race at a Cubs’ gala by a handsome older boy.

“We got first prize, and I remember having pangs of fraudulence going up to get the prize when all I’d done was lie like Cleopatra being ferried up the Nile!’”

Becky herself has fonder recollections.

“In the early 1970s my mother (famous anti-war activist and Huddersfield JP Catherine Thackray) started a swimming club at the baths.

It was a somewhat unconventional approach to Mrs Thackray’s work as a psychiatric social worker.

A few Greenhead High sixth form girls helped with the club.

“There was the challenge of learning to swim there and the annual day out of the swimming gala, plus the very sweet fluorescent orange juice and chocolate raisins from the vending machine.

“On the other hand my elder brother, Simon Thackray, has fondest memories of Ramsden Street Baths, where he was taught to swim by Olympic breast-stroke medal winner Anita Lonsbrough.

“It seems many Huddersfield people enjoyed beetle drives in the early 1970s at Cambridge Road, sometimes held in aid of the Labour Party of the ‘Shelter Shop’ which might have been Shelter’s first shop.”

There is a CD transcript of Becca’s 1970s diaries at Huddersfield library.