It’s Cambridge Road Baths ... but like you’ve never seen them before.
And they have come from a 96-year-old who is skilled in the use of Facebook.
We mentioned the baths in a story on our Facebook site recently and Joan Cool was straight back to us to say she had photographs of it being made.
They had been taken by her father, Ernest Haigh White, who had his own concreting business at the time and took photos while the baths were under construction.
Joan said: “The photos show the seating around the pool and, as you will remember, the changing rooms were under there.”
The baths were opened in August 1931.
Ernest, who died in the early 1960s, also did work on paths in Greenhead Park.
Joan was educated at Greenhead Girls High School and then left Huddersfield to train as a nurse in Birmingham and qualified as a specialist fever nurse.
She said: “In the 1930s – and before – every town had its own isolation hospital where cases of diphtheria, scarlet fever and any other infectious diseases were treated except tuberculosis which was treated in the local sanatorium.
“The hospital where I did my fever training had 750 beds and we had 24 wards, each used for one or another disease. The hospital in Birmingham where I trained is now a general hospital which is a good example how much immunisation has reduced the occurrence of diptheria, measles, chicken pox and a lot more infectious diseases. In those days we lived in the nurses home – no going home when you came off duty. And as it was the first time I had been away from home on my own for a long period, boy was I homesick!
After achieving her fever nurse certificate Joan went on to become a general trained nurse.
She later worked as a maternity nurse and finished her career as a school nurse in Manchester.
During the war she was a nurse in the RAF, working at several hospitals and vividly remembers all the planes flying overhead to drop troops on the D-Day landings.
And she also marched on the first Battle of Britain parade down Pall Mall and past Buckingham Palace in 1943.
Joan met husband John while working as an industrial nurse in Stockport. The couple moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset 20 years ago and John died a short time later in 1998.
Joan has two children, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
She was secretary of the Women’s Institute in her area 10 years ago and was fed up of doing the administration on an old typewriter. Her daughter encouraged her to use a computer instead and she joined Facebook five years ago.
