Disrupting bathing space in the Humber River

I’ll give you fair warning. I’m engaging in some wide-eyed speculation here. I’m interested in bathing culture and I’m interested in clothes and the little Toronto Star article below manages to touch on both of those areas. The Humber supported its own group of swimmers. Expect to hear more about them in future posts. Groups bathing along the Humber or the Don River were usually composed of boys and/or young men into their twenties. Typically I think you came with a group of male friends but you were also, assuming the weather was decent, likely joining a group of people that were already there and participating in this shared male space. In 1912 it probably was exclusively male space along the Humber, although we’ll see females showing up later and certainly there were female baths at the city’s official bathing stations.

It was shared male space and there were shared expectations about behavior. The article below suggests how the “crazy man” stumbled into this bathing space and disrupted it with his “strange antics.” The article doesn’t specify what those strange antics were; presumably they would have disrupted any social space that he walked into. My point, in this case, is that there was a shared space of expected behavior to BE disrupted along the Humber.

With respect to the “crazy man’s” behavior, the only thing singled out is that he was “putting his clothes in a cloth bag to keep them dry and then swimming the river.” My question is, was there something unusual in the way he treated his clothes that earned it a mention in the article? Or was this the norm? I’m speculating. But it almost seems as if his behavior was too fussy for the Humber bathers, otherwise why mention it in the article? I suspect most bathers laid their clothes out in a pile and expected to pick them up when they were done.  We’re not told if he was swimming in the buff or whether the other bathers were. By this point the City of Toronto had amped up enforcement of clothing requirements at bathing spaces and had raided the Humber River. So the bathers may have been wearing suits, they might have just had trunks on or they might have been wearing nothing. It seems unlikely that the “crazy man” would have had a bathing suit available but this is not remarked upon in the article one way or another. And perhaps that silence speaks to how much the Humber bathing space was both assumed and yet in a state of flux at the time.

Crazy man swims Humber
Escapes From Mimico Asylum and Creates a Lot of Trouble. 

 A man who escaped from the Mimico Hospital for the insane caused excitement along the Humber River for some hours last night. He first appeared among a group of boy swimmers and alarmed them by his strange antics, putting his clothes in a cloth bag to keep them dry and then swimming the river. He then took refuge in Mr. Harry Cornish’s restaurant who, in order to detain him, fed him well, then on the pretext of taking him out for a boat ride, took him down the Humber to the asylum guards in a launch. While this was going on, the Mimico officials had been searching in the bush and surrounding country.[1]

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[1] “Crazy man swims Humber,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, July 26, 1912, Page 17.