LAND AND WATER 
November 13, 1915- 
BRITISH SPAS AND GERMAN BADS. 
By Francis Stopford. 
CHELTENHAM last month celebrated the bicen- 
tenary of the discovery of its mineral waters. 
Bath re-opened on Monday with due pomp and 
ceremony its Cirand Pump room. Harrugatc 
this bununer and autunm has been responsible for more 
" cures " (almost double the normal average) than at any 
period in its history. Bu.\ton and Llandrindod. Stratli- 
l>etfer and Woodhall report big inllu.xes of visitors. There 
is not a British Spa in this troublous year which has not 
done exceedingly well. This is as it should be, but why 
has it not alwa\s been so ? , . , j 
It is a question which ought to be thoroughly thrashed 
out, for the writer believes it to be but a small part of a 
much bigger problem which will have to be faced 
courageously sooner or later. Lord St. Aldwyn attri- 
buted the decline of Cheltenham as a health resort to the 
desire for foreign tra\-el which possessed English people 
the latter half of the eighteenth century. This shrewd 
diagnosis of the primary cause of the decline seems to be 
accurate. The Grand "Tour instituted among a certain 
section of Society a vogue for foreign ideas. This vogue 
spread to fashions of dress, manners and living, l-rench 
plats, for instance, ousted British dishes, not altogether 
unreasonably, from the tables of the few who were qualified 
to contrast the relative merits of both. But as these 
few happened to be persons of consequence, their habits 
were subjected to that debasing form of flattery— insincere 
imitation, and " insular " became the favourite taunt to 
be hurled against any Briton who dared to champion the 
good (jualities of his own land. It was the old story of ; 
the little drop of water, able to hollow the stone or to 
inflict the most hideous torture imaginable on the brain 
of a Chinese malefactor. Year by year, generation after ■ 
generation, the Briton who dared to defend British 
institutions against international rivals was suppressed 
by the small sneer, " Insular, insular ! " until at last 
people on these islands did honestly come to thir k there 
was nothing good on this side the narrow seas, and that , 
the only way to arrive at a fair comparison was to contrast 
their own faults and weaknesses with the virtues and 
merits of neighbouring nations. 
The Devil's Darling Sin. 
The Teuton would not have been the Teuton if , with 
his engrained cunning and quickness to seize an advantage, 
fair or unfair, he had not exploited this absurd humility 
for all it was worth. In point of fact, the devil's darling 
sin, " pride that apes humihty," has come very near to 
turning this land into the devil's dominion. Having 
escaped, let us once for all purge our minds of the offence 
and for the future take a bold and sturdy pride in every 
good thing which Nature has bestowed on " this sceptred 
isle, this earth of majesty." 
We have all sinned and done amiss. Only this 
autumn the writer visited, for the first time, Harrogate, 
that cup of healing waters lifted high on the Yorkshire 
moorlands. It was a revelation. Harrogate had been 
regarded by him aforetimes as a sort of one horse place 
with which people had to be content who had not the 
money or the time to go to Carlsbad, Marienbad or 
Kissingen. He can trace exactly how this impression 
had been created, and he has now awakened to the truth 
that the one obstacle to Harrogate having been hailed as 
the finest watering-place in Europe, has lain in the fact 
that it was English, not German or Austrian. It is not 
only the natural waters that give pre-eminence to York- 
shire's Siloam, but its exhilarating air and its glorious views 
and still more that wonderful system of baths which has 
been installed there, and which is constantly being added 
too. A new " cure" has only to be properly vouched for 
by medical authorities to be instituted. The men of 
Yorkshire have no absurd views on humility. 
And is not the Tyke a match for the Teuton ? Let 
us be clear on this point. Only in Germany and England 
are British watering-places consistently run down. When 
a few months before the war, Belgian enterprise 
was endeavouring to revive the fashion of Spa, it was not 
in Germany but in England that it sought a general 
manaeer Had Bath not been alive to the true value of 
Zjohn Haddon. he would have been lost to that city. 
Now the general manager of a fashionable watering-place 
if he be a good man, should be a despot, a benevolent 
despot, all executive power being' vested in him by his 
Committees, for he holds in his hand the futuie of his 
little realm • its success or failure will depend on him. 
He must enjoy the confidence and generous support of the 
administrators whom he represents. 
Shrewd Business Men. 
It will interest the many visitors of Harrogate to know 
that the well-being and progress of that watering-place 
is entirely in the hands of the Corporation, the members 
uf which are shrewd North Country business men, with 
wide interests and a very genuine and right pnde in the 
virtues and advantages of their town. Their chief 
executive officer, Mr. Broome, a \orkshireman by birth, 
possesses rare energy and large ideas ; and he is deter- 
mined that Harrogate henceforth shall be above rivalry 
Criticism is invited ; suggestions are welcome ; the foohsh 
thought that because much money has been spent, there- 
fore everything must be perfect is entirely absent. It is 
realised that the prosperity of the Spa is largely in the 
hands of that small section of the community which 
from the very nature of birth and upbringing, is inclined 
to be most critical, and their tastes are carefully studied; 
their wishes attended to. This is the right attitude of mind 
and no one will ever convince the writer that there exists 
any real reason why British Spas cannot be made superior 
to German Bads. 
The doctors in this country should agree among 
themselves to drop the old cliches of Nauheim treatment, 
Kissingen water, etc., etc. Because from a natural spring 
in a Yorkshire dale there bubbles forth water strongly 
impregnated with iron and alkali, that does not make 
it Kissingen water ; it is Harrogate water just as much as 
if it issued from the Old Sulphur Well, hot and strong. 
Whether it be at Harrogate, Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham 
or elsewhere, let us be done with this Continental nomen- 
clature of waters, douches, treatments, etc., and adhere 
to plain English in the future. It may be urged that this 
is a very small matter. It is small— small as the drop of 
water, but constantly in operation it has a great effect. 
Expenditure of British Gold. 
It is impossible in a brief article to write all one 
would like to write on this subject. But it is obvious 
that the hour has arrived when it is the duty of every 
Briton to support British Spas in the future. If only it 
were possible to obtain figures showing the amount of 
good sterling British gold that was expended at German 
and Austrian bads during, say, the five years 1909-1913, 
this reason would become even more apparent. What- 
ever faults may have lain with British management and 
administration in the past they are being rectified, but 
let not this be overlooked, that those faults have ever 
been magnified a hundredfold by Continental rivals. 
The fact that many hotels at British watering-places 
have been under Teuton management has foolishly been 
accepted as a tribute to the attractions of those places, 
but the possibility has been ignored that these same 
Teuton managers may have possessed a larger or more 
permanent interest in some Teuton bad, and that while 
doing the best for themselves in the land of their adoption 
they never lost an opportunity to proclaim the superiority 
of the " cures " in the land of their birth. 
When these islands were under Roman occupation, 
British waters were considered not a whit inferior to any 
of the fashionable springs scattered throughout the 
Roman Empire. And the old Romans had a much more 
intimate experience of baths than modem Germans. 
There is no reason why this should not be so again. 
Henceforth we must play our own game and no longer 
be bluffed into the belief that a thing is inferior merely 
because it is British and good because it is German. 
We have had enough, more than enough, of that. 
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