BC - RECORDS OF BATH CITY COUNCIL AND BATH & NORTH EAST SOMERSET COUNCIL
- BC/13 - Bath as a Spa, Cultural and Tourist centre: records of Bath City Council and Bath & North East Somerset Council's responsibilities for culture, leisure and tourism
  - BC/13/12 - Records relating to the Thermae Bath Spa
    - BC/13/12/1 - Records relating to the Bath Spa Project (1997-2006)
      - BC/13/12/1/1 - Audio recordings of interviews conducted to aid in the development of displays for the Spa Visitor Centre, Bath
        BC/13/12/1/1/7 - Minidisc including two oral history interviews with women who describe their experiences of working at the Spa Treatment Centre, Bath

Interview with Pat Hall who speaks of her experience of working at the Spa Treatment Centre, Bath

Reference Number: BC/13/12/1/1/7/a
Alternative Reference Number: 0779
Level of Description: Item
Title: Interview with Pat Hall who speaks of her experience of working at the Spa Treatment Centre, Bath
Date: c.2005
Extent: Extent: 1 minidisc
Description: An audio recording of an interview with Pat Hall who recalls her time working at the Spa Treatment Centre in Bath in the 1970s. This interview, along with others, was conducted to aid in the development of visitor displays at the Spa Visitor Centre, which opened in August 2006.

Further details of the date and location of the recording have not been captured and it is not clear who is conducting the interview.

The recording is 00:03:29 long with the interviewer’s voice breaking in at 00:00:03. Below are the extracts of what was said during the interview. Please note this is not a complete transcript as the superfluous conversation in between questions has been removed:

[Pat Hall] ‘Well, I started to work at the treatment centre in the small Beau Street Baths in about 1974, and we gave water treatments there, exercises in the water, which had to be cooled down for the treatments. And the water turned your bathing costumes brown after a time, with the iron, lead, I don't know what it was in the water that did it. And the patients were lowered into the water on a Victorian construction seat, which some of them were terrified of. And we gave exercises for various treatments, arthritis and different things like that. And I also worked in the modern treatment centre, giving electrical massage and exercises, and mud packs, which were very popular, which were made up for us, and they put them on the patients for about 20 minutes to help the circulation’.

[Interviewer] ‘Who were the people that used to come? They mostly would have been local, I guess’.

[Pat Hall] ‘Mostly local, sent by doctors or the hospitals, the mineral water hospital, and some from abroad, and some actually came from, they had been in concentration camps. And they still had their numbers tattooed on their arms’.

[Interviewer] ‘And they were given the kind of treatment that you gave, and you said that mud packs were the most popular. How were the mud packs put together? How did that work?’

[Pat Hall] ‘Well, they were made up of material, and then this very hot mud, which was full of earth mixed with the mineral water, and it was wrapped up in several layers of material, and then we put it around the joints or on whatever part was affected, and it helped the circulation. And then after that, they'd probably have a massage and then exercises for whatever condition they had’.

[Interviewer] ‘And you said that was the most popular. It obviously seemed to work for people’.

[Pat Hall] ‘Oh, it was very popular, yes. And there were also different water treatments they had, individual baths they could go into like a jacuzzi nowadays, but again, very old-fashioned. Oh, in the Beau Street Bath, there was a very old Victorian shower that was made up of pipes with lots of holes in them, and jets came out all around you’.
Existence and Location of Copies: Digitised MP3 versions are available on Preservica via internal access at Bath Record Office.