Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

by Glenn Stout

  Unfortunately for Webb, swimming the Channel would prove to be his undoing, creating unrealistic expectations over the remainder of his life. After swimming the Channel he was forced to try to attempt swims that were even more daring and dangerous, but none had the resonance of the English Channel. In 1883, while attempting to swim across the rapids of the Niagara River beneath Niagara Falls, Webb was swept up in the current and carried downstream. When he reached a famous whirlpool he went under and didn't reappear until his body was discovered four days later several miles downstream.

  For a young reader like Trudy, however, it was easy to overlook Webb's tragic death and focus on the heroic figure of the man himself, someone who against all odds had done something that everyone had previously thought to be impossible. Trudy was not alone. Soon other men and women would follow in Webb's wake and take on mankind's most challenging individual endeavor.

  7. The Teacher

  WHEN TRUDY EDERLE walked into a WSA pool for her first formal lesson in the fall of 1918, in the basement of a Brooklyn Heights apartment building, sharing space with the building's boiler room, she had no idea that she was walking in on the start of a revolution. Not only was the WSA virtually the first athletic organization for women, but it was one of the few organizations anywhere that young girls and teenagers like Trudy and her sisters could belong to—even the Girls Scouts had been in existence only since 1916.

  With peace in Europe a few short weeks away, it was becoming clear that the world was changing, and changing rapidly. The women's suffragist movement was on the precipice of success, as most states had given women the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which would extend the right to vote to all women, had the support of President Woodrow Wilson, had passed the House of Representatives, and needed only Senate approval before being ratified by the states.

  While that process would take two long years, what the Nineteenth Amendment did for women's voting rights, the WSA would do for women's athletics. Sports would no longer be for men only.

  When Trudy, Meg, and Helen arrived at the pool, nothing was familiar. Indoor pools were rare, and none of the girls had ever seen one before, much less swum in one. Although in time the organization would eventually have its own pool in a building on West Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan, as the group approached its first anniversary the organization rented a pool every Wednesday and Friday evening.

  After changing into their swimming attire in a small dressing room, when Trudy and her sisters first pushed through the heavy doors that opened to the pool, they were hit with a blast of air as hot and heavy as that of a sauna, acrid with the smell of chlorine, which rapidly caused any untiled surface not covered in a heavy coat of paint to rust and corrode. The pool, only thirty feet long and so shallow that except for one end all but the youngest girls could stand upright with their head and chest out of the water, was surrounded by a narrow tiled walkway and a few wooden benches. It hardly seemed sufficient for more than the most basic instruction. Compared to the open ocean, it was absolutely claustrophobic.

  As Trudy and her sisters stood alongside the pool waiting for their first lesson, among the dozens of swimmers and instructors from the previous session crowded in and around the pool, she couldn't help but notice that one person stood out—a man. Unlike all the young women, this man—tall, fit, and with a shock of graying hair—was not wearing swimming attire. Despite the near tropical heat in the basement, he was dressed formally, in business attire, wearing a starched white shirt with a high collar, a tie knotted in a taut Windsor knot, a vest, a jacket, and a bowler. His only concession to the oppressive conditions in the basement was, on rare occasions, to remove his jacket.

  The other girls called him "Mr. Handley," and as Trudy watched, Handley was clearly in charge, keeping dozens of swimmers, swimmers to be, and instructors busy at once. One group of girls at the far, deep end of the pool practiced diving from a small platform. Another group alongside the pool lay down with their stomachs supported by chairs and practiced kicking and stroking with their arms, turning their heads and pretending to take in and release their breath. Others simply held onto the side of the pool and kicked, and more accomplished swimmers swam back and forth. As they did the man in the business suit strode between groups, leaning down to give advice. Sometimes he pantomimed the movement he expected. At other times he stood before everyone, even the other instructors, and with a swimmer at his side pointed out proper arm and hand positions, making small adjustments as he spoke. He moved back and forth between all swimmers and spent the same amount of time with each one, speaking formally in a firm yet gentle voice that still contained more than a hint of fine breeding and exposure to the Continent.

  To Trudy and her sisters it seemed as if the water was full of Cath erine Browns, because every swimmer in the water sped back and forth with a speed they found astonishing and had not seen since that day of the exhibition at the Highlands. Absolutely no one was using the dog paddle, and even the few swimmers using the breaststroke were obviously already far more accomplished swimmers than anyone Trudy had ever seen at the Highlands.

  It was all due to Louis de Breda Handley. A generation before he had revolutionized the sport of swimming for men by helping to develop an improvement on the trudgen, known as the crawl, an advance in swimming that was as dramatic and profound as learning to run after a lifetime of walking. And now he was teaching the exact same stroke to women swimmers. In fact, at the time he was probably not only the only person in the world teaching the stroke to women, but the only person who thought women could even have the ability to learn it. Despite the fact that the WSA was a women's organization, few people would have more to do with the cause of women's athletics or with the career of Trudy Ederle than the man standing at the side of the pool that fall evening.

  At last the pool cleared and the Ederle girls, as well as a few dozen other swimmers, were allowed into the pool to begin the new session. Handley and the other WSA instructors had to assess the skills of the girls, as new members of the group, before they were assigned to classes.

  After learning her name, Handley systematically asked each girl to get into the water and swim. Helen and Meg both went before Trudy and, compared to the other girls, seemed to do well. When he came to Trudy, he said simply, "Well, Gertrude, get in and swim as fast as you can."

  Trudy lowered herself in the water. Ever since the demonstration at the pier, she and Meg and Helen had been trying to swim like Catherine Brown, and although Trudy knew she wasn't nearly as fast as the young swimmer, she was quite proud of her progress. She took a deep breath, stretched out in the water and began to swim for the opposite side of the pool, only thirty feet away.

  There were cruise ships plying the North Atlantic that didn't create so much havoc on the water. Legs and arms thrashing wildly, Trudy laboriously plowed through the pool. Every so often she lifted her head, and like a whale, took a great deep breath before she went back under the surface. The end result was a great deal of splashing but little progress.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Trudy reached the far end of the pool, turned around, and after another period of extended flogging of the water, finally made it back to where she started, panting and out of breath. Then she looked up expectantly to Handley, who had stood by calmly, watching, with the WSA diving instructor.

  The other instructor turned to Handley and said, "Oh, she'll never make a swimmer. She's too wild," and suggested instead that perhaps Trudy might make a better diver than a swimmer.

  Handley, however, disagreed. He wasn't interested in how much Trudy knew about swimming and how well she did. In fact, he actually preferred working with swimmers like Trudy who were so raw they hadn't developed any bad habits, and he was impressed by the way all the Ederle girls had tried to swim the crawl, even though they really didn't know how.

  He would teach, she would learn, and in time Trudy Ederle would be a swimmer.

  Like Henry Ederle, Louis de Bred
a Handley's first glimpse of America had probably been that of the Twin Lights of the Highlands. He was born in 1874 in Rome, his mother was Italian, and his name on his birth certificate was Luigi de Breda. His American-born father, Francis Montague Handley, was a sculptor, specializing in marble, capable of producing exquisite figures in the classical style. The elder Handley, whose family was already prominent, became attached to the Vatican as a palace official, serving as a Privy Chamberlain of Sword and Cape to both Popes Pius X and Leo XII—their private butler—and becoming the first American to be made a commander in the Order of Saint Gregory. Of the five pontifical orders of knighthood in the Catholic Church, to be appointed to that group is the highest honor that a layman can attain, an honor given in recognition of extraordinary service to the church.

  One of three children, Louis de Breda Handley's two sisters later became nuns. Educated by the Christian Brothers in Rome, Handley received a classical education in the most formal sense, learning Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian, and earned a reputation as a persuasive and elegant writer. But for all his academic prowess, he adhered to the classical notion of "healthy mind, healthy body" and took physical training as seriously as he took his studies. He learned to swim in the Tiber River.

  In 1896, at the age of twenty-two, Handley, who adopted the anglicized version of his name, left Rome to live in the United States. Upon his arrival he went into the importing business. A gentleman, he spent most of his time pursuing pastimes appropriate to his status.

  He joined the prestigious Knickerbocker Athletic Club, for whom he competed in sweeps and sculls, swimming, and water polo, but he also trained and bred dogs, raced sailboats, hunted, rode, and played football. When the club disbanded after the notorious Molineaux murder case, a scandal in which one club member tried to poison the club's athletic director and accidentally killed the director's aunt instead, Handley quietly changed allegiances and joined the New York Athletic Club.

  Despite his mannered appearance and upbringing, Handley was one of the finest all-around athletes of the era, recognized as the world champion in an event known as the "medley race," a event popular at the turn of the century, which combined aspects of both the decathlon and the modern triathlon. Racers competed against one another in a series of consecutive, quarter-mile races, walking, running, cycling, riding, swimming, and rowing in sequence, a feat Handley accomplished in a remarkable sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

  Handley, however, made his greatest mark as an athlete in the water. Like Trudy Ederle, swimming fulfilled him like nothing else and served his life the same way the church had once served his father. His reverence for the sport of swimming bordered on the spiritual, and he once wrote, "There is no better form of physical culture. Swimming brings into action the entire system, giving every part of the body its proportionate share of work; it develops thoroughly and symmetrically, producing supple, resilient, well rounded muscles; it makes for grace of carriage and ease of movement; it activates and strengthens the functional organs, it ensures robust good health and good spirits." When teaching, either in print or in person, he often proceeded in the manner of the Catholic catechism, asking questions and then providing the answer himself, all the while cautioning that while the desire to win was natural, that was never the sole goal of sport. "If undue importance is attached to them so that victory becomes the paramount consideration and defeat leaves a feeling of disappointment and humiliation," wrote Handley, "then the zest goes out of the game and it no longer represents pastime and recreation, as it should."

  This did not mean that Handley was any kind of milquetoast, for to do anything but one's best was not only unacceptable, but essentially immoral, a betrayal of one's physical gifts as delivered by God, and Handley himself played to win, an attitude he fostered in Trudy and every other swimmer under his direction. During an era in which the sport of water polo was considerably more violent than it is today, Handley was considered the greatest player of his era. He served as captain of both the swimming and water polo teams for first the Knickerbocker Athletic Club and then the New York Athletic Club and led the American water polo team to victory at the 1904 Olympics. In over a decade of competitive water polo, teams captained by Handley lost exactly twice.

  He constantly strove to be better, and he studied swimming as if it were a subject taught to him by the Christian Brothers. When word of a new stroke known as the Australian crawl made its way to the United States in 1903, Handley sought not only to understand and learn the new stroke, but to improve upon it.

  Like the trudgen, the new stroke had its beginnings in the style of native people, although the specific circumstances are still debated by swimming historians. Some trace the origination to a ten-year-old boy, Alick Wickham, who had been reared in the Solomon Islands by his English father and native mother, where he learned to swim. When he was then sent to boarding school in Australia he inadvertently imported an entirely new stroke, one that combined the arm action of the trudgen with an up-and-down leg kick used by Solomon Island natives. A swimming coach named George Farmer saw the boy swimming in a race at Sydney and allegedly called out, "Look at that boy crawling over the water!" thus giving the stroke its name.

  But at about the same time, three brothers by the name of Cavill also began using the stroke, which their father, Frederick Cavill, later claimed to have learned from a Samoan woman while traveling through the Samoan Islands. The Cavills refined the stroke somewhat, so that as one arm came over and pulled down, the opposite leg kicked downward. However the stroke originated, male swimmers using the so-called Australian crawl began winning races in Australia in times never seen before. The days of the trudgen were just about over.

  Handley first learned of the stroke through written descriptions and diagrams in newspapers and magazines and tried to teach himself in the indoor pool of the New York Athletic Club, at the time one of only a few indoor pools in New York. Yet no matter how fast he stroked with his arms and kicked with his feet, Handley, already one of the best swimmers in America, equally proficient in the backstroke, the trudgen, and the breaststroke, could not manage the Australian crawl. In fact, after only a few strokes his legs kept sinking under the water, bringing him to almost a complete stop. Other club members who tried the stroke were no more successful and after only a few tries returned to the more familiar trudgen, dismissing the Australian crawl as some unexplained foreign novelty, leaving Handley to learn the stroke on his own.

  He studied the problem as if it were an issue of science, which, in effect, it was. He concluded that the problem he was having stemmed not from the arm stroke, which was almost identical to that used in the trudgen, but from the unique kick. In the Australian crawl, the swimmer kicked at the knee, as Handley himself once described it, "lifting the feet high above the water and beating them down just once to every arm stroke." Over and over and over again Handley tried to master the kick, only to falter as if he had never been in the water before. It was embarrassing and the cause of no small amount of amusement to other club members, for Handley had rarely experienced failure of any kind.

  He was nearly ready to give up, concluding that either the Cavill brothers were freaks of nature or that the descriptions of the stroke were simply wrong.

  Then it came to him. In Australia, competitive swimming events took place in so-called ocean pools—outdoor swimming pools filled with water from tidal tanks or even from the tide itself simply spilling over the sides of the pool. Competitive swimming was done in seawater. But the indoor pool at the New York Athletic Club was filled with fresh water, which Handley knew provided far less buoyancy than the salt water of the sea.

  Out of the sea, in fresh water, the kick used in the Australian crawl was not sufficient to keep Handley's lower body above the water. When one leg left the water to begin the kick down, the other leg—and the rest of the swimmer's body below the waist—sank. Each subsequent kick only made the problem worse, for as the leg raised up to kick back down,
it drove the swimmer farther under water. In only a few strokes all forward progress stopped.

  Now that he knew what the problem was, Handley puzzled over the solution. In seawater the Australian crawl kick had already proven superior to any other kind used at the time, such as the frog kick used by the breaststroke and the scissor kick of the trudgen, so Handley knew he had to develop a kick that would prove equally superior in fresh water. One day while he was in the pool experimenting, he discussed the issue with Gus Sundstrom, the club's veteran swimming instructor. Sundstrom instructed Handley to watch him closely and then demonstrated what he referred to as the "swordfish kick," a kick he used in training demonstrations with novice swimmers to convince them of the importance of using their legs while swimming. Stretching his arms forward in front of him, Sundstrom locked his thumbs so that he was unable to either stroke or paddle with his arms. He then stretched out in the water and began kicking furiously, not from the knee, using the lower leg as in the Australian crawl, but from the hip, keeping his legs straight and using his feet as if they were flippers. In this way he was able to propel himself across the width of the pool without using his arms at all.

  For Handley, it was a "Eureka!" moment. In an instant, he combined the overhand arm stroke with Sundstrom's swordfish kick. That changed everything. His lower body stayed buoyant and Handley moved through the water with a speed that he had never thought was possible. It wasn't easy, but it worked.

  Over the next few months and years, Handley and another club member, Austrian-born Otto Wahle, spent hours perfecting the new stroke, over time adding several other adaptations, and timing the stroke with breathing. Handley discovered that since the swordfish kick, which he preferred to refer to as the "thrash," provided the swimmer with more forward momentum, it was possible to reach out farther with the arms than was standard in the trudgen stroke, and that the swimmer need not stroke quite as quickly to maintain speed. Although Handley and Wahle initially tried to time the thrash precisely with the arm action, they discovered that was of absolutely no benefit. For consistency, all the swimmer needed to do was make sure that he or she kept kicking at a regular pace, usually four or six times for each stroke of the arms, but it didn't matter a wit whether the downward leg kick matched the downward motion of the arm, or if the kick of the left leg took place simultaneously with the stroke of either arm. All that mattered was that both the arms and the legs remained in motion the entire time. The result was the first swimming stroke in history in which the arms and legs were in motion independent of one another. The "American crawl" was born, and Louis de Breda Handley became its evangelist.