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

by Glenn Stout

  Neither she nor perhaps even Marshall realized it, but Trudy had just articulated what made her different from swimmers like Hilda James or many of the other girls who swam in competition of the WSA. Most of them had come to swimming later in life, first learning for safety reasons, then, as their skills improved, competing, and then continuing to swim only to compete. When swimming became a sport it also became something that was practiced like a chore—a pleasant one perhaps, but nevertheless a chore, something that they had to work at to become good.

  But to Trudy Ederle, swimming was something else altogether. It was play transformed, a way to herself. She never thought of winning while she was swimming because, well, she really never thought of anything when she was swimming. And that was the best part.

  Ironically enough, although Louis de Breda Handley deserved credit for the American performance in the 1920 games, he bore little direct responsibility for Trudy's victory in the Day Cup. Handley was not even aware that she had regularly been swimming long distances and afterward didn't even recall that she had tried the swim in 1921, telling reporters she was "a rank outsider never having competed in a race longer than 220 yards."

  At the end of the interview with Marshall, Trudy was photographed in athletic poses, touching her toes and, oddly enough, boxing. Although she is wearing a sweater over her suit in the photographs, compared to swimmers like Aileen Riggen or Helen Wainwright, whose bodies still resembled those of children, Trudy was much more athletic, with powerful arms, legs, and shoulders.

  For a few days anyway, Trudy's Day Cup win made her nearly as well known as Olympians such as Thelda Bleibtrey and Helen Wainwright, girls that she had always looked up to. Swimming had always been fun for her, but now Trudy seemed to sense that it was something more. Near the end of the interview, Marshall asked her "What else do you want to do?" Trudy, who just a few minutes earlier had confided to Marshall about the Day Cup that "I never dreamed I could win. It never occurred to me that I could beat the other girls," now had an answer.

  "Win some more races," she blurted out with a grin. "And I want to go to the Olympic Games."

  Now that Trudy Ederle had a goal, she might even start trying to win.

  12. Rivals

  AFTER THE GREAT WAR some looked out upon the English Channel and were reminded of the recent conflagration, others thought of shipping and commerce, and artists saw a subject for their work. Jabez Wolffe and Bill Burgess, however, saw something else.

  Money. As soon as the war ended, swimmer after swimmer traveled to the English Channel, desperate to be the next, next man, after Burgess, to cross the waters. To that end, both Burgess and Jabez Wolffe suddenly found themselves not only popular among these new aspirants, but in competition once again. This time they would not compete against each other directly to see who could first cross the Channel, but compete they still would, through the men—and women—who had decided the take up the challenge.

  By 1920, in fact, it was even beginning to get a bit crowded, both in Dover and on Cape Gris-Nez, as it sometimes seemed that anyone who could stay afloat for more than fifteen minutes suddenly wanted to swim the Channel, or at least announce that they did and for a brief time bask in the spotlight. To Jabez Wolffe and Bill Burgess, that was the best news possible at a time when the European economy was in tough shape. For much of the next decade Wolffe and Burgess spent almost as much time in Channel waters assisting others who wanted to swim the Channel as they had when each was trying to do so himself.

  Before World War I the English Channel was little more than a name to most Americans. Most were almost completely unaware of the great naval battles that had taken place on its waters during the Napoleonic Wars or when the British fleet repelled the Spanish Armada. If they knew anything about the Channel at all, they knew it only as a simple fact of geography, that it separated England from France. For most, the Channel was a place with little romance and absolutely no story.

  The Great War changed that. Early in the war German destroyers, U-boats (submarines), and other vessels roamed the Channel waters like sharks, sinking vessels of all nationalities, including those sailing under American flags. In February 1915 the German government declared "the waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole English Channel, a war zone from and after February 18," daring any vessel to test the prowess of its navy. Early in the war there was even speculation that if Germany could gain control of Calais it would use the port to launch an invasion of Britain across the Channel.

  Both sides also made use of mines to deter boat traffic. The German navy laid mine fields at the mouth of many Channel harbors, while the British navy, hoping to prevent U-boats from roaming Channel waters in a pack, seeking out and destroying ships at will, maintained a mine field across the Strait of Dover from Dover to Cape Gris-Nez. For much of the war all but the most necessary military and transport boat traffic stayed in port. It was simply too dangerous to be exposed in open water, and those that did venture forth usually did so with military escorts.

  Aspiring Channel swimmers were likewise confined to port, as the war made any notion of swimming the Channel an act of pure madness. And even after the war ended in November 1918, it was more than a year before the Channel was cleared of mines—even then the occasional rogue mine sank ships, or, still dangerous, washed up on the beach. Not until 1920 did swimmers again venture into the Channel waters and once more dream of reaching the other side.

  Although the list of Channel aspirants before the war had almost exclusively been confined to swimmers of either English or French citizenship, after the war the nature of the combatants changed. The Americans were not only coming, they were already there and they were staying.

  By then the English Channel meant much more to the American public than it had before the war. Now they understood not only its geography, but its recent political and military importance. Hundreds of Americans and dozens of American vessels had been lost in the Channel during the war, and thousands of American soldiers had either crossed the Channel on their way to fight in Europe, breathing its heavy, salt air and looking in wonder at the white cliffs of Dover, or else stood on the French coast, weary of battle, and dreamed of the end of the war and a return to peacetime. The reopening of the Channel after the war to both boat traffic and swimmers marked not only a return to normalcy, but a shift in world view. The Channel was no longer seen solely as a barrier that separated England from France, but as a passage that united England—and America—not only to the European continent, but to the future.

  The war had changed everything. As soon as the passage was cleared of mines, swimming the Channel suddenly took on a significance that it had previously lacked. Before the war men like Webb, Holbein, Wolffe, and Burgess had been celebrated—and occasionally castigated—as individuals. Their desire to swim the Channel had been seen as a kind of partly eccentric, partly exotic, somewhat quixotic pursuit. But the Great War had spawned a strong sense of nationalism among all combatants, and now those that came to swim the Channel did so not only as individuals but as representatives of both their country and their culture. The next generation of swimmers to test the Channel did not try so much to cross the Channel as they tried to conquer it.

  Unburdened by war, in the 1920s citizens on both the American continent and in Europe, eager to forget, found themselves spellbound by athletes and athletic achievements, giving attempts to swim the Channel new significance. The Channel Swimming Club was formed to oversee and support Channel swimmers, and the London tabloid the Daily Sketch made a standing offer of one thousand pounds to any swimmer who could match the efforts of Webb and Burgess. Over the next few years the Sketch would give Channel swimmers more and more ink, leading newspapers on both sides of the continent to do the same. In a few short years Channel swimming would evolve from an act of madness to a sport and even something of a craze.

  No one was more in need of that than Wolffe and Burgess. The already modest fortunes of each had taken a hit during
the war, and each man was scrambling to pay the bills. Although in the wake of his successful crossing Burgess had received a modest windfall—the Nestle Company paid him to endorse its chocolate, and even Wolffe had received an endorsement opportunity from Shredded Wheat cereal—those days had long since passed. He had given up life as a blacksmith in favor of operating a Paris garage, but the war virtually destroyed his business. When Channel swimmers waving not pound notes or francs but dollar bills began knocking on the doors of both men—Wolffe in Brighton, on the English coast, and Burgess in his cottage atop Cape Gris-Nez—they were invited inside. Each man soon discovered that, in the summer at least, training Channel swimmers could be something like a full-time occupation. It certainly beat working.

  The first swimmer of note to return to the Channel waters was the first serious American contestant, Henry Sullivan of Lowell, Massachusetts. The portly son of a Lowell businessman, Sullivan, like Matthew Webb, favored the breaststroke. He had tried and failed to swim the Channel in 1913 but as soon as the mines were cleared he announced his intention to try again in 1920.

  He wasn't alone. Jabez Wolffe himself still entertained his own dim dream of making it across, and there was a growing list of others determined to try the swim, among them a waiter from Boston named Charles Toth, the Canadian Omer Perrault, Georges Michel from France, and Enrique Sebastian Tirabocchi, a native of Genoa, Italy, who was now a citizen of Argentina. Over the next few years all these swimmers and more would make repeated attempts to swim the Channel.

  It was no accident that so many were now determined to try. Before the war, for those few men who were determined to swim the Channel, the biggest impediment to the swim—apart from the tide and the weather—had been money. It was costly to spend the better part of two months in either England or France, training and awaiting the proper conditions. But after the war the European economy had collapsed, and most of Europe was in the throes of a deep recession. In 1923 one U.S. dollar was worth about seventeen French francs, or nearly four English pounds, making a middle-class American wealthy. Suddenly one didn't need to be a millionaire to finance a swim across the Channel.

  What a swimmer did need was the funds to provide for room and board either in Dover or, if one chose to swim from France, in Calais or Boulogne or the village of Gris-Nez. Apart from that the only requirement was an accompanying pilot boat and crew, and there were plenty of boats and boat captains of varying ability available to escort swimmers across the Channel.

  That was where Wolffe and Burgess came in. Although nothing beyond their experience in Channel waters really qualified either man as a swimming coach, they were still invaluable. In addition to their experience in the water each man had extensive contacts with boat captains on each side of the Channel, for each had made the crossing himself by boat many, many times. These local mariners had an intimate knowledge of the tides and weather conditions and were more than willing to assist a crossing in exchange for cash. Once a swimmer was in the water the boat captain became almost solely responsible for navigating the swimmer across the Channel.

  Beginning in 1920, and for the next several summers, each man was kept busy. Burgess found more or less part-time employment from Henry Sullivan, because after Sullivan failed in 1920 he kept returning and kept trying. He was something of a throwback, for while most swimmers had given up the breaststroke in favor of the sidestroke, or a combination, Sullivan, although he occasionally used both the sidestroke and the old trudgen, much favored the breaststroke.

  Finally, on August 9, 1923, in his sixth attempt, Henry Sullivan became the third man to swim the Channel. But he didn't so much swim it as bob across in one of the most grueling efforts in the history of Channel swimming. The New York Times reported that at times he "drifted, scarcely making progress," and "sometimes he lost distance for hours at a time," for Sullivan simply wasn't a powerful enough swimmer to swim either against or across the current. As such it took him more than a full day—twenty-six hours and fifty minutes—to cross, so long that by the time the normally clean-shaven swimmer walked ashore, he had grown a beard.

  Both Wolffe and Burgess took some credit for his success—at various times Sullivan had consulted with each man—but Burgess received the greatest acclaim. He, and not Wolffe, had been on board the pilot boat for Sullivan's entire journey.

  Although Sullivan collected his one thousand pounds from the Sketch and hustled off to London for what he hoped were some lucrative opportunities, he had precious little time to enjoy his no toriety. Only three days later, Enrique Tirabocchi, leaving from France, crossed in only sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes, cutting eight hours from Webb's record. His achievement was stunning, and again Burgess basked in the afterglow—once again, he had been aboard one of the pilot boats. Wolffe had been in the water, but had been accompanying another swimmer, one of four who tried to swim the Channel that day. Only Tirabocchi—and Burgess—found success.

  Incredibly, one month later, on September 9, another one of those swimmers, Charles Toth of Boston, who was trained by Burgess, became the third person to successfully swim the Channel, nearly matching Tirabocchi's mark with a time of sixteen hours and fifty minutes. Unlike Sullivan and Tirabocchi, however, Toth gained little from his achievement apart from the satisfaction of having done it. The Daily Sketch, after paying out two one-thousand-pound offers in a matter of days, had withdrawn the prize before Toth's swim. Swimming the Channel was suddenly becoming almost commonplace.

  In just a few short weeks the entire nature of crossing the Channel had changed. Three successful swims in such close proximity seemed to indicate that, somehow, swimming the Channel had been "solved" and simply wasn't as challenging as it once had been. To the great dismay of Jabez Wolffe, Bill Burgess was the common denominator for all three successful swims, and it appeared as if he somehow possessed a secret key to crossing the Channel.

  That wasn't entirely true. Part of the reason the three swimmers had succeeded was the weather, which had been unusually favorable, and the fact that so many swimmers were in the water trying at the same time. The 1923 season had been the busiest in Channel history—nearly twenty separate swims had been attempted—increasing the odds that someone would succeed.

  There had also been an enormous amount of luck involved. Both Tirabocchi and Toth had landed on a tiny point of land that extended into the Channel between Cape Margaret's Bay and Kingsdown—literally a spit of sand only about a yard wide at the base of a sheer cliff. Had either man missed the point, each would have been swept several miles farther down the coast and may not have finished at all.

  Yet luck was not the only reason. The era of the breaststroke and sidestroke was beginning to end, for despite Sullivan's success, both Tirabocchi and Toth used a variety of strokes but primarily depended upon the trudgen, which allowed both to swim far faster than previous Channel conquerors. In so doing, each was able to avoid a tidal change, allowing both men to swim the Channel in a course that more resembled the single letter Z rather than the squat double Z that Webb and Sullivan had followed.

  Still, swimming the Channel remained a significant challenge. Over the next few years the goal of many swimmers would not be so much to swim the Channel, but to swim the Channel faster or in some kind of novel way.

  Five men had already conquered the Channel. As the Boston Globe asked after Toth's swim, "Who will be the first woman to swim the English Channel?"

  13. Records

  ON THE MORNING of Saturday, August 5, 1922, dawn in Manhattan revealed one of those rare perfect days that happen only a few times each summer and make New York seem the center of the season. Blue skies, a gentle breeze, and a few puffy white clouds sent New Yorkers outside in droves. For sports fans—and nearly everyone was a sports fan—there was, truly, something for everyone.

  In Seabright, New Jersey, just south of the Highlands on the Jersey Shore, some three thousand spectators turned out to see Boston's Leslie Bancroft try to knock off women's tennis champion M
olla Mallory. Several thousand more traveled a bit farther south to Spring Lake where U.S. Open golf champion Gene Sarazen was scheduled to play the English champion Long Jim Barnes in thirty-six holes of match play. Excursion trains heading up the Hudson River were packed to overflowing as the biggest crowd of the racing season, more than fifteen thousand strong, pressed through the gates at Saratoga Springs to see thoroughbred sensation Martingale race in the prestigious U.S. Hotel Stakes for two-year-old thoroughbreds. A similar number of fans poured from the Ninth Avenue elevated train station near the Polo Grounds in Manhattan to see the New York Giants, in a pitched battle for first place in the National League, play host for the Chicago Cubs. And in Brooklyn, even though the Dodgers—then better known as the Robins—were in sixth place, another eight thousand fans packed Ebbets Field for a doubleheader between Brooklyn's nine and the Reds of Cincinnati. Just outside New York parks and beaches were packed to overflowing, while those who remained in the city flocked to Central Park and to Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

  In later years, the dean of American sportswriters, Grantland Rice, would refer to the decade of the 1920s as a golden age that spawned "sport's first tidal wave of popularity."

  Rice was correct, for in the 1920s, America was sports mad. For the first time in the nation's history both participating in and watching sports became something of a national obsession.

  Despite the restrictions of Prohibition after the war, America not only cut loose and cut ties with the repressive Victorian era and its restrictive sense of morality, but shed its insularity and became part of the world. The biplane heralded a new era in transportation, radio broadcasts and telephones began to become commonplace. News traveled faster and farther. What happened today could be known halfway across the world in a matter of minutes. The world had become smaller almost overnight.