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

by Glenn Stout

  For most of the spectators, this was their first real look at the swimmers they had been reading about for more than a month. And although Wainwright and James were more experienced and somewhat better known, Marguerite Mooers Marshall's profile of Ederle had done a fine job of exposing her to the public, and it responded to her bubbly personality. Trudy was still the crowd favorite.

  It also didn't hurt that when spectators saw Trudy alongside Wainwright and James, they found her much better looking than James and more voluptuous than Helen Wainwright. In person James was not quite the beauty her publicity pictures made her appear to be, while Trudy appeared as the quintessential American teenager.

  At the start of the race the three swimmers stood side by side, each dressed similarly in a competition suit, Wainwright and Ederle's both sporting the red, white, and blue logo of the WSA. Hands out front, each was poised at the edge of the pool listening for the report of the starter's pistol that signaled the beginning of the race.

  At the gun, Wainwright and James took to the air a heartbeat before Trudy, but by the time each woman had reached the surface and started to stroke, Trudy already had a slight lead. Observers later noted that she began the race as if it were a fifty-yard sprint, showing early speed that she had never before demonstrated. At the first turn she held a slight lead over both Wainwright and James, and at the end of fifty yards still swam as if she were in a sprint, while James and Wainwright began to slow. Pushing ahead of the others, Trudy also had little trouble staying in her lane. She swam straight as a string, while both Wainwright and James occasionally wavered and continually had to correct their course.

  Over the next fifty yards, Trudy slowly pulled ahead as Wainwright, who had been third at the fifty-yard mark, went into a sprint and passed Hilda James, putting her within reach of Trudy. But if Ederle felt the pressure, she didn't show it. In fact, she swam as if she were in the pool by herself, apparently unconcerned about the whereabouts of the other swimmers, never varying her stroke or taking a glance their way. She may as well have been at the Highlands, swimming along and humming to herself in the surf.

  At the two-hundred-yard mark she led Wainwright by more than a yard, with James another five feet back. Ederle was in command, but the race was still relatively close. Over the next fifty yards, however, both Wainwright and James began to flag as Ederle kept up the same inexorable pace she assumed at the start of the race. With each stroke she increased her lead by a precious inch or two.

  As she approached the turn to mark three hundred yards, the lead over Wainwright approached five yards, and race officials took their first timed measurement. They were astonished.

  The existing record over three hundred yards was 4 minutes 8⅗ seconds. Yet Trudy had covered the distance in ten and one-fifth fewer seconds—3 minutes 58⅖ seconds. She had not just broken the record, she had nearly broken the stopwatch as the incredulous timekeeper looked at his watch again and again before recording the time. In fact, officials were so shocked that they failed to get a time for Ederle at the three-hundred-meter mark—she was swimming so swiftly that she outraced the timer to the mark, a factor that undoubtedly prevented her from breaking Helen Wainwright's recent record at the distance.

  From then on it was as if Trudy Ederle swam with the current while Wainwright and James fought against a riptide. On each lap Trudy added another yard or two to her lead as Wainwright and James dropped farther and farther behind.

  And each time she passed a milestone, the same scene was repeated as the timekeeper checked his watch again and again as if unable to believe the numbers. At four hundred yards she was timed at 5 minutes 22⅖ seconds, an incredible forty seconds faster than the existing mark, and she passed the four-hundred-meter line at 5 minutes 53 seconds, forty-three seconds faster than the record, and the 440-yard mark in 5 minutes 54⅗ seconds, twenty-three seconds better than Hilda James's world best.

  While the crowd roared, sensing from both her growing lead and the behavior of race officials that something extraordinary was happening, Trudy swam merrily along, oblivious to nearly everything, utterly relaxed, wholly and completely in her element.

  And she was oblivious. She had not even bothered to keep track of her number of laps, and when she made the next turn, she rolled over on her side for a moment, spotted a race official, and without stopping asked how many more laps she still needed to swim. One observer later noted that she spoke as if "she were addressing a bystander at a club practice session." The startled official blurted out "two" and Ederle, without comment, put her face back in the water and resumed her pace.

  Leading Helen Wainwright by fifteen yards with only one lap remaining, Ederle finished in a flourish, sprinting on top of what already had looked like a sprint. She added another five yards to her lead, swimming her strongest lap yet, and touched the end of the pool just a few beats after Wainwright made the final turn. Trudy was timed at 7 minutes 22⅕ seconds for the 500-meter race, her sixth record of the day. She covered the final hundred meters in eighty-eight seconds, almost the same pace at which she had covered each of the first four hundred meters, a remarkable demonstration of her stamina and strength. Even more significant, however, was the fact that she beat Helen Wainwright by twenty yards, and bettered Hilda James by twice that distance. It was the most extraordinary performance by a woman swimmer to date, a tour de force performance that in historical terms was akin to the day in 1935 that track star sprinter Jesse Owens set world records in the long jump, 100 yards, 220 yards, and 220-yard low hurdles. There was no doubt whatsoever that Trudy Ederle was the best female swimmer in the world.

  And she was only fifteen.

  14. Girl in the Water

  THERE MAY AS WELL have been a sign on each shore of the English Channel stating the obvious: For Men Only.

  Despite the fact that Matthew Webb had swum the Channel in 1875, it had remained virtually off-limits to women swimmers of any ability. No woman even made a serious attempt to swim the Channel until 1900, when Walburga von Icacescu, an Austrian, spent ten and half hours in the water, alternating between the breaststroke and the sidestroke, reportedly covering twenty miles before giving up. Five years later Annette Kellerman made the first of her two attempts to swim the Channel using the trudgen stroke. She failed each time but garnered massive amounts of publicity for her other ventures.

  "I had the endurance," said Kellerman afterward, "but not the brute strength." For much of the next two decades that statement encompassed the prevailing attitude toward any woman who even hazarded to dream of swimming the Channel. It was considered completely out reach, beyond a woman's physical capability, about as likely as a woman fighting for and winning the heavyweight boxing title. Just as women were once considered far too frail to run a marathon, even as more and more women learned to swim, they were considered too weak to challenge the strong tides and currents of the Channel—Kellerman's admission seemed to underscore that fact. After her failures, as Wolffe and Burgess and several dozen men tested the cold Channel waters again and again and again, the English Channel remained an all-male domain. For the next decade no other woman made a serious attempt to swim the Channel.

  Then the war, the suffragist movement, the success of women's swimming at the 1920 Olympics, and economic conditions on both sides of the Atlantic all combined to make the Channel more accessible to women. Female swimmers suddenly took to the waters of the Channel as if it were an extension of the WSA swimming pool. The moral, physical, and even psychological barriers that had prevented women from competing in sports like swimming, while not entirely erased, were no longer as rigid—and neither were the swimming suits, as more and more women swimmers opted for less-confining garments more like those used by swimmers in the WSA. Women finally had the license to swim as athletes, for their health, and, increasingly, in competition. Now—finally—they could swim simply because they chose to.

  The first woman to enter the Channel after the war was Mrs. Arthur Hamilton, the daughter of the Englis
h baron Sir Charles Fairlie-Cuninghame, a confirmed member of the upper crust. Although Hamilton's effort is little known today, her attempt was hugely important in the history of women's long-distance swimming. Hamilton, whose family was known for its eccentricity and independence, had been the first woman to swim the Solent, the four-mile stretch of water between the Isle of Wight and the English mainland. During the war she became notable for her work with soldiers, helping to develop the so-called trench sock to help prevent trench foot.

  In the spring of 1920, as soon as the Channel was cleared of mines, she announced that she intended to duplicate Webb's feat and become the first woman to swim the Channel. She took her task seriously, spending months training in the Channel waters, posing for British newsreel photographers both in the water and out, modeling bathing suits—including a revealing unitard.

  Hamilton failed—due to convention, the press never even bothered to refer to her by her own given name, but as either Mrs. Hamilton or even more anonymously as "the Baron's daughter"—but although she barely made it halfway across the Channel she nevertheless stayed in the water for twelve hours, considered an unofficial record for women swimmers at the time. Although her effort was greeted with some skepticism—a Margate businessman who provided a motorboat to accompany her claimed she spent much of her swim inside the boat, a charge Hamilton vigorously denied—few argued that she did not have the right to try, even as they may have considered the attempt foolhardy. As it was, Hamilton's swim opened Channel waters to women, and when she tried again the following summer, leaving from Cape Gris-Nez, over twenty hours she man aged to make it to within three miles of Deal using the trudgen stroke, an effort no one questioned. With each stroke of her arms she supplied increasing evidence that swimming the Channel was within a woman's capacity.

  The next female Channel swimmer of note was Amelia "Mille" Gade of Denmark. As a young woman Gade grew up in Vejle, a fjord on Denmark's east coast. Athletically inclined, Gade, although she stood only five feet four, was built more like a football lineman, squat with large bones and, for a woman, heavily muscled. Although her parents hoped she would become a musician like her father, she was more athletically inclined. She learned to swim and as a young woman worked as a swimming instructor and lifeguard, reportedly rescuing no fewer than three swimmers from drowning in the waters near Vejle. On one occasion she even retrieved a young girl who had gone under for the last time in twenty feet of water. Gade managed not only to bring her to the surface, but to haul her seventy-five feet to shore, where she was resuscitated and survived. Her act of heroism earned a decoration from King Christian X.

  It was not, however, enough to make Gade remain in Denmark. Like the rest of Europe, Denmark's economy was in a shambles after the war. In the fall of 1919, at age twenty-two, she immigrated to the United States, passing through Ellis Island and joining her older sister Helga. Gade, who spoke some English, was soon hired as a swimming instructor at the Harlem branch of the YWCA.

  Teaching swimming, however, was little challenge to Gade, who missed the notoriety that had been hers in Denmark, as she once explained, "It was funny, very funny to come to this big country where nobody knew me. At home, all the people know who I am—a big swimmer in a country with many." All over America, it seemed, young people were swept up in all manner of fads and stunts, from marathon dancing to flagpole sitting and other nonsensical pursuits. In the summer of 1921, Gade, who was determined, as she put it, "to do something fine in my line," stared at the waters of the Harlem River and was suddenly seized by the notion to swim around the island of Manhattan.

  She stopped a passerby and asked how far it was. He shrugged and told her it was probably thirty or forty miles. "Right then" she later said, "I decided to swim." It wasn't a particularly original idea—Robert Dowling had been the first to accomplish the feat in 1915, and a woman, Ida Elionsky, had done the same in 1916, completing the swim in eleven hours and thirty-five minutes, two hours faster than Dowling. The swim was challenging but was as much a matter of planning as athletic skill. To succeed a swimmer had to make the best use of the tides and currents that swept around Manhattan, riding the outgoing tide south and hoping to catch the incoming tide back north.

  This did not deter Gade. She boldly approached the naval vessel USS Illinois, docked at the foot of West Ninety-sixth Street in the Hudson River for use by the New York state naval militia, and asked for maps and tidal charts to assist her in planning her swim.

  She received all that and even more, meeting Lieutenant Clemington Corson, a thirty-seven-year-old career navy man. Corson not only helped her out with maps, but the two quickly became an item. He taught her how to read the charts, assisted her in her training, and a few months later accompanied her on her swim, trailing her in a rowboat. Gade, primarily using the breaststroke, succeeded, finishing her swim in fifteen hours and fifty-seven minutes, while covering a distance of some forty miles. But in a world increasingly impressed by fads, she received far more attention for her swim than either Elionsky or Dowling had received for theirs, even though Gade was by far the slowest of the three.

  Gade was undeterred. Thrilled with the spotlight, in September she set her sights on another swim heavily impacted by the tides and current. She announced that she would swim down the Hudson River from Albany to New York, a distance of some 150 miles. Once more she rode the tide, and she reached Manhattan 153 hours after leaving Albany, spending 63 hours in the water—the first person to accomplish the swim in more than twenty-five years.

  The six-day journey kept her in the headlines for a week, and this second swim made Gade famous. Each day she spent in the water she drew more attention, and as she approached New York more and more spectators turned out to watch her pass, and whenever Gade was aware of the crowd she wisely stayed close to shore.

  The press loved her. It didn't hurt that Gade, despite her size, photographed well, her blond hair and high cheekbones accentuating a bright and open smile. The story of the immigrant who fell in love with the doughboy was ready-made for the postwar press, and only a few weeks after the swim she and Corson married, using the occasion to announce that Gade—who retained her maiden name in swimming events—next intended to swim the English Channel.

  It would be two years, however, before Gade Corson made good on her promised intention. She quickly became pregnant and gave birth to a son, then was hired as swimming instructor on her husband's naval vessel, essentially providing sponsorship for her swimming career, and began training with Louis Leibgold, well-known race walker and physical director of the Illinois. In the summer of 1923 she finally made it to England, training with Henry Sullivan and several other men who planned to try to swim the Channel.

  She made her first attempt to swim the Channel on August 9, 1923, just a day after Henry Sullivan's successful crossing. But with the French coast in sight, the water turned rough, the tide turned, and Gade Corson was pushed back some seven miles before abandoning her attempt after spending fourteen and a half hours in the water and covering twenty-one miles. Although few made note of it at the time, until the moment she left the water Gade Corson had actually outperformed Sullivan, swimming much faster than the American man.

  Like a sand castle facing a rising tide, the barriers that barred women from competing in sports were beginning to fall. As Thelda Bleibtrey had told the Ladies' Home Journal earlier that summer, "The tremendous advance of women in athletics during the past twenty years, and especially in the past five years, has been a thrilling drama to me." Just a few weeks earlier Sybil Bauer, an eighteen-year-old student at Northwestern University, had shocked the world by unofficially breaking the men's world record for the 440-yard backstroke. Although the new record was never officially recognized due to the fact she swam in an unsanctioned meet and used the new "alternate arm" backstroke rather than then standard double arm method in which both arms were used in tandem, it nevertheless represented a stunning achievement.

  That was part of the reason that Gade
Corson's presence in Channel waters had caused so little comment or controversy. Due to the efforts of the WSA, at least as far as the sport of swimming was concerned, women swimmers were no longer a novelty. As one anony mous writer in the Literary Digest cautioned at the time, "Masculine holders of championships in athletics, look to your laurels. Sundry members of the so called weaker sex, having obtained the vote and many other things upon which they had set their dear fluttering little hearts, are now out for far bigger game. Frankly, they are making what maybe called Herculean efforts to overcome the vaunted superiority of their brothers."

  Everywhere one looked, all of a sudden it seemed as if there was a girl in the water, swimming faster than ever before.

  Why should the English Channel be any different?

  15. Trials

  TRUDY WAS SO GOOD it was almost getting monotonous.

  After her record-setting performance on Labor Day, Trudy Ederle was still a long, long way from swimming the English Channel, although she may have started entertaining the notion as she shared space on the sports page the next day with Charles Toth, who had just become the third man to swim the Channel that summer, and the fifth of all time. But for the next year and a half, all she did was swim and win, at any distance, under any conditions, against any competition, setting world records with nearly every breath and kick. Fifty yards in an indoor pool against the world record holder? Check. One hundred and twenty yards in an outdoor pool in Bermuda against Britain's best swimmers? Check. A half mile in an ocean pool? Check. With the wind in her face? Check. When she was sick? Check. In Boston? Check. When it was hot? In Indianapolis? Honolulu? Bermuda? Over four hundred meters, the quarter mile, the half mile, in a relay, in a sixty-foot pool, over 50 yards, 100, 120, 150, 200, 400, a half mile, in a handicap, giving every other swimmer a head start? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. "Ederle Sets World Record" became as common a headline in the sports pages as "Ruth Hits Home Run."