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

by Glenn Stout

  18. Wolffe

  THE DAY AFTER Trudy Ederle swam from the Battery to Sandy Hook, she met her chaperone, Elsie Viets, at Pier 54 at the foot of West Twelfth Street to sail for England aboard the Berengaria, the pride of the Cunard Line. Although Charlotte Epstein had originally intended to accompany Trudy and Helen Wainwright, when Wainwright dropped out it was decided that only Viets would make the trip with Trudy.

  Even among the nearly five thousand passengers, thousand-man crew, and thousands of visitors aboard the ship to see people off, Trudy Ederle stood out. In the wake of her record-setting swim the day before, newsreel and still photographers sought her out and made certain they shot some footage of her boarding the vessel and posing on deck. By the time she reached England, moviegoers all over the United States would be made aware of her quest. When it came time to swim the Channel, the entire nation would follow Trudy's wake.

  At the same time a syndicated article by Louis Handley appeared in newspapers from coast to coast. Entitled "Will 'Trudy' be the First to Swim the Channel?" Handley, logically and dispassionately, laid out the reasons why he expected her to succeed. After citing Trudy's already substantial accomplishments from the Day Cup to the Sandy Hook swim, Handley concluded, "From every point of view then, Miss Ederle appears ready for the great venture."

  Unlike for her trip to the Olympics the previous summer, conditions on board the Berengaria would play no role in her success or failure. She was pleased to discover that accommodations on the Berengaria were much more opulent than those on board the America. Like the America, the Berengaria had also been confiscated from Germany during the war and turned over to the British as reparations for the sinking of the Lusitania. The flagship of the Cunard Line, the enormous vessel, which measured over nine hundred feet in length, was the most luxurious liner of its day, featuring almost every creature comfort imaginable, including numerous restaurants, lounges, saloons, gymnasiums, a sauna, and a cinema.

  To Trudy, however, the most significant feature of the ship was its swimming pool. Although not the first cruise ship to feature a pool, none was as lavish as that of the Berengaria. The indoor pool measured twelve meters by twenty-four meters, cut through two decks, and looked like it would have been more at home in a Roman villa of antiquity. In fact, it was decorated in the Pompeian style, complete with marble benches and columns, fountains, a tiled promenade, and other features that seemed entirely unlikely on a cruise ship. As Trudy limbered up in the pool, the irony must not have been lost on her—had the America been equipped with such a pool, perhaps Trudy would have been more successful in the 1924 Olympics. Then again, had she won three gold medals, she may well have felt no need to take on the English Channel.

  The weeklong trip was uneventful, and as soon as Trudy and Miss Viets disembarked at Southampton, they traveled to Brighton and met Jabez Wolffe for the first time. They planned to train there for the next month before moving across the Channel to Boulogne, France. At the time, most Channel swimmers had concluded that the route from France to England was somewhat easier than beginning in England.

  From their first meeting, the swimmer and the trainer eyed each other warily. Trudy and Viets were accustomed to the quiet, professional, polite, almost scientific approach of Louis Handley, who built a swimmer's skill and confidence slowly and incrementally. Jabez Wolffe was an entirely different creature.

  He saw little need to indulge in social pleasantries and eyed Trudy like she was a racehorse, looking her up and down as if he were trying to determine if she met his standard by her shape alone. The burly old swimmer was built like a barrel, his round face in a permanent flush. He was a tough man to begin with, gruff, blunt, and short spoken, and his nearly two dozen trials in Channel waters had done little to soften his approach. Because he had failed so often, he thought failure was the norm and tried to scare swimmers with tales of the horrors they were certain to endure—the power of positive thinking was not an approach he recognized. He resented anyone who did not share his dour outlook.

  From their first conversation, Wolffe underscored the notion that swimming the Channel was nearly impossible, a point that he felt he had to impress on Ederle again and again and again. He dismissed her swims in America—"The Channel is different, Miss Ederle," became a phrase Trudy would soon hear in her sleep. To hear Wolffe tell it, there was no water anywhere in the world colder than the waters of the Channel, no tide more mysterious, no current swifter, no weather less forgiving. Nothing she had previously done, insisted Wolffe, prepared her in any way for what was about to come.

  Trudy, however, thought differently. Before she left the United States, Louis Handley had designed her training schedule for her, slowly increasing the time she spent in the water so she could acclimate to Channel conditions, focused on getting her in shape to maintain a steady rate of twenty-eight strokes to the minute, a rate designed to get her across the Channel in less than fourteen hours, a strategy that that would bridge only two tidal cycles so her route across would resemble the much-preferred single letter Z rather than the squat—and slower—double Z.

  Wolffe rolled his eyes at that. There was no way she'd swim the Channel that quickly, he thought. In fact, he was unimpressed with almost everything Trudy did and said. He took issue with her style of swimming, her training schedule, and Handley's assumptions about the Channel. Wolffe didn't believe in the American crawl, at least for use in the rough waters of the open sea, and refused to believe that any swimmer, much less a young woman, could possibly maintain the stroke for the many hours it would take to cross the Channel. And even if a swimmer did use the crawl in the Channel, Wolffe argued, Trudy's rapid stroke rate was impossible to maintain. Handley, thought Wolffe, was a fool, a mere pool swimmer, and his belief that Trudy could swim the Channel in fourteen hours was pure fantasy.

  That was only half of it. Wolffe was accustomed to young women who deferred to him because of both his gender and his status as a Channel expert. Neither Trudy nor Elsie Viets paid him the deference he felt he deserved. Trudy now wore her hair in a bob, a practical style for a swimmer but still considered risqué in some circles, and her speech was peppered with the latest slang—to Trudy, Wolffe was "all wet." Even worse, she didn't listen to Wolffe but had her own opinions about swimming. Although Trudy was generally shy, when it came to swimming she knew her stuff and wasn't afraid to express her opinion. Over the past few months Meg and Handley had convinced her she could succeed, and she had never felt more self-assured. Wolffe had expected to meet a malleable hunk of clay. Instead he met a young woman brimming with confidence, certain and secure.

  In short, Wolffe behaved as if he was offended by the fact that Trudy was a more talented swimmer than he had ever been, or that a woman might be able to do something that he himself never could. When Trudy began to train in the waters off Brighton, Wolffe tried to change everything. He was soon disabused of that notion by Viets, who from the start served as an advocate for Trudy and as a foil between the trainer and the swimmer. She told the trainer that while they welcomed Wolffe's suggestions, his main responsibility was logistical. He was expected to lend his expertise to the actual details of the crossing—securing a support boat and an experienced captain and navigators who could direct Trudy across, taking into consideration the weather, the currents, and the tides and, based on his own knowledge of local conditions, recommending the best time to make an attempt. As far as Trudy's training went, Wolffe was to supervise her sessions and attend to her physical safety, but he was largely expected to leave the details of her training schedule alone and not make any recommendations whatsoever in regard to her swimming stroke.

  Wolffe was infuriated. He was not accustomed to such treatment and reacted by berating Trudy at every opportunity. During her training swims, when Wolffe followed alongside her in his rowboat he constantly urged her to slow down and screamed at her that she'd never make it across the Channel if she failed to follow his instructions. "This isn't a 400-meter race, Miss Ederle," Wolffe
called out sarcastically over and over again. Despite Viets's admonitions to leave her stroke alone, Wolffe continued to try to dissuade Trudy from Handley's notion of swimming at the rate of twenty-eight strokes per minute to a much slower rate of eighteen or twenty, a pace Trudy knew would cause her to spend at least eighteen hours in the water and therefore contend with a third tidal change. This would make the chances of her success slim. She didn't just reject his suggestions, but laughed at them, making him even angrier.

  Wolffe didn't think she was working hard enough, either. Handley had recommended that Trudy swim for two hours each day and spend another two hours doing road work, walking and hiking, enough to build her stamina without wearing her out.

  Wolffe thought that was crazy. He believed a person trained for swimming the Channel by swimming in the Channel, over and over again, sometimes for extended periods of time. He wanted Trudy to spend many more hours in the water and much preferred a schedule in which over a three-day period she spent ever more time in the water, then took the fourth day off, and then repeated the pattern. Then, after every workout, he wanted to give Trudy a deep and vigorous massage of her muscles, particularly those of her arms and legs. He believed that over time such massages, which took at least an hour under his rough hands, "hardened" the muscles and made them immune to fatigue.

  Trudy was appalled—she wanted none of it. At age eighteen she didn't want anyone to touch her that she didn't want to touch her, particularly a middle-aged man she didn't particularly like and already did not trust. Elsie Viets stepped in and told Wolffe that if he thought massages were so necessary, they would have to be administered by a woman.

  Wolffe even found fault with the way Trudy spent her time when she wasn't training. Trudy had brought along a ukulele and when she wasn't in the water or doing road work she was teaching herself to play and could be found curled up in a corner crouched over the instrument plucking out a tune. Wolffe would look at her, and with sarcasm dripping from his voice, ask, "Playing the ukulele again, are we, Miss Ederle?" as if every second she spent with a ukulele in her hand was adding miles to her journey across the Channel. Trudy would just ignore him and play a little louder.

  They might as well have dug trenches, like opposing forces in the Great War, Trudy and Viets on one side and Wolffe on the other, and a considerable breach of trust in the middle. Nevertheless, it was too late for either side to change—Wolffe had already been paid, needed the money, and was still the most experienced trainer in England. Burgess, at Cape Gris-Nez, was already engaged by other swimmers.

  After nearly a month in Brighton, in the last week of July, Trudy, Viets, and Wolffe relocated across the Channel, to Boulogne, on the coast just south of Cape Gris-Nez. Now she could train in the same waters she would encounter at the start of her swim, and whenever Wolffe determined that conditions were amenable to the swim, Trudy wouldn't have to race across the Channel from England. Although she would have preferred to stay in the village of Cape Gris-Nez, where her swim would begin, there were no accommodations available—other swimmers and journalists had locked up all the space at the only two hotels in town. Wolffe had targeted two periods when he believed that tidal conditions might prove favorable for Trudy to make her attempt—August 4 to 7, and August 17 to 19. While Trudy waited for Wolffe to give the go-ahead, other Channel swimmers weren't waiting around.

  Lillian Harrison had already tried and failed to swim the Channel a few weeks before but was preparing to make another attempt. A Japanese swimmer, Masanori Nakamuri, was in training, as were the World War I hero Colonel Cyril Freyburg, the Frenchwoman Jeanne Sion, and a garrulous giant of a swimmer from Egypt, Ishaq Helmi.

  The son of a famous Egyptian general, Helmi, the spelling of which caused newspapermen on both sides of the Channel fits, was as close to being a professional Channel swimmer as was then humanly possible. Considered a member of Egyptian royalty with the rank of bek, Helmi received a stipend of some twenty-five thousand dollars a year and was in training to swim the Channel at the behest of King Fouad I, who for nationalistic reasons wanted an Egyptian to make a crossing. Helmi spent the bulk of his annual fortune on his desire to swim the Channel—in the summer of 1925 he had rented one of Cape Gris-Nez's two hotels for his use alone, effectively trying to block other swimmers from having access to the town.

  Although all the swimmers in training for crossing the Channel were, in some way, in competition with one another, they were more in competition with the Channel itself. Over time the swimmers became close to one another. Despite his lease of the hotel, Helmi's broad, open face, bright smile, and gentle manner made him in stantly likeable. He served as something of a social secretary and big brother among the swimmers, leading excursions to the beach and impromptu gatherings at his hotel. Nearly every time a swimmer entered the water, Helmi volunteered his services as a pacesetter. Standing six feet four inches and weighing upward of 250 pounds, although Helmi didn't swim very fast he was blessed with considerable stamina and strength, making him invaluable.

  As July turned into August the swimmers began jockeying for position to make their crossing. The summer had been unusually hot, and the waters of the Channel were warmer than usual, sometimes as warm as sixty-four or sixty-five degrees, but that didn't necessarily make the trip any easier—warm water did not necessarily mean calm seas. Each time a swimmer entered the Channel the other swimmers paid close attention, eager to learn from their experience and hoping their encounter with the Channel was not so horrible as to destroy their confidence and cause them to second guess their own efforts.

  Taking advantage of a favorable tide, Jeanne Sion left from France on the morning of August 4 and swam strongly, if not terribly fast, for the better part of the day. As dusk approached, she was only one and one-quarter miles from the English coast when the tide turned and forced her from the water after some thirteen and a half hours. As she made her return to France her boat passed Colonel Freyburg, who had entered the water twelve hours after Sion. He swam through the dark and the next morning was within a quarter mile of the white cliffs of Dover, near enough to hear the crowds onshore cheering him on. One member of his party, noting that the tide was beginning to change, told a reporter, "If he can get over the next 200 yards in fifteen minutes, he'll make it."

  But those two hundred yards might as well have been two hundred miles. The tide turned, and Freyburg was simply not a strong enough swimmer to go against it, yet he refused to quit. For the next two hours, despite his best effort, he was slowly but surely swept back toward France, losing more than a mile before he finally lost his bearings and, delirious, began swimming back toward France. When he was pulled from the sea he had spent nearly seventeen hours in the water.

  Trudy was not put off by these failures, and the other swimmers, amazed at her speed, boosted her self-confidence when they told her they believed she would succeed. While Trudy waited for the go-ahead from Wolffe, she continued training.

  In some areas Trudy did take Wolffe's advice. She took part in several "dress rehearsals" of the swim that mimicked the conditions she'd soon face for real. During these practices Trudy wore the one-piece unitard she expected to use during the swim and donned her bathing cap and goggles, which were attached to her face with latex in an attempt to create a waterproof seal. Wolffe and Trudy experimented with various types of grease and oils to cover her body, not only so she could get accustomed to the feel, but to the smell, as she tried various combinations of olive oil, petroleum jelly, lanolin, and porpoise fat to reduce chafing and help her to retain her body heat. Wolffe, who still expected that she would spend as much as twenty hours in the water, also wanted to make sure Trudy grew accustomed to swimming in the dark. He recommended that she begin her swim before sunrise so her time in the darkness would take place while she was still fresh. Wolffe not only trailed her in a rowboat, as he would during her real attempt, but even had an accompanying tugboat shadow her so she would grow accustomed to the sound of its engines and its effec
t on the surf.

  In any Channel crossing, due to the strain and the cold Channel waters, swimmers must take nourishment. Although Trudy had neither eaten nor drunk during the Sandy Hook swim, the journey across the Channel would be at least twice as long and in cold water, Channel swimmers can burn more than twenty thousand calories. According to the then unwritten but widely accepted rules of Channel crossing, if a swimmer was touched, even accidentally, by another human being while in the water, or sought support on a floating object, such as a boat, the swim was invalid. As a result, finding a way to eat and drink in the water posed quite a challenge, as did getting accustomed to eating and drinking while battling seasickness and the accidental ingestion of seawater. Wolffe practiced passing food and drink to Trudy from the rowboat, sometimes by hand, and sometimes by means of a long pole to cut down on the chance of an accidental touch. He made himself responsible for selecting her food and drink, convincing Trudy and Viets that he knew what would be palatable in mid-Channel.

  Trudy's dress rehearsals were near perfect. During one swim she spent three hours in the water, and even though she battled an adverse tide for the first sixty minutes, she still swam nine miles from shore and her pace of twenty-six strokes per minute never varied. Observers, including the tug captain Joseph Corthes, who had captained many crossings, were stunned not only at her pace but with the ease with which she moved through the water. He called her "marvelous," and offered that he believed she would beat Tirabocchi's mark "by several hours."

  Trudy did find one of Wolffe's suggestions utterly baffling, at least at first. For each of Wolffe's many attempts, he tried to swim to the accompaniment of a bagpiper on his support boat playing familiar tunes, helping him battle boredom and maintain the proper pace. He wanted Trudy to do the same. "If I have anything to say about the musical program," he said, "we will have several bagpipers so that they can work in relays, a fresh man to take up the tune as fast as the piper is exhausted," adding that he had the bagpiper play different tunes during meals and when he needed extra motivation requested his favorite tune, "I Love a Lassie."