Downstream
To all Thames swimmers, past, present and future . . .
Contents
Introduction
Trewsbury Mead–Lechlade–Grafton Lock
Cotswolds Swim
Oxford
Reading
Shiplake and Wargrave
Henley-on-Thames
Marlow–Cookham–Maidenhead
Windsor and Eton
Hampton Court–Molesey Lock–Sunbury–Kingston
Teddington
Richmond
Kew–Chiswick
Putney
The Port of London Authority
Battersea–Lambeth
Westminster
Charing Cross–Blackfriars
London Bridge
Tower Bridge and Tower Beach
London Docklands
Dock Swim
Greenwich–Woolwich–Grays–Gravesend
Southend
Crowstone Swim
Andy, Ness and the OSS
Swimming the Thames: Then and Now
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Introduction
‘For they were young and the Thames was old,
And this is the tale that the River told’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The River’s Tale’, 1911
I’m standing at the edge of a marshy meadow in Gloucestershire, cold water seeping into my wellington boots. In front of me, under an ancient ash tree, is a squat monument that looks like a tombstone, inscribed with the words: THE CONSERVATORS OF THE RIVER THAMES 1857–1974. THIS STONE WAS PLACED HERE TO MARK THE SOURCE OF THE RIVER THAMES. A wooden sign shows the direction of the Thames Path, which follows the river for most of its length, while the sign below reads ‘Thames Barrier London 184 miles’. It’s early February and there have been flood warnings all along the path, following heavy snow, a thaw and general downpours. Normally this spot is bone dry, but today I could almost swim in it.
Beneath my boots is a clear pool of water, with blades of grass and smooth pale stones. A handful of bubbles rise to the surface and for a moment I wonder if there are fish in here, but this is water straight out of the Cotswolds earth, where a spring becomes a pool and then a stream. This is where, in theory, it all begins, this trickle of water that forms the longest river that is entirely in England, covering 215 miles from the heart of the countryside through its capital and out to the North Sea.
The River Thames has existed in one form or another for millions of years. It has been written and sung about, painted and mapped, portrayed as a place both majestic and dangerous, refreshing and polluted. It is father – or grandfather – Thames when noble or particularly chilly; it is mother Thames when tranquil and offering a watery embrace. People have drunk from it, washed and fished in it, and used it to dispose of every sort of waste. It has been a highway, a boundary and a food store, home to porpoises, whales, otters and sharks. An important trade and transport route since prehistoric times, it has carried passengers and goods from and to all over the world in boats of all shapes and sizes. We have rowed, sailed, canoed and punted along it; we’ve held regattas and aquatic carnivals, played water polo and skated over its frozen surface. But what of its swimmers? What of all those who have been drawn to its waters for enjoyment and to show off their skills, swims daring and reckless, theatrical and highly symbolic?
Before I started researching this book I’d only ever swum once in the River Thames, some forty years ago on a warm summer’s evening near Taplow in Berkshire. I was ten years old and staying with a schoolfriend and I remember laughing as we tried to swim against the current. I’d never considered its history as a place to swim, or stopped to wonder if my childhood splash made me part of a tradition. But it did, because this has been our bathing spot for centuries.
This is the story of Thames swimming as I travel from source to sea, visiting places with long traditions of river swimming, delving into town and city archives, interviewing modern-day swimmers, and looking for evidence, whether written, photographic or oral, of how we used to swim. I want to explore the character of the Thames and discover what it has meant, and still means, to the people who live by it and swim in it, to celebrate all those who have meandered along it and raced down it, who have submerged themselves for pleasure or for charity, who have performed spectacular dives from boats and bridges. What remains of how we once swam, what happened to the individuals and the clubs? Who has been documented and who has been forgotten?
Victorian ‘swimming professors’ taught people how to swim as well as giving public displays at indoor baths and in the Thames.
The Romans, who built the first bridge over the Thames, enjoyed military training swims, and for hundreds of years the river was the playground of royalty. Edward II swam as both Prince and King in the twelfth century; King Charles II was nearly assassinated while swimming near Battersea in the seventeenth century when the Thames was so ‘clear and pure’ that ‘noblemen’ swam in it all the time. Jonathan Swift took regular dips in the early 1700s; Lord Byron boasted of having swum three miles from Lambeth to London Bridge in 1807.
Soon the Thames was a major trading route for ships and, as a result, the river became the haunt of pirates and thieves. Yet even as London became industrialised, as docks were built and warehouses lined its banks, people still swam. While history tells us that princes, kings, earls and poets swam in the Thames, as did the privileged public school boys of Westminster and Eton, the students and dons of Oxford University, what of the average person? This has always been our summer bathing spot. Seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick sent his ‘supremest kiss/To thee, my silver-footed Thamesis’ where in the ‘summer sweeter evenings’ thousands ‘bathe in thee’.
But it was the fact people bathed naked that led to the first regulation of Thames swimming. In the mid-1800s ‘indecency’ was seen as such a problem that male bathers were issued fines by local magistrates. ‘What are the poor people to do?’ asked one letter writer to The Times, but to use the ‘great highway of the Thames’, when there were no baths in which to swim. But then the 1846 Baths and Washhouses Act allowed the building of indoor pools, swimming became popularised and it wasn’t long before societies and clubs were formed. Soon the pupils of the National Swimming Society were racing in the Thames, despite the fact that sewage pollution was so severe it would result in cholera outbreaks.
Originally races were held for a bet and a dare. In 1791 three men apparently swam from Westminster Bridge to London Bridge for an eight-guinea wager. The winner was carried to a pub to celebrate, where he drank so much gin he ‘expired’. Then races for men became far more organised; in 1840 the ‘aquatic jockeys’ raced twice across the Thames near Battersea, naked. The one-mile amateur championships began in 1869, from Putney to Hammersmith, while in 1877 the Lords and Commons race, the long-distance amateur championships of Great Britain, went from Putney to Westminster. Endurance swimmers also used it as their training ground, including Captain Matthew Webb, the first man to swim across the Channel successfully and unaided in 1875 and whose feat would transform the world of swimming.
Girls and women often swam in the Thames in Victorian times, where they won numerous medals and trophies.
Yet, while some of these swimmers’ exploits have gone down in history, for others their adventures have been wiped out, especially the women. It’s a common belief that in Victorian times women rarely swam, at least competitively. But they did, and their venue of choice was often the Thames, where men proved their ‘manliness’ and women proved not only that they could swim but that they could successfully compete in a male arena.
Thousands gathered on banks and bridges to watch teenage champions such as Agnes Beckwith, ‘the youthful water sprite’
, Emily Parker, the ‘heroine of the Thames’, and famed diver Marie Finney.
By the 1890s there were men-only swimming clubs all along the Thames – in Oxford, Reading, Henley, Windsor, Kingston and Southend – with seventeen swimming clubs holding their captaincy races in the Thames in London. Soon swimmers were flocking from all over the world to compete, although there remains confusion about some of the distances swum, their starting and ending points. It can be difficult tracing the history of the various swimming societies, groups and clubs, and establishing who won what at a time when swimmers frequently called themselves ‘champion of London’ or ‘champion of the world’.
As swimming became a leisure activity for the masses, floating baths were opened near Hungerford Bridge in London with filtered water ‘clear and green’. All along the Thames places were created for swimmers: at Tumbling Bay in Oxford, King’s Meadow in Reading, Solomon’s Hatch in Henley and Cuckoo Weir in Eton there were bathing islands, open-air baths, floating platforms and pontoons, and temporary lidos.
Londoners flocked to the upper Thames on houseboats and steam launches, attending regattas and Venetian-style fêtes, river picnics and carnivals. Jerome K. Jerome immortalised the boating trip in his 1889 book Three Men in a Boat in which his narrator sets off with two friends and a dog to journey upriver from Kingston. The river is an escape, a landscape and way of life ‘free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving’, and bathing would form a big part of the trip; ‘we all talked as if we were going to have a long swim every morning’. But at once things begin to go wrong: the river is full of inept city boaters, parties of provincial ’Arrys and ’Arriets, just like themselves. While the plan is to get up early and ‘fling off our rugs and shawls’ and ‘spring into the river with a joyous shout, and revel in a long delicious swim’, once morning dawns the notion is less tempting. Still, their intention is to head upstream to Oxford ‘on a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river, if it killed us’.
By now the Thames was seen as ‘quite respectable’ compared with a hundred years earlier. It had ‘come to be largely used as a place of public recreation and resort’ according to the 1885 Thames Preservation Act, although men still swam naked. A Thames Conservancy by-law of 1887 warned that ‘no person shall bathe without proper bathing dress or drawers, bathe or prepare to bathe between the hours of eight in the morning and nine in the evening during the months of June, July and August or during the remaining months between the hours of eight in the morning and eight in the evening, except in bathing places authorized by the Conservators’. In 1889 this was amended so that no one should bathe without proper dress or drawers ‘unless properly screened from view’, which would have a significant impact on many Thames bathing places.
But the river could also be dangerous, the scene of fatal collisions, drownings, murder and tragedy. ‘Few things are pleasanter on a hot day than a plunge into one of the deep, quiet, shady pools in which the Thames abounds,’ commented Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames in 1887. ‘But it should always be remembered that any sudden flood . . . may transform the usually safe bathing place into what is practically nothing more nor less than a death trap.’ The dangers of the Thames were ever-present, many died because they didn’t know how to swim, while around 500 Londoners killed themselves each year by jumping into the river.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the success of the British team at the 1908 Olympic Games in London, swimming gained even more favour. Women began to form their own clubs, at Kingston, Reading and Windsor, holding regular races in the often icy Thames. Australian Annette Kellerman – the most famous woman swimmer of the last century – swam thirteen miles from Putney to Blackwell in her debut British swim in 1905. Others included Elsie Aykroyd, the American ‘girl fish’, Lily Smith, the only woman to compete in the first Richmond to Blackfriars race in 1907, and Eileen Lee, who beat the world record for women after swimming thirty-six miles from Teddington in 1916. Women didn’t have the vote, they were still seen as the weaker sex – physically and mentally – and yet here they were swimming for hours over long distances in the Thames.
Annette Kellerman, the champion Australian swimmer, made her British debut in the River Thames in 1905. Here an illustration from her 1919 book How to Swim shows her demonstrating a dive.
River racing was put on hold during the First World War, and then the growth of municipal baths drew people away from rivers and into purpose-built pools. Yet still in the 1920s championships and endurance swims continued, and river swimming was a popular family activity until at least the 1940s. The Thames became a seaside resort for Londoners, with beaches at Putney, Tower Bridge, Greenwich and Grays. When the children’s beach at the Tower of London opened in 1934 King George V declared that children would ‘have this tidal playground as their own for ever’.
In 1957 the river was declared biologically dead, bombing during the Second World War had damaged infrastructure, sewage was heading straight into the Thames again and in some stretches there was no oxygen and no life form at all. Organised racing was now largely over, and by the 1970s swimming in the Thames was considered dangerous. Local boroughs began to ban swimming, citing pollution, warning signs were erected, access became harder. Traditional swimming spots were closed down, and although by now Thames water quality was improving, this was a trend that continued into the 1990s.
Yet in the past decade or so we have returned to the Thames, with thousands of swimmers, many of them triathletes in wetsuits, taking part in mass events at Windsor, Eton, Hampton Court and the London Docks. River swimming may be nowhere near the scale it used to be, but it is back: from the Bridge to Bridge swim between Henley and Marlow, to the Great River Swim from Chiswick Pier, and the Crowstone Crawl in the Thames Estuary. Wild swimming is more popular than it has been for decades, and the River Thames is what Kate Rew, founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society, calls ‘a swimming super highway’.
Despite the modern cult of Health & Safety, and signs specifically banning swimming, people continue to enjoy the Thames. For many it’s the memory of a childhood pleasure that takes them back, as if returning to the world of The Wind in the Willows in which the river – a ‘sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh’ – is as much a character as Mole, Ratty, Badger and Mr Toad. It is Ratty’s world and he wouldn’t want any other, from the ‘shock of the early plunge’ in the morning to the bathing of an afternoon, radiant by day yet full of mystery and even terror at night. It is the place of his ‘song-dream’, striking awe into everyone who beholds it.
Today the Thames is, after the sea, our second favourite open-water place to swim in, according to the charity Swimathon, and the most common things we do while we swim are: relax, think about the day and sing. The river has a magnetic draw over anyone who likes to bathe, although there has always been conflict between its various users, and now, at least officially, we can’t swim downstream from Putney any more. In 2012 a by-law was introduced preventing people from swimming between Putney Bridge and Crossness, just below the Thames Barrier, without prior permission from the Port of London Authority (PLA). It argues that ‘this is a dangerous stretch of the river, with strong tides and eddies that can drag a person underwater without warning. It is also the busiest inland waterway in the UK.’ There are passenger vessels ‘which carry over six million people a year and 1,000-tonne barges carrying freight. In this environment, swimming in the Thames is akin to rambling on the M25. A hazardous undertaking.’ But others question if swimming in the Thames should be a criminal offence when it has always been a natural pastime. And why, when the river is now generally seen as one of the world’s cleanest metropolitan waterways, are we so worried about pollution?
In recent years Thames swims are more likely to be for stunts and protests, from John Prescott’s 1983 swim against dumping nuclear waste in the sea, to Trenton Oldfield’s disruption of the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race in 2012.
When, in 2006, Lewis Pugh became the first person to swim the entire length of the Thames it was to bring attention to the issue of climate change.
Raising money for charity is another major motivation. It is one of the reasons Alison Streeter swam upstream from Gravesend to Richmond in 1986 and why Andy Nation became the first person to swim the length of the non-tidal Thames in 2005. It is why brothers Richard and Mark Walsh swam from Lechlade to Teddington in 2009, American Charlie Wittmack swam along the Thames and across the English Channel in 2010, and why David Walliams completed a 140-mile swim in 2011. While David wasn’t the first modern swimmer to undertake a long-distance swim in the Thames, the fact that he is a celebrity and the enormous publicity that surrounded his swim for Sport Relief raised its profile. And because he fell sick, it also put a lot of people off, convinced they too would get ill.
The biggest fear among non-river swimmers is contracting Weil’s disease, a severe form of leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread by animals. Swimmers can potentially catch the disease from water contaminated with the urine of infected rats, but leptospirosis is rare in the UK; forty-four cases were reported in England and Wales in 2011, of which fifteen originated overseas, and none was fatal.
Others swim for different reasons. Matthew Parris made a midnight excursion across the Thames in 2010, just to see if it could be done, while artist Amy Sharrocks is planning a mass swim across the Thames from Tower Bridge. ‘It’s our river,’ she says. ‘It is the whole reason we are here in London, it’s the reason for the metropolis.’ Others still swim the Thames to win a bet or for a dare, just as in Victorian times, individuals such as Peter Rae who in 2003 swam across the estuary from Southend to Kent – and back.
This book is a trip downstream, from a marshy meadow in Gloucestershire all the way to Southend Pier, an exploration of how we once used the river, why we stopped, and the reasons behind the current revival. This is a history of our relationship with the Thames from a swimmer’s perspective.
Downstream Page 1