The tone of the press report is one of utter admiration: ‘All records were being pulverized. The swimmer herself was in the happiest of mood.’ She had beaten the previous record holder, ‘an Austrian lady’ who had swum twenty miles in ten hours. This was Madame Walburga von Isacescu (her name is spelt in a variety of ways), presumably in the Danube where, in 1902, she had swum for twelve hours between Melk and Vienna. Two years earlier she had become the first woman to ‘attempt to rival Webb’ by swimming the Channel. She was then thirty, of medium height and ‘powerful physique’. But, twenty miles out of Calais, she was forced to give up.
Yet despite her being ‘long distance lady champion of the world’ in 1916, I can find very little on Eileen Lee but for a handful of newspaper clippings. What happened to this young woman who had only started swimming at the age of fifteen and a few years later covered more than thirty-six miles from Teddington, through London and back to Kew? Why does she disappear from the sporting pages after 1916? Was she perhaps a casualty of war? I had given up trying to find out more about her, when, one evening I received an email from someone I’d never heard of, Jill Morrison. The message window was blank and I was about to add it to the spam folder when something made me click on it. The email came from Seattle, Washington State, and began with the words, ‘I am Eileen Lee’s granddaughter.’ Jill had read on the internet that I was writing a book on Thames swimming and wanted to put me in touch with her cousins Barbara Allan and Cathy Stroud who live in Hamilton, Ontario, and have researched the family’s history, because ‘I think Granny was quite the amazing woman and it still boggles my mind that she did what she did’.
Now, at last, I was to find out more about her grandmother’s life. Eileen Lee was born in Sheffield on 27 October 1895, the second eldest of thirteen children. Her father, Patrick, was a naval officer who was awarded several medals during the course of his career, including a Silver Medal and Certificate from the Royal Humane Society in 1892 for heroism on HMS Audacious. He also served on HMS Inconstant where one of his shipmates was Prince Philip’s grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg. Patrick had joined the Royal Navy on his fifteenth birthday, retiring after twenty-three years as chief petty officer. He qualified as a naval diver, and after leaving the navy worked for the River Thames Conservancy; he rejoined the navy in 1917 before reaching the rank of sergeant major in the army, serving until 1920.
When I contact Barbara Allan, she sends me two photos of Patrick Lee. In the first he looks dashing in his Royal Navy uniform, a row of medals on his jacket; in the second he appears decades older, a pipe in his mouth and a sou’wester on his head. ‘Granny was having her portrait taken by a professional photographer (I don’t remember why) and her father stopped by the photographer’s studio to pick her up on his way home,’ explains Barbara. ‘As soon as he walked in the door of the studio, wearing his rain gear, the photographer yelled “DON’T MOVE” and took the photo of Patrick Lee. This photo then appeared on packages of Skipper Sardines!’ Her great-grandfather also achieved local notoriety when, in 1910, while working as the assistant lock keeper at Teddington, he was ‘summoned for detaining a parrot’ that he was keeping in a cage outside his house at the lock and which apparently belonged to someone else.
Eileen’s father Patrick Lee, pictured here in his Royal Naval uniform, was the lock keeper at Teddington.
His daughter Eileen, meanwhile, appears to have won her first race in 1912 and Barbara sends me a letter dated September 1913 in which her grandmother is offered ‘our very hearty congratulations on your excellent swim at Liverpool the other day’. It’s only when I look at the letter heading that I realise Eileen must have been a member of the Kingston Ladies Swimming Club. It is signed by Vera Offer, honorary secretary, sent with best wishes for Eileen’s future success, noting that ‘if the distance had been greater you would have done better still . . . you did credit to your club and instructors’.
As to why Eileen never attempted the Channel, Barbara believes ‘financials were part of the decision, but the bigger obstacle was the war. It was deemed far too risky for all involved for her to be in the Channel for the length of time the swim would have taken when war ships including submarines were doing battle.’ And the reason I couldn’t find anything about her grandmother after her triumphant Thames swim in 1916 was because Eileen Lee moved to Canada. In 1919, along with her husband Maxwell Rowley Morrison, she left England and after several moves settled in Hamilton, Ontario. She was still famous enough to have been invited to meet the Prince of Wales, then travelling through Canada, at a drawing-room reception at ‘the Armories’ on 22 October 1919. But it appears that Eileen did not accept the invitation: ‘maybe she didn’t go since the reception was held on a Wednesday night from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m., so maybe a bit late for a mother?’ suggests Jill.
But she continued her swimming career, and in the mid-1920s, now the mother of five children, she entered the annual Canadian National Exhibition swims in Lake Ontario which Jill describes as ‘quite a gruelling swim. Granny did continue to have an amazing life. She taught swimming, ran a dance studio where one of her students, Frank Augustine, went on to become a principal dancer with the Canadian National Ballet, and in 1942 she started schools for the education of children with special needs in Hamilton. She also ran summer camps for special education kids and adults. Granny’s youngest child and daughter was born mentally handicapped as a result of the doctor who came to the house to deliver the baby being drunk and the cord was wrapped around the neck, cutting off the oxygen supply during the birth. She had a personal interest in these children as a mother of one.
‘Granny was a natural-born teacher,’ adds Barbara, ‘but her life was a hard one after marrying and having seven children.’ It was made harder by the fact her husband, a graduate of Sandhurst, had been a victim of mustard gas during the war: ‘the pain was excruciating for him and he turned to alcohol to numb the pain. Once his youngest child was born, he could no longer take the pressures and returned to England to seek compensation in the courts for the mustard gas. He died a few months before I was born.’ Eileen Lee remained in Canada, however, with her seven children, eighteen grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She died on 20 April 1976.
Her grandchildren always knew about her record-breaking swims, particularly the one from Teddington lasting ten hours. Two of her sisters, Delia and Doris, also swam the Thames and ‘earned recognition in their own rights, but Granny’s swim became the most famous of the Lee children as it set a world record,’ says Barbara. ‘She certainly could have taken gold at the Olympics given the opportunity.’ Both her granddaughters, Jill and Cathy, were competitive swimmers, Cathy competing in Canada and the United States, winning ‘many first-place ribbons and medals’, while Jill changed direction and began instructing and examining children for the Red Cross and Royal Life Saving Society swimming programmes.
Barbara sends me a photo of her grandmother taken around 1915. She’s standing on a beach with another young woman, both in bathing costumes as if about to start on a swim. Eileen has a regal bearing, her face full on to the viewer, while the top of the photo is pitted with holes from where it’s been proudly pinned to Cathy’s bulletin board for forty years.
In 1967 Barbara went on a family trip to England to visit relatives and it was then that she finally saw the site of her grandmother’s famous swim. ‘We stopped at Teddington and chatted with the current lock keeper who permitted me to actually work the same lock that Grandpa Lee did, located just across the river from their house. I was eleven years old, and the thought of turning that big wheel to open the lock was very intimidating to say the least! The lock keeper was quite surprised that he was chatting with a former lock keeper’s granddaughter, one all the way from Canada, and offered to me, the eldest of five little girls there and standing shyly by my mum, the opportunity to work the lock. I really didn’t want to, it looked so heavy, but the gentleman encouraged me and actually helped me get the wheel to start. I was right
, it was sooo heavy! The entire time I was turning the wheel, only one thought was in my head, here I am, touching something that Grandpa Lee touched so many years ago and I will never forget doing this for the rest of my life!’
And what did she think of the River Thames? ‘I thought it was very small at Teddington, as we had already seen it up in London, and I was amazed that this little lock was holding a river that became so big further upstream. The thought that Granny swam here was lovely, as in Teddington the river is very charming. But thinking of her swimming further upstream was not so pleasant as the river turned into a highway!’
The family have certainly treasured Eileen Lee’s memory and sporting legacy. While they are disappointed to have lost letters from Noël Coward, born in Teddington in 1899 and a close friend of their grandmother’s, they have a silver challenge cup from the Kingston Ladies’ Club engraved with the words, ‘Sunbury Lock Hampton Court Bridge to or below Molesey Lock or below Kingston Bridge for long distance swimming’. There’s a list of names, dates and distances, beginning in 1905 with Claire Parlett, who swam to Richmond Lock, and ending with Eileen Lee swimming from Hampton Court to Hammersmith in 1912.
The family also has newspaper clippings, three medals (including one from a Crystal Palace fête in 1915), a set of their grandmother’s dumbbells and a carved statue of Eileen Lee in wood and bronze, her hands held above her head in a diving position. But, best of all, Barbara tells me she has her grandmother’s swimsuit and, when she asks if I’d like to see it, I email back YES! The next day she sends the picture and my first impression is that it looks so flimsy, this one-piece costume with capped sleeves and a Union Jack on the front. It’s a hundred years old, faded to a dull grey, a little ragged below one arm, as if eaten by moths. I think of the Lycra costume I normally wear, and how heavy and waterlogged Eileen’s must have become after hour upon hour swimming in the Thames. Was this the one she wore in August 1915 when she swam between Tower Bridge and Kew, struggling against a strong headwind, dodging pieces of floating boxes, her eyes so inflamed by the sun that she had to stop after nearly twenty-two miles? And did she wear it the following summer when the press reported ‘all records were being pulverized’? Whether or not she did, ‘Granny’s swimming costume is a hoot!’ says Barbara. ‘How she swam in a suit with capped sleeves, buttons and legs that went down the thigh a bit just boggles the mind.’ While the cloth is very thin, ‘it’s not too bad for something that had a lot of use, was greased, oiled and had who knows what else from the river on it,’ adds Cathy, who keeps it in a towel in her dresser with her own costumes and swimming meet t-shirts.
Not only did Eileen Lee continue to swim in Canada, but she set about teaching others as well, at the school she founded in Hamilton in 1942. ‘She wanted people to know how to swim so that they could save themselves,’ says Barbara. ‘These children never knew that they were being taught by a world champion. She was simply “Mrs Morrison”. There may have been drownings in the river that she knew of as a child. With her father being a naval officer and diver, I’m sure swimming had something to do with that as well. One of Granny’s sisters mentioned to us that, when they were small, Grandpa Lee just took them and threw them into the river and said “swim” so they did! Rather an odd thing to do but they did manage to figure it out. What a character! She rarely spoke of her swims as she considered it bragging, which appalled her. If she started bragging I’m sure all her siblings would have knocked it out of her in a hurry! We are so thrilled that not only Granny’s story but the stories of so many who swam the river are finally being shared. The focus always seemed to be on the Channel swims and the river swims largely ignored.’
‘Granny really never talked about her great feats,’ says Cathy, ‘in our family the deed was/is always more important than the glory. The British stiff upper lip, never complain, never explain, was always there to an extreme with her. She was very brave for swimming in a place that still, 100 years later, can cause gastrointestinal issues. Maybe I am just putting my twenty-first-century values, ideas and knowledge on an era that didn’t have the same, but it still wouldn’t make me want to ever swim in the Thames! If she didn’t want the accolades she shouldn’t have swum a world record. She also has grandchildren who think the world should know how wonderful she was.’
11
Richmond
‘Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
O Thames! that other bards may see,
As lovely visions by thy side
As now, fair river! come to me’
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written near Richmond’, 1790
The town of Richmond, from where Eileen Lee set off to swim to Tower Bridge in 1915, is situated in London’s most attractive borough, at least according to the town’s website, and is among the wealthiest areas in the UK. Outside the railway station, however, as I walk past upmarket chain stores on my way to the local studies collection, I see a man on the pavement with a handwritten cardboard sign which reads ‘Homeless’. I’ve come to see a scrapbook belonging to the Richmond Swimming Club, founded in 1883, and covering nearly fifty years of the history of Thames swimming. The collection is housed in the Old Town Hall, close to the riverside where the Thames glitters in the sun, the broad promenade overlooked by affluent buildings that rise up from a manicured lawn. The Thames runs through the borough for twenty-one miles and it was the beauty of the river here that inspired Wordsworth’s 1790 poem, where ‘in thy waters may be seen/The image of a poet’s heart’.
It’s a sunny day and people are already lining up for boat rides near Richmond Bridge, completed in 1777 and once an ancient ferry site. Horace Walpole, writing to a friend a few years before the bridge was finished, complained, ‘It has rained this whole month . . . the Thames is as broad as your Danube . . . The ferry-boat was turned round by the current, and carried to Isleworth.’ Charles Dickens often stayed along this stretch of the river. In the summer of 1839 he rented Elm Cottage in nearby Petersham for four months, writing to the artist Daniel MacLise, ‘Beard is hearty, new and thicker ropes have been put up at the tree . . . swimming feats from Petersham to Richmond Bridge have been achieved before breakfast, I myself have risen at 6 and plunged head foremost into the water to the astonishment and admiration of all beholders . . .’ But while Dickens may have loved a swim, there were soon bathing regulations in place. In 1844 a letter writer to The Times objected, ‘I have myself gone to Richmond for a river bath, but found numerous ill-natured announcements on boards, that I must be taken into custody . . . if I attempted it before so late an hour that would prevent my getting a conveyance to town the same evening.’
As with other Thames-side towns, there is little on swimming at the local museum, but for an electro-plated nickel silver cup engraved, ‘Won by Tom Ward, 16th Sept. 1871, Swimming Match Richmond to Kew’. Unfortunately, explains curator Sue Barber, there are no details of the event and the man who donated the cup found it in a skip in the Isle of Wight.
The atmosphere inside the local studies collection is friendly and relaxed, the low-ceilinged attic room crowded with books and pamphlets. Archivist Felix Lancashire has the scrapbook ready for me, a large blue hardbound document including handbooks and annual reports, which together provide a potted history of the evolution of swimming in England. The book begins with an 1885 programme for the annual entertainments held by the club, which was amalgamated with the Kew Bridge Swimming Club, at the Richmond Baths. This was the headquarters of the club, and its president was the MP Thomas Skewes-Cox. A few years later the Life Saving Society was demonstrating ‘rescuing and resuscitating the Apparently Drowned’, while club members were competing in a lighted candle race, attired in nightdress and nightcaps.
The Richmond Club also swam in the Thames. In 1895 fixtures included a half-mile handicap held in June, with the club using the ‘dressing barge’ belonging to the Surbiton Swimming Club, while three years later a quarter-mile river race was introduced. As with the Otter club, the venue for the ri
ver races changed over the years; the half-mile was sometimes held at Walton, and the quarter-mile at Petersham, Staines or Walton. In 1902, the Richmond Club’s president was now a JP – he was knighted a few years later – and another river race was launched, a two-and-a-half-mile scratch race for the Holbein Shield, between Teddington and Richmond locks, ‘on the ebb tide’.
The three river races soon acquired formal titles. The Majority Challenge Cup for the half-mile was inaugurated in 1903 to commemorate the club’s ‘coming of age’, and the Wishart Challenge Cup started in 1907 for the quarter-mile at Walton.
Club members were clearly established swimmers. In 1906 they were competing in the 150 yards championship of London, where they practised ‘the “crawl” stroke’. Two years later they had ‘some of the fastest swimmers in the south’ and one member, S. Parvin, reached the semi-finals of the 100 metres backstroke in the Olympic Games. But the number of people entering the river races was beginning to dwindle. In 1909 ‘inclement weather completely spoilt’ the half-mile, while only six entered for the Holbein Shield. In 1911, again with bad weather, it was down to just three men.
I turn the page to find a letter written in 1915 explaining there were no fixtures arranged for the current year and no handbook had been published. And while I know what’s coming, it’s still a shock as I come to the club’s report for the spring of that year. It makes bleak reading: gone is the usual page-long account of successes in swimming and water polo; instead there is a list of members who have joined His Majesty’s Forces – as privates, lieutenants, troopers and gunners. Church bells begin to chime ominously outside the attic room as I turn to the next year’s report. Now the men are missing, wounded, killed in action. Soon these young men, former champion swimmers, are invalided, gassed and prisoners of war, while some were awarded medals such as the Military Cross.
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