Downstream

by Caitlin Davies

  As for swimming in Richmond today, the local newspaper carries the usual warnings and reports of fatalities. In August 2001 a licensed river ‘waterman’ pulled a man from the Thames at around 1 a.m. ‘I have worked on the river for 25 years,’ he told the press, ‘and I have seen a number of bodies pulled from the river. This guy didn’t have long to go.’ But locals such as TV personality and author Bamber Gascoigne still enjoy river swimming. His first time in the Thames was during his schooldays at Eton in the late 1940s: ‘it was a tributary, a sluggish backwater, and a normal place for the boys to swim. There were lots of weeds and an unpleasant beastly feel, and it was rather dangerous, two boys got polio so it wasn’t done after that.’ Bamber moved to Richmond about thirty years ago and one day he saw Fred Hauptfuhrer, London bureau chief for People magazine, ‘who lives in a magnificent house by the river’, swimming. ‘The Thames was still pretty dirty,’ he says, ‘but we thought if an American can do it surely we can too.’ So on a hot day he took the plunge.

  The seventy-eight-year-old still swims today and says there has been ‘a massive change in the Thames, there used to be nothing in the water but eels and nothing on the surface but mallards, now there are herons in the trees and crested grebes on the banks. I don’t do the macho Christmas Day swim, I wait until it’s hot.’ The furthest he’s swum is half a mile upstream and back: ‘you very much feel the current on the way back, swimming at high tide is the nicest. Once a seal popped up next to me, and looked at one with some curiosity, it spent a week in Richmond where there was easy fishing and then it got bored and swam off.’

  According to the Teddington lifeboat service, since 2002 they have only been ‘turned down twice’ when setting out to rescue someone, once when there was a report of ‘a man in distress in the water at Richmond. The man was Bamber Gascoigne, a regular swimmer in the river, who assured the police that he was OK.’ Bamber doesn’t recall this incident, but says ‘the PLA police boat know us and give us a wave’. He often swims with his wife, Christina, and a group of around ten friends at Richmond and Twickenham: ‘swimming is a noticeable activity, so we cross the river and swim the other side, it’s an informal thing, if it’s a hot day and high tide in ten minutes then we will have a swim. A few years ago there was a motor boat, with an open roof, and around ten extremely drunk young ladies on board, one recognised me and asked if I was me and I said I was. I asked if they were a hen party and they said if they gave me a glass of champagne would I toast the bride? So I trod water and toasted her and on they went.’

  He says swimmers do have to be careful of boats around Richmond: ‘it is busy. I wear my specs so I can see. Once I saw a sculler and I shouted, “swimmer ahead!” and he stopped at once. It can be dangerous and we discourage people from swimming if they don’t know about the river. On Saturday nights people are drunk and they jump in and their mates cheer them on, then the tide carries them and the state they are in they want to get back to where they started instead of crossing the river. Some years ago three people died in different parts of the Thames and the headline in one of the newspapers was “Killer River”. A week later I was there swimming and a police officer called out, “are you coming in, sir?” I said, “yes, soon, officer”, and I swam on a bit longer. As I got out the police officer said, “are you aware, sir, that this is a killer river?” Well, I told him it wasn’t and we had a chat and we left the best of friends.’

  ‘Killer river’ or not, the Thames at Richmond has long been beloved of swimmers, from Dickens’ joyful head-first plunge in 1839 to the formation of the town’s swimming club in 1883, from record breakers John Arthur Jarvis and Lily Smith at the turn of the century to Kevin Murphy and Alison Streeter’s endurance swims in the 1980s. Now that I’m about two-thirds of the way through my journey downstream, having travelled some 150 miles from the source in Gloucestershire to Richmond, I’m wondering how many other forgotten champions I have still to find as I catch the train to nearby Kew, a place I often went to as a child, but never as an adult, on the hunt for Thames swimmers.

  12

  Kew–Chiswick

  ‘On the way to Kew,

  By the river old and gray,

  Where in the Long Ago

  We laughed and loitered so’

  William Ernest Henley (1849–1903),

  ‘On the Way to Kew’

  The district of Kew was the starting point for one of the most famous swimming championships on the River Thames, a five-mile course to Putney which first ran from here in 1890 and, except for the interruption of the First World War, continued until 1939. When I arrive at Kew Road Bridge the scene is disappointing; from street level it looks more like a motorway, but as I start to walk across the bridge I see a brown, silty beach at the far end providing easy access to the water. I think of a report I read from 1882, when a woman and her two-year-old child were spotted here and when a passer-by commented that it was ‘cold for the child to be out’, the woman replied, ‘it will be colder soon’. Two bodies were later found tied together with a handkerchief and apron, with the child bound to her mother’s waist.

  The Thames has always been a place of tragedy and death, whether deliberate or accidental, and Kew is no exception. It was incidents like these, and particularly the plight of unmarried mothers, that inspired Jerome K. Jerome to a more sombre passage in his otherwise comical Three Men in a Boat, when the three friends discover the dead body of a woman, lying ‘very lightly on the water’. She had ‘loved and been deceived . . . left to fight the world alone, with the millstone of her shame around her neck’. After keeping herself and her child ‘in miserably paid drudgery’ she eventually drowned herself and the river ‘hushed away the pain’.

  But Kew plays a happier role in the history of Thames swimming as the setting for the five-mile long-distance championship. This initially began in 1877 and was known as the ‘Lords and Commons race’ because the cup was subscribed for by members of both Houses of Parliament. The original course was from Putney to Westminster Bridge or vice versa, then it was changed from Putney to Charing Cross. In 1879 the race was handed over to the Metropolitan Swimming Association, and was later run by its successor, the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA). In August 1890, ‘owing to the dirty state of the river’, the ASA decided to move it to Kew. The course ran from Kew Railway Bridge, half a mile downstream from where I’m standing, to Putney Pier. Sixteen swimmers competed that first year, with eleven finishing and qualifying for ‘standard certificates for swimming the journey within 10 minutes of the winner’. By 1897 ‘colonials and foreigners’ were taking part; in 1899 the winner received a sixty-guinea challenge cup and the race began from the ‘Anglia Boat-house at Kew’. Only three men entered that year and just one managed to finish because the water was so cold.

  Other races were held at Kew as well. In 1891 clubs affiliated to the ‘City of London Swimming Association’ had held their annual 1,000 yards swim from ‘Maynard’s Boat House to the Ibis Club House’. The following year the Zephyr Swimming Club, ‘one of the best known amateur organisations in the metropolis’, had their annual mile handicap with nineteen people swimming from ‘Kew-bridge’ to the ‘Ship at Mortlake’, while the ASA held a 1,000 yards race from ‘Kew-bridge’ to the ‘Ibis Boat-house’.

  Kew was also the starting point for a memorable long-distance swim by seventeen-year-old Annie Luker when, in August 1892, she set off for Greenwich intending to swim eighteen and a half miles to ‘establish claim to the female championship of the world’. By London Bridge, the press reported, she was showing signs of tiring but she ‘struggled on with the utmost gameness’, refusing to leave the water. However, after nearly five hours and having covered sixteen miles, with ‘no refreshment at all’, she was helped out of the river and on to the accompanying boat, exhausted. Apart from Madame Mitchell swimming from Kingston to Henley in 1888, this is the earliest long-distance Thames swim by a woman I’ve yet found, and, as usual, further information is thin on the ground. Annie was born Haga
r Ann Luker in 1870, in the Thames-side market town of Abingdon, one of eight children whose father, John Pearson Luker, was a swimming professor who was said to have trained Captain Webb for his Channel swim. While she appears to have started her career as a river swimmer, she went on to become a famous high diver. In January 1894 she was appearing at the Royal Aquarium, diving ‘from the mid-air platform into the shallow tank used by the male divers’, took part in an aquatic entertainment at Earls Court, and in May that year performed a ‘sensational dive’ from London Bridge.

  A reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette described her as a ‘quiet, innocent-looking’ little figure, with ‘timid dark diving eyes; the sort of girl one would expect to scream at a black beetle’. Yet she was thrilling London on a nightly basis diving 70 feet into the Aquarium tank, sometimes sharing the billing with a boxing kangaroo and a talking horse. Her debut had certainly been dramatic; the feat had already been performed by a number of men when a member of the audience stood up to declare that a woman could do it. Annie Luker duly made her perilous plunge and ‘the effect was electrical’. She had wanted her husband – ‘I’m married, you know’ – to make the challenge but ‘he was too nervous’ so a friend took his place. Her husband, however, couldn’t overcome his fears: ‘he never comes to see me, he couldn’t stand it. We live close by, and he waits for me at home.’ In 1895 she was described as Champion Lady Diver, still at the Royal Aquarium, where she continued to dive until 1900, and she was now appearing in the press as part of an endorsement for Ellimans Muscle Rub Lotion. She also worked as ‘swimming instructress’ at the Caledonian Road Baths in London.

  Meanwhile, the long-distance amateur championship from Kew was still going strong, and in 1905 The Times reported on ‘certainly the best race ever seen’. John Arthur Jarvis had held the title for seven years but this time he met his match in the form of B.B. Kieran, the Australian amateur champion, and D. Billington, who’d won the mile amateur championship a few weeks earlier at Highgate Pond on Hampstead Heath. Jarvis made a ‘plucky effort’, but was overtaken by both men, with Billington the eventual winner. In 1914 the race was won by H.C. Hatfield, but it was then put on hold during the war, resuming in 1920 with ‘very few competitors’. In 1925 it attracted twenty-seven of the ‘world’s best swimmers’ and was won by Paulo Radmilovic, also the winner in 1907. Radmilovic, born in Cardiff in 1886, had a glittering career, representing Great Britain in five Olympic Games, twice as captain of the winning water polo team.

  The Kew to Putney race for men continued until the outbreak of the Second World War, while at some point a separate race for women was introduced. In 1921 the ‘ladies’ long distance swimming championship’ from Kew to Putney was won by eighteen-year-old P. Scott from Cardiff. Twenty-two women took part and all completed the course.

  In 1923 the winner was Hilda James, already a swimming superstar who had won a silver medal at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp as a member of the British 4×100 metres relay team. When the Americans took gold with their speedy style, sixteen-year-old Hilda asked them to teach her their novel stroke and then introduced the American crawl to the UK, making her a ‘pioneer of modern freestyle,’ explains Ian McAllister, her grandson and biographer.

  Born in 1904 in Garston, Liverpool, Hilda’s religious upbringing meant she was not allowed to do RE at school and so as an unusual alternative she was taken for swimming lessons at the local baths. Although at first she hated her hand-knitted costume and didn’t fancy cold water, after dodging lessons by hiding in the changing cubicle she was encouraged into the pool. Bill Howcroft, a respected swimming race official, soon spotted her star qualities and started to coach her; Hilda James then began competing at ASA championships and took two surprise gold medals at the Olympic Tests in 1919. This was despite having left school at thirteen to help her mother and sick brother, and now working full-time as a shop assistant. After the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, swimming in a roped-off canal basin in cold, dirty water, she became known as ‘the English Comet’, dominating ASA competitions in the early 1920s, officially breaking six world records, and unofficially, because of time-keeping problems, breaking many more. She was invited to the 1922 Women’s Swimming Association of New York American Summer Tour, held to raise awareness of swimming as a sport and hobby for women, and used the Atlantic crossing to trial a new role as Cunard Club swimmer on RMS Aquitania.

  Women launch themselves off from a boat at the start of the long-distance race from Kew to Putney in 1923. The winner was Hilda James (far left and closest to the camera) who three years earlier had won a silver medal at the Olympics.

  Then, in July 1923, she won the long-distance Thames race, followed the next month by the eight-kilometre Seine long-distance championships, in choppy water full of sewage. But then triumph turned to crushing disappointment. Her mother insisted on accompanying her to the 1924 Olympics. When the Olympic Committee told her there was already a chaperone and that she would have to go at her own expense, she refused to let her daughter go. Hilda was under twenty-one and a minor: there was nothing she could do but bow to her parents’ wishes. That year, however, she won the Thames championship again, before leaving the world of amateur swimming to join Cunard officially as the first celebrity crewmember.

  By now she had ‘broken and lowered English records at almost every yards distance available,’ explains Ian. A Gaumont clip from 1927 shows her swimming freestyle like a tornado through the water, followed by breaststroke, backstroke, trick swimming and dives. His grandmother retired ‘to keep house, have a child, and return to live with her parents again’, although in the mid-1960s she would teach Ian and his brother to swim. Then, in 1982, at the age of seventy-six and now with a pacemaker, she brought the house down at Guinea Gap Baths in Merseyside with an impromptu swimming display during a memorial gala for another well-known open-water swimmer, Ernie Warrington.

  While Ian always knew about his grandmother’s swimming career, and used to beg for information about her trophies, he only began his research in earnest when his own son was born and ‘it became a mission to leave a record of his interesting great-grandmother’ to go with all the memorabilia. ‘I think she did the Thames because it was on the circuit and coach Howcroft would have put her up to it,’ says Ian. ‘She was a sprint swimmer really and more used to a pool but it was an ASA championship race; and if you put her in water she would swim.’

  A 1925 publicity photo of swimming superstar Hilda James in her role as Cunard ‘cruise hostess’ aboard RMS Carinthia.

  Ian himself swam up to school level, while ‘my son is a brilliant swimmer, he’s a volunteer lifeguard at Bournemouth and he’s built like an eel’. Yet although he has many medals, trophies and archive pictures, he doesn’t have any of his grandmother’s blue silk swimming costumes: ‘she cut one down and made it into a swimsuit for my brother’s bear!’ Thanks to her adoring grandson’s thirty years of research, Hilda James is better known than many of her contemporaries and to Ian’s delight she was recently nominated for inclusion in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

  Joyce Cooper winner of the 1931 Women’s Long Distance Swimming Championship from Mortlake to Putney, one of several long-distance Thames races for women.

  In 1939, meanwhile, the Thames women’s race from Kew to Putney was won by Ruth Langer, an eighteen-year-old Austrian refugee. Also a noted swimmer, three years earlier Langer had refused to take part in the Olympic Games in Berlin, later explaining, ‘being Jewish, it was unthinkable to compete in the Games in Nazi Germany, where my people were being persecuted’.

  As I walk back across Kew Bridge I’m wondering why, with all this illustrious river racing history, I haven’t found any reports of people swimming around Kew any more and, unlike at Henley, Marlow, Maidenhead, Windsor and Hampton Court, there are no mass-participation events either. I head down to the Thames Path, stop at the Kew Pier ticket office and ask the man inside if he ever sees people swimming. ‘Not with all the sewage they pump in,’ he says, pointi
ng just past the bridge. I’m later told that in the summer of 2013 a man leapt into the Thames from a pub at Kew Road Bridge for a dare, and swam across the river and back before winning a prize of a pint of beer.

  Downstream in the neighbouring district of Chiswick, however, people still swim on a regular basis. In the 1920s there were open-air baths here where ‘brilliant weather attracts parties of bathers,’ explained Pathé News which filmed men and women splashing around together, while dozens clamber up diving boards and hurl themselves off. Today Chiswick is the location of the Great River Swim, held annually from Chiswick Pier and until recently organised in conjunction with a local restaurant, Pissarro. It started in 2002 and is in aid of Chiswick Sea Cadets, who provide activities such as ‘Throw the Rope’, ‘Fishing for Ducks’ and face painting, reminiscent of riverside carnivals of yesteryear.

  Steve Newell, the swim’s founder, explains, ‘I’d been doing Iron Man triathlons but I’d retired by then having done twelve years of that. I was talking to friends at the Pissarro one day. I played golf with some of them and we’d been toying with the idea of hitting a golf ball across the Thames when one said, “I bet you couldn’t swim across”, and I said of course I could. I tried it out one summer’s day at high tide, from Chiswick Pier to the Surrey bank, which is about 200 yards. My wife was there watching just in case. I had no doubts about my ability to do it, but there is a lifeboat station next door so help was at hand in an emergency. It was my first time to swim in the Thames, although I’d fallen out of boats before, when it was not that pleasant but not so bad.’

  Just as would later happen at Henley and Maidenhead, when Steve advertised a Thames swim others joined in. ‘I let the PLA and river police know and they came and watched. But we found it was fraught with difficulties. If you swim right on high tide there is no current, but at low tide there would be no water. And you are crossing what I call the shipping lane and that can be difficult.’ So the second year they swam parallel to the bank; ‘there is a quiet area near the pier. We did about 600 metres. I borrowed a sizeable buoy from the Human Race people and at low tide I went out and fixed it to the seabed.’