The first year fifteen people took part, the next year numbers dropped, because of weather, and only six people entered. ‘There had been a thunderstorm and the sewers were overflowing. There had been a general alert to canoe and row clubs not to go on the river. So we almost didn’t do it.’ But then Steve says he got a better understanding of the river and in 2004 ‘we went up to one kilometre, to a green navigational pole at the upstream end of Chiswick Eyot, to the island and back. You start by swimming into the tide knowing it will turn in a few minutes, then you keep close to the riverbank as there is less current at the edge. It’s a slightly unfair race because if you’re fast then you get to the turnaround point and the tide is still coming in so you get a good push back. But for a weaker swimmer you get halfway and then you’re swimming against high tide.’
However, he says, ‘people just like to swim the Thames and especially the tidal Thames because it’s a challenge’. A lot of people come from the Serpentine Swimming Club in Hyde Park: ‘where they swim it’s flat and calm and there’s no current and they fancy a change of scenery’. Wetsuits are not required, although ‘the PLA say we have to have insurance, it is a little more costly without a wetsuit rule’. From 2010 the swim was extended to a full mile to include a clockwise circumnavigation of Chiswick Eyot. In 2012, sixty people took part; the most they’ve ever had is 120.
Unusually, Steve was well aware of the swimmers who have come before him even before he launched the Chiswick event. ‘I was introduced on one occasion to a quite elderly gentleman and he had a postcard photograph of his aunt who’d won the race from Richmond Lock to Blackfriars in 1911.’ Steve is also part of a group who swim in the Thames roughly every fortnight, from the Black Lion pub in Hammersmith, half an hour before high tide, to Chiswick Pier. ‘On a sunny evening it’s idyllic, there are nice houses to look at, and with a strong tide and a good stroke you can do it in a quarter of an hour, or you take in the scenery and it takes twenty-five minutes.’ Again many come from the Serpentine Club, most not wearing wetsuits. There is no entry fee and it’s run on a voluntary basis. Steve supplies a dinghy and a friend rows it. On one recent evening they had eleven swimmers, with only one in a wetsuit, and the water was 13 degrees. Rod Newing, who regularly takes part, explains, ‘it is a very scenic and historic part of the Thames’. Steve says the PLA seem ‘unconcerned about the Hammersmith swim, they say they want to work with me not against me. It’s only when there are a hundred people that they want to warn ships and river clubs. They don’t close the river but they send out a warning.’ However, some rowing clubs disapprove: ‘they feel the upstream river belongs to them. They’ve done well, in the Olympics and everything, and they feel they own the river. But they don’t like operating at high tide.’ The PLA insists on public liability insurance in exchange for a notice to mariners and, while this used to be costly, he says the insurance situation has improved. With more organised open-water swims, partly on the back of the triathlon boom, ‘insurance companies are now better able to judge the risks and costs have started to fall to an affordable level’.
As elsewhere on the Thames, there are accidents at Chiswick involving unorganised, careless or drunk swimmers. In August 2003 the owner of a courier company dived into the river at around 9 p.m. to save a drowning man who had ‘drunk one too many’ and was struggling against the high tide. ‘This kind of thing can be dangerous,’ said a spokesperson from Chiswick’s RNLI lifeboat, ‘people don’t understand how strong the river can be.’ The lifeboat had already been called out ‘over 170 times’ that year and had recovered forty-eight people from the river.
Such warnings aren’t new and seem to have increased in the past forty years, initially as we were first encouraged to move away from the river and into indoor pools and now, with the closure of so many pools and lidos, as we make our way back to the Thames. In the early 1980s youngsters in Chiswick were said to be risking their lives by swimming during a hot spell. One resident said, ‘I have lived here for eighteen years and it is only since the Chiswick swimming baths closed that children have been coming here in larger numbers. You can’t stop them wanting to swim. It is very worrying. They haven’t a clue about the tides. They just launch themselves into the water and then panic when they are quickly carried off.’ Sewage can also be a problem. In the summer of 2004 torrential downpours led to the river’s worst pollution incident in twenty years, with blocked sewerage pipes and Thames Water pumping up to one million tons of raw sewage into the river to prevent it from spilling into homes and streets.
Jason Finch, former director of the Thames Explorer Trust, an educational charity based in Chiswick, stresses the general cleanliness of the Thames, but also warns of the dangers of swimming. The Trust work with around 18,000 schoolchildren a year, taking them on to the foreshore at ten sites in London and helping them learn about geography, wildlife and history. ’You’d be amazed,’ he says, ‘at the number of children who live in London yet never go to the Thames . . . or who come and see the Thames at, say, Docklands and think it’s the sea. A lot of our work is really helping people realise how wonderful the Thames is. It is the cleanest river flowing through any world city and has a hundred and twenty-five different species of fish. Sometimes at Chiswick it feels like we’re overrun with geese, cormorants, swans and herons.’
But as for swimming, the Thames is much wider than people think: ‘at Chiswick it’s 144 metres wide but when we ask visiting school groups how wide they think it is, most guess 50 metres or less! The current is much stronger than people realise as well; it’s not helped by the fact that the Thames is much narrower than it was originally, because of artificially built riverside embankments, so the same amount of water flows deeper and faster than it ever did when the river was “natural”.’
Chiswick is the location of the Great River Swim, which began in 2002 and is held annually from Chiswick Pier.
He says it’s no wonder that two of the busiest RNLI stations are on the Thames, at Embankment and Chiswick, and are among only a handful nationally that have a full-time crew rather than volunteers; such is the demand for their services. ‘The other aspect that makes Thames swimming dangerous,’ says Jason, ‘is the amount of river traffic – you could be hit by a boat!’, whether they be rowers around Chiswick, river ferries and taxis in central and eastern London, or freight ports further east. But when it comes to the Thames foreshore, today it’s a relatively empty landscape. ‘You have us doing our educational work, dog walkers and sunbathers and sometimes the modern mudlarks at work. If you were to go back historically in many places it was an amazingly busy place. Really the foreshore has only become empty since the end of the Second World War.’
But there were plenty of people around on 7 April 2012 when Australian Trenton Oldfield decided to demonstrate against government cuts by disrupting the 158th University Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge. Footage filmed from the riverbank shows both boats heading towards Chiswick Pier, with several motor boats behind, and then a lone swimmer appears. The rowers pass on either side of Trenton; incredibly, he isn’t hit, and as he ducks under the blades they stop, to cries of ‘you idiot!’ and ‘get out of the water!’ He is then yanked out and thrown on to a boat, to loud applause, and is jeered as he’s arrested and led away.
Trenton had apparently entered the water about five minutes earlier, and waited for the boats to arrive. The race was eventually won by Cambridge. During the subsequent court case he was found to have acted dangerously and ‘displayed prejudice in sabotaging the event which he regarded as elitist’. He argued that the race was ‘a symbol of a lot of issues in Britain around class. Seventy per cent of government pushing through very significant cuts are Oxford or Cambridge graduates.’ He was jailed for six months for causing a public nuisance. Trenton’s stunt received widespread coverage, but record-breaking river swimmer Andy Nation feels ‘he is not a credit to swimming in the Thames’ because ‘like a naughty child he just did it to get attention’.
13
Putney
‘Swimming [is] the best sport in the world for women’
Annette Kellerman, 1918
Annette Kellerman is one of the few women champions still internationally known today. Here she demonstrates the breaststroke.
Putney Bridge in west London is a significant spot in the history of Thames swimming for several reasons. It was here, for example, that in 1905 Australian Annette Kellerman began a swim that would launch her international career, while today people are no longer allowed to swim downstream from Putney to the Thames Barrier without a licence from the PLA. I approach from the Putney side of the bridge, down the high street from the station, where I can see the fifteenth-century tower of St Mary’s church just on the riverside. At the other end of the bridge is All Saints’ church, and according to local lore the two sisters who ‘founded’ the churches lived on opposite sides of the river. When they visited each other they gave instructions, either ‘Full home, waterman’ or ‘Put nigh’, and thus the two towns earned their names – Fulham and Putney.
But this is no quaint river crossing and, as with Kew Bridge, travelling across the Thames here is more like walking beside a motorway. Traffic thunders along the A219, and there are so many buses, vans and cars that it’s a relief to pause for a moment and rest my eyes on the water below. The Thames is wide, with patches of shore along the banks, but it also feels like a river in a city; I’ve long left the countryside behind.
At the Fulham end of the bridge I walk down steps to Bishop’s Park. The noise of the traffic is suddenly silenced and all I can hear are birds. The recently renovated park has its roots in Victorian times and its facilities now include an ‘urban beach’ for children to play on, although not on the river itself. I stop in the sculpture garden in front of a statue of two figures in stone. They seem to be embracing; perhaps it’s a love story. Then I bend down to read the plaque beneath it where I can just make out a single word: GRIEF. Suddenly the sky thickens with clouds and when I look behind me the water beneath Putney Bridge has been thrown into threatening dark shadow. I think of Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist philosopher and writer best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who in 1795 threw herself into the river here. In April of that year she had returned to England from a trip to Scandinavia to learn that her lover and the father of her child, Captain Gilbert Imlay, had moved in with another woman. One November night in heavy rain she jumped from Putney Bridge – some reports say she rented a boat and rowed over to Putney after finding Battersea Bridge too crowded. Incredibly, she was pulled out of the water alive and taken to a doctor. Wollstonecraft had left Imlay a letter, written ‘on my knees’, imploring him to send their daughter to Paris. ‘When you receive this, my burning head will be cold . . . I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek.’ Wollstonecraft survived, returned to her writing career and two years later married William Godwin, dying as a result of childbirth in 1797. How desperate she must have been, and how ideal the Thames would have seemed as a place to end it all for someone who couldn’t swim.
But as is often the case in the story of the river, this was also the setting of joyful occasions and in the nineteenth century Putney was the starting point for several races between champion men. In August 1869 the first ever amateur mile race in the Thames, from Putney to Hammersmith, was won by Tom Morris in twenty-seven minutes eighteen seconds. The long-distance amateur championship also began (or ended) at Putney, before the course was changed to Kew. In July 1877 the inaugural winner was Horace Davenport from the Ilex Club who swam from Putney to Westminster in just over one hour thirteen minutes. Davenport was ‘the finest long distance amateur swimmer that England has ever seen’, according to The Badminton Library of 1893; he played an important role in the ASA and one of his later feats was swimming from Southsea in Portsmouth to Ryde in the Isle of Wight, and back.
Other races for men were held at Putney in Victorian times. In 1874 there was a two-mile swimming championship to Hammersmith, won by E.T. Jones from Leeds, ‘champion swimmer of the world’, who had recently won the mile championship in the Serpentine. Two years later Jones again raced the same Thames course and won, this time against another famed swimmer, J.B. Johnson, for a cup ‘instituted by the Serpentine Club, which represents the championship of England’ with a ‘hundred pound aside bet’. The press reported thousands assembled on the towpath and bridge, and the ‘scene on the river was quite unprecedented’. In 1895 Professor G. Peat, ‘well-known high diver’, decided to dive from Putney Bridge and swim to Hammersmith, where he also dived off the bridge, ‘for a wager and a medal’.
But for me it is Annette Kellerman’s swim from Putney that is most memorable, for she is one of the few women champions from the past still internationally known and honoured today. Born in 1886 in Sydney, New South Wales, her father was Australian and her mother ‘one of Paris’s greatest pianists’. As a child she had ‘a very distressing’ leg condition, probably rickets, and wore leg braces until she was seven. Once the braces were off, and following medical advice, she started swimming. By the age of sixteen she was the 100 metres world record holder. She then set a women’s world record for the mile in thirty-two minutes twenty-nine seconds, a time she later lowered to twenty-eight minutes, and her first long-distance swim was ten miles in Melbourne’s Yarra River. She also gave exhibitions of swimming and diving at the Melbourne baths, and swam with fish in a glass tank at the Exhibition Aquarium. Then, with her father, Frederick, she set sail for England to try and ‘swim back the family fortune’, lost in the Depression of the 1890s.
During the long voyage from Australia she paced the decks to keep fit, often walking as much as ten miles. But London, she later wrote, was the ‘bitterest disappointment’ of her life and the streets ‘as still as the dead’. Father and daughter rented rooms in Gower Street and approached local swimming clubs, but according to her biographer Emily Gibson ‘there was no chance of Annette performing as a professional in a country where an amateur was seen as superior’. However, the British press had already reported that Kellerman was here to swim the Channel and ‘she will probably do some record breaking while in England’. Soon she was giving an exhibition of fast swimming at an indoor bath, the press explaining she ‘hails from the land of the Cornstalk’ (‘cornstalks’ was a term sometimes used to describe ‘the first generation of non-indigenous inhabitants’ born in Australia), with a debut that included the ‘standing-sitting-standing honeypot’ or ‘cannonball’ dive. Kellerman demonstrated the then popular trudgeon style (similar to front crawl) at Westminster Baths, as well as swimming ‘a length on her side with her hands tied behind her back’ and some fancy diving, ‘giving the Australian “Cooee” just before disappearing’.
‘Try swimming, old chap.’ Montague Holbein, who in 1899 covered forty-three miles from Blackwall to Gravesend and back, the longest Thames swim ever recorded at the time.
But with their money running out, father and daughter moved to King’s Cross, where Kellerman stayed in a windowless attic room. Then Frederick came up with the idea for a publicity stunt: his daughter would swim the Thames. After all, what better place could there be for Annette to make a name for herself than England’s most famous river? The Auckland Star reported that she had taken up residence near Kew and ‘is in active training for her proposed attempt to break the records of Montague Holbein, Fred Bownes and Matthew Webb in the matter of long distance swims in the Thames’. No mention is made of any women’s records Kellerman may have wanted to beat, as if those who came before her never existed; or perhaps it was just seen as more dramatic and newsworthy for a woman to attempt to break a record set by a man.
On 25 July 1899, Montague Holbein had swum from Blackwall two miles past Gravesend and back, covering forty-three miles in the longest Thames swim ever recorded at the time. He began at Blackwall Pier, ‘went down river on a strong ebb’ and then turned with the tide after Gravesend an
d ‘came back on the flood to Blackwall’. Although he didn’t manage to reach the pier ‘owing to the tide failing him’, he left the water ‘quite fit and strong’ after swimming for just over twelve hours. He used a slow but powerful stroke, described as ‘half-side, half-back’.
Born around 1862 in the Thames-side town of Twickenham, Holbein was a cotton ‘warehouseman’ and had already achieved ‘practically world-wide fame’ for ‘some marvellous feats on a bicycle’. He was also a cross-country runner and distance walker. A man of ‘exceptional physique and power’ according to the press, ‘he made one of the finest distance riders English cycling ever produced’. He broke a number of records and in 1891 came second place in the first Bordeaux–Paris bike race.
But a cycling accident, which fractured his leg and left him lame, forced him to retire and, as with Annette Kellerman, doctors advised him to turn his attention to swimming. ‘When I recovered, my leg was very stiff,’ he later wrote. ‘My doctor said to me: “try swimming, old chap; it may benefit the limb.” I took his advice, and to my great surprise became so fond of the water that the idea struck me to break records in it as well as on land. I have never gone in for quick swimming, staying being more to my liking.’
Holbein definitely had staying power. In 1908 he would manage an incredible fifty miles in the Thames, without leaving the water. Again he began and ended at Blackwall, finishing the swim in just over thirteen hours, and ‘anybody seeing him climb the ladder lowered from the tug in attendance would never have dreamed that he was returning from a fifty mile swim in rough water’.
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