Franklin, who grew up near the sea in Boston, had been swimming since a child and had ‘been ever delighted with this exercise’. While in England he taught two friends to swim in the Thames and, before returning to America, he considered opening a swimming school, much like Random a hundred years later. In 1968 Franklin was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, which describes him as ‘one of our first marathon and ornamental “synchronized” swimmers’.
So, well before Eton College had its seven bathing places along the river, Sir Dudley North was running naked along the Thames near Chelsea in order to swim back to his clothes, Jonathan Swift was taking a dip to escape the heat and Benjamin Franklin was showing off and inspiring others with his skills. The tradition of Thames swimming appears to be even older within the city than it is in the clear reaches of the upper river.
By Victorian times Franklin’s skills would have seemed a little less remarkable, although life saving was still in its infancy and the Royal Humane Society frequently handed out medals for those brave enough to try and save another’s life. In 1882 Bram Stoker of subsequent Dracula fame, then in his mid-thirties, was awarded a bronze medal for attempting to save a man in the Thames. On 14 September, at about six in the evening near Chelsea, a man aged between sixty and seventy and presumed to be a soldier, jumped into the river from the steamboat Twilight. Stoker, who was on the same boat, travelling to London Bridge and perhaps on his way to the Lyceum Theatre where he was acting manager, threw off his coat and jumped overboard. After ‘grappling’ with the man for five minutes, both were hauled back on to the boat and Stoker carried the man to 27 Cheyne Walk where his brother, Dr George Stoker, was unable to revive him. Bram was rewarded for his ‘gallant attempt’ and went on to create several fictional characters who would successfully rescue people from drowning.
By now there was an opportunity for more people to swim in the Thames, around a mile downstream from Chelsea Bridge, near Vauxhall Bridge. These were Pimlico floating baths, established by the Floating Swimming Bath Company, with plans showing a glorious front elevation like a huge conservatory. The Board of Trade approved the idea towards the end of 1873 and the bath would be moored off Grosvenor Road, at the end of Ranelagh Road. However, press reports say the 260×47-foot pool was erected opposite Pimlico Pier.
It’s not easy, walking parallel with the Thames along Grosvenor Road today, to find where the baths might have been. At the end of St George’s Square Garden there is still a pier, then comes Pimlico Gardens and the Westminster Boating Base. But past this there is no access to the river – which is blocked by a petrol station, flats and office buildings. I stand on tiptoe at the end of Claverton Road and peer over the stone wall at the choppy waters of the Thames. The sound of traffic behind me on Grosvenor Road is never-ending, while on the river there is nothing moving at all. Where would the floating bath have been, was it ever built and, if so, did people use it?
I walk on to Vauxhall Bridge, the first cast-iron bridge over the Thames, where the air is noisy with the clanging of builders’ cranes. Below street level the bridge is colourful, a riot of orange, red and blue, with large bronze figures gazing out over the water. It was here in the mid-1800s that there were charges of ‘indecent’ bathing upsetting steamboat passengers and where a clown called Mr Barry set sail in a washtub pulled by geese all the way to Westminster Bridge.
I head next to Lambeth Bridge, around three-quarters of a mile downstream and the ‘ugliest ever built’ according to Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames, where Lord Byron enjoyed a lengthy swim in 1807. On 11 August, the nineteen-year-old wrote to Elizabeth Pigot that he was about to set off for the Highlands. He would hire a boat and visit the Hebrides and then, if the weather were good, set sail to Iceland. ‘Last week I swam in the Thames from Lambeth through the 2 Bridges Westminster & Blackfriars, a distance including the different turns & tacks made on the way, of 3 miles!! You see I am in excellent training in case of a squall at Sea.’ Byron must have swum more than once in the Thames, for the poet James Leigh Hunt remembered first seeing him in the river sometime around 1809: ‘There used to be a bathing-machine stationed on the eastern side of Westminster Bridge; and I had been bathing, and was standing on this machine adjusting my clothes, when I noticed a respectable-looking manly person, who was eyeing something at a distance.’ This was Mr Jackson, a prize fighter, waiting for his pupil, Byron, who was swimming against somebody ‘for a wager’.
If Byron sounded boastful in his letter to Pigot, he would soon have reason to be and today his epic swims are almost as enduring as his poetry. Three years after his swim from Lambeth he crossed the Hellespont, on his second attempt, inspired by the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, covering four miles in one hour ten minutes. Leander drowned one evening while swimming across the Hellespont to visit his lover, Hero, a journey he made every night. He ‘swum for love, as I for glory,’ wrote Byron in ‘Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos’.
Later he swam from the Lido in Venice ‘right to the end of the Grand Canal, including its whole length’. Byron was inducted as an Honour Swimmer by the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame in 1982 and is considered one of the earliest pioneers of open-water swimming. The 1828 Book of the Society of Psychrolutes at Eton contains a calendar with notable dates in the history of swimming, including the birth of Lord Byron, ‘the first poet and first swimmer of his age’. Born with a contracted Achilles tendon, ‘Swimming gave him some of the most exhilarating moments of his life,’ writes Charles Sprawson, ‘though he always wore trousers to conceal his disfigurement. Only in swimming could he experience complete freedom of movement, the principal to which he devoted his life.’
I stand on Lambeth Bridge, no longer the ‘ugliest ever built’ but today painted bright red in parts, the same colour as the seats in the House of Lords. Downstream the view is impressive, with the towers of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and I think about the waterway below me and the stories it carries with it. This really is, as former MP John Burns declared in 1929, ‘liquid history’; where naked aquatic jockeys, poets and politicians all stripped off to immerse themselves. When Benjamin Franklin took to the river in 1726 he would hardly have had the option of an indoor pool, and nor did Byron in the early 1800s, aside from a couple of London ‘Pleasure Baths’. But even if warm indoor baths had been readily available, both would still no doubt have preferred the glorious wild openness of the River Thames.
16
Westminster
‘Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!’
William Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, 1802
Westminster Bridge is one of the most recognisable spots in London, towered over by Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and long romanticised by painters and poets. ‘What sight in the world can be finer,’ asked George Henry Birch in his 1903 study of the Thames, ‘than that from the bridge at Westminster as we stand close to the statue of that Boadicea who in the far-gone days burnt this Roman City of Londinium?’
The original bridge was opened in 1750; today’s version is a modest looking construction painted pale green, the same colour as the seating in the House of Commons. The steps leading up to the bridge are packed, people photograph themselves on their iPads in the shadow of Boadicea in her war chariot, the still impressive bronze monument designed by Thomas Thornycroft and placed here in 1902. Big Ben chimes midday; a city cruiser churns up the river water like dirty snow, there’s the slap of a police boat speeding under the bridge. Westminster Pier is similarly heaving; tourists buy ice creams and queue up for boat rides; pavement shops sell Union Jack umbrellas and postcards, while from somewhere up on the bridge comes the sound of a lone bagpiper.
Back in Birch’s day the scene was a more sombre one, ‘the wherries and boats which used to
ply on [the Thames] have long gone. The steamboats, with their crowded decks, have gone also. Nothing is stirring on the tideway but a wretched tug, which hoots from time to time like some horrid monster in distress.’ The deserted river was no longer a popular highway, but a ‘receptacle for filth’ – as it had been for decades. A satirical etching by William Heath in 1828 showed just how concerned people already were about the state of the water, as a woman hurls down her teacup in horror when she sees monsters swimming in a magnified drop of Thames water. This was the year that a Commission on the London Water Supply reported on its investigation into the city’s drinking water, but it wasn’t until much later that a proper sewage system was installed. In the boiling hot summer of 1858 such was the stench that MPs in the Houses of Parliament were driven from parts of the building that overlooked the river. The curtains of the Commons were soaked in chloride of lime in an attempt to ward off the overpowering smell, and a Bill was rushed through to raise money for a new sewer scheme, designed by noted engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, and to build the Embankment. Both would have a significant impact on the river, the sewer making it cleaner and the Embankment making the Thames far narrower and its water therefore faster flowing.
The work wasn’t completed until 1875, and in the meantime Captain Matthew Webb chose Westminster for a swim in order to show he was capable of swimming the Channel, an idea then dismissed as ludicrous. Webb, born in Shropshire in 1848, had grown up a seeker of adventure, daydreaming of one day performing ‘a great feat or act of heroism’. He learned to swim when he was eight in a ‘pond, or the River Severn, which ran near our house’. At the age of twelve he joined the merchant navy to fulfil a childhood longing for the sea and in 1873 received the Stanhope Gold Medal from the Royal Humane Society for trying to save a sailor who had fallen overboard. When in 1873 Webb read about J.B. Johnson’s failed attempt to swim the Channel he was inspired to try it himself. So he did what so many long-distance swimmers did after him: he swam in the Thames.
In 1874 Captain Matthew Webb swam six miles from Westminster Bridge in order to show he was capable of conquering the Channel, using a ‘slow, methodical, but perfect, breaststroke’.
On 22 September 1874 Webb went out on a boat from Westminster Bridge with swimming professor Frederick Beckwith and journalist Robert Watson. He ‘plunged immediately under the arch’ of the bridge and ended at the Regent’s Canal Dock, covering nearly six miles in one hour twenty minutes. ‘We grew tired of watching Webb’s slow, methodical, but perfect, breaststroke, and magnificent sweep of his ponderous legs,’ remembered Watson. Webb then made his ‘first public swim’ on 3 July 1875 from Blackwall Pier to Gravesend, twenty miles ‘of course with the tide’. It was this Thames swim that ‘greatly encouraged me in making the attempt to swim across the Channel’ and so off he went to Dover to start ‘practising’. On 24 August, on his second attempt, Webb swam from Dover to Calais in twenty-one hours forty-five minutes. He was the hero of the hour, the first person to swim the Channel without using any aids, and the toast of the nation.
Of all Thames champions, Captain Matthew Webb remains the most famous today, although it’s his Channel swim he’s remembered for. Webb completed other feats in the Thames, performed in the United States in tank shows, and in London at the Royal Westminster Aquarium, and took part in stunts, including a six-day swim at the Lambeth Baths. And all the time he was trying to come up with something – anything – that could surpass what he’d already done by crossing the Channel. In July 1883 he thought he’d found a new way to earn a fortune, but died while trying to swim through the whirlpool rapids on the Niagara River below Niagara Falls. His object, wrote Watson, ‘was not suicide but money and imperishable fame’. Today there is a memorial to Webb at Dover, and in his birthplace of Dawley where there is also a road and a school named after him.
Shortly before Webb’s Channel triumph, meanwhile, his rival Captain Boyton also set off from Westminster to swim the Thames. A couple of months earlier, in May 1875, he had already crossed the Channel and become an international celebrity – although unlike Webb he did it wearing a rubber life-saving suit. While Webb is included in the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an Honour Swimmer, Boyton is listed as an Honour Pioneer Contributor.
On 20 July 1875 Boyton left Westminster, clad in his famous suit, and walked down the House of Commons stairs, ‘loudly cheered’ by people on the bridge and where three special steamers with a ‘distinguished company’ accompanied him. Boyton paddled his way to Vauxhall Bridge within fourteen minutes and, as he reached Chelsea Suspension Bridge, received a ‘salute from the pier guns’. After three miles he had a rest, then got on to a boat and returned to the water at Hammersmith before arriving triumphant at Richmond.
Boyton was born in 1848, although it’s disputed if this was in Ireland or the United States, and was known as ‘the Fearless Frogman’. A ‘showman and adventurer’, he was a dedicated advocate of a suit invented by C.S. Merriman as a life-saving device for steamship passengers. The pair of rubber pants and shirt were held tight at the waist, while tubes could be used to inflate air pockets inside. Wearers remained dry and could float on their back, using a paddle to propel themselves feet first. This was one of many swimming aids and devices at the time, and in the coming decades inventors would patent a whole array of air bladders, buoys and floats, webbed gloves and winged boots, most of which were ‘crude and utterly illogical’, according to The Badminton Library.
Boyton swam up and down several rivers in the USA and Europe to publicise the suit and often, as was the case in the Thames, invited journalists to accompany him. He later toured with his own aquatic circus, opened an amusement park in Chicago and then one on Coney Island. Unlike all the failed Victorian swimming aids, the International Swimming Hall of Fame reports that a ‘similar suit’ is today used by the United States Navy and Coast Guard for sea rescue operations.
There were some other unusual swims from Westminster as well. In August 1878 a lieutenant in the Hungarian army decided to swim to Greenwich on a horse named Sultan. He was accompanied by a steamer carrying representatives of the Austrian, Spanish, Persian and Chinese embassies. However, the horse, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t like the cheering and after five miles the swim was abandoned because Sultan was ‘suffering from nervousness’. The lieutenant had recently patented a saddle with which to cross rivers on horseback and was clearly eager to demonstrate this, but he’d pledged to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Towards Animals that he would stop if the horse were unhappy.
Ten years later Westminster was again the scene of a novel swim when Jules Paul Victor Gautier set off for Greenwich, the first this daring exhibitionist would make with his feet and hands bound with rope. Gautier was born in 1856 and by his early twenties was taking part in amateur swimming races. He was a pianoforte maker by trade, and in 1880 he first appeared in the press not for his swimming but because of his temper. One evening a man named Harry Scarborough was about to enter a pub in Camden Town when he thought he felt Gautier’s hand in his pocket and accused him of being a thief. Gautier, furious at the allegation, waited until Scarborough came out of the pub and ‘wanted to fight him’ until he was stopped by a police constable. Scarborough then boarded an omnibus; Gautier got on, too, but was pushed off by the conductor. So then Gautier, in single-minded fury, ran alongside the bus until Scarborough got off and went to a police station. Some twenty minutes later, as Scarborough was ‘proceeding in the direction of his home’, he was set upon by Gautier, who exclaimed, ‘I have got you now’, attacked him and kicked him, breaking his leg. Gautier was later arrested. He pleaded mistaken identity, but the jury found him guilty, although they recommended mercy ‘on account of the provocation which he had received in being falsely accused’. Gautier was sentenced to three months’ hard labour.
‘The daring professor’. Jules Paul Victor Gautier, who swam the Thames with his hands and feet tied.
A little over a year later he was bac
k to swimming, taking part with four other men, all noted champions, in ‘the mile professional championship’ at the Welsh Harp in Hendon where he came last. He was described as ‘late of France’ and in the 1881 census he puts it as his birthplace. In reality, Gautier had been born in Islington, but for the time being he appeared happy to maintain the myth. By the end of that year an aquatic gala was held at the North London Baths ‘for the benefit of Jules Gautier, the champion of France’ and a few years later he was at the Lambeth Baths competing in the ‘Professional Swimming Association’s Handicaps races’, making two finals but each time coming fifth.
He took part in events at the Royal Aquarium, where he was described as ‘coming from Paris’, and worked as a swimming instructor or ‘professor’ to the North London Swimming Club. Then, on 16 September 1888, at the age of thirty-one, Gautier tried his hand at something a little different, swimming three and a half miles in the Thames with his wrists and feet tied. ‘Our old enemies the French are at us again,’ reported The Licensed Victuallers’ Mirror, ‘This time Waterloo went the other way. For the “fight was fit” within a stone’s throw of Waterloo on the South Western. It was a bloodless victory. Professor Jules Gautier represented France on the occasion . . . He is the Champion Long Distance Swimmer of that gallant and impulsive nation. He essayed the apparently impossible task of swimming from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich with his hands and feet tied on Sunday.’
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