Downstream
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The Victorians, and later the Edwardians, loved public feats of skill and endurance, the more bizarre, dramatic and potentially fatal the better, whether at fairs, music halls, seaside piers, agricultural halls or aquariums. Competing for a challenge and a wager were admirable things to do, while swimming as an organised event, with rules on everything from distances to clothing, was still in its infancy. When Jules Gautier set off from Westminster, extreme endurance events were all the rage, especially pedestrianism (competitive and often long-distance walking) which in some cases lasted six days straight. So it’s no surprise that a ‘dense concourse’ assembled on the Embankment to witness ‘the daring Professor’ who had ‘challenged all comers to try the feat with him. But all comers were no comers.’ Amid cheers from the crowds on land and in boats, and as Big Ben struck a quarter to one, Gautier jumped from a skiff and ‘took to the water like a duck’. Followed by ‘an interested mob’ on boats and protected by ‘a vigilant river police’ he reached Cherry Garden Pier ‘as fresh as he started. An enthusiastic demonstration awaited him here, and he expressed a wish to go on to Greenwich. As, however, he had beaten the record his friends did not consider this advisable. So he reluctantly left the water – the hero of the hour.’
Gautier, noted The Licensed Victuallers’ Mirror, was a ‘native of Normandy. He is 5ft 4½ inches in height. And he weighs ten stone. A wiry man who strips well. And though he has not a very powerful physique, looks capable of any amount of endurance. He has shown us Londoners how to perform a feat not long since deemed as impossible. A feat too which has its uses. For it demonstrates the perfect facility with which an accomplished swimmer can make his way through the water, no matter how heavily handicapped. Gautier swims with a side stroke, bringing his bound hands around in a semi-circle. It looks clumsy and awkward of course. But it is wonderful the pace the Professor can get on. He is a bold and skilful swimmer. And a modest and unassuming man. Good Luck To Him.’ Gautier completed the three-and-a-half-mile course in fifty-five minutes.
‘The long-distance swimming champion of France, Jules Gautier, has done rather a neat thing in natation,’ commented another paper. ‘We don’t admire big feet, as a rule, but Jules can certainly stand on his feat for bigness. Our good old national prejudice compels us to add, however, that, strange as it may appear, the “tied” was actually in his favour. Vive la France!’ The following year Gautier was appearing at a swimming exhibition at Clacton-on-Sea, where he was said to be ‘the champion of the world for speed’, born at Caen in Normandy but coming to England at the age of four. His trick swimming (popular in the period at indoor and outdoor venues and performed by both men and women) now included ‘smoking, singing, and writing; peeling, sucking, and eating an orange in the water, turning somersaults, the spinning wheel etc.’. He was still instructor to the London Swimming Club, and now to the Cholmeley School as well – the private boys’ school otherwise known as Highgate School.
The same year Gautier held an ‘annual costume entertainment’ at the Islington Baths and then in 1890 it was back to the Thames. ‘Shortly after four o’clock yesterday afternoon a man was seen to mount the parapet of London Bridge, near Fresh Wharf, and plunge into the stream. He was attired in a tight fitting bathing costume, and as he took the dive it was seen that his hands were bound together, as also were his legs just above the ankle. It afterwards transpired that the man’s name was Jules Gautier, the champion French swimmer.’ In 1891 he issued a challenge to swim against ‘any man in the world from Dover to Victoria Pier, Folkestone, with hands and feet tied, and allow them thirty yards start. This is not all. Gautier further undertakes to dive one hundred feet with hands and feet tied, and to take a clean header from the height of fifty feet with arms bound behind and feet tied. Jules, you see, is ready to face the foe. Is the foe forthcoming?’ The answer was presumably, no.
Gautier continued to take part in swimming entertainments and then in 1892 decided to try the Channel. But first he swam from Folkestone to Dover with his hands and feet chained, though some reports said he was taken out of the water about a mile from Dover. Soon after he dived 71 feet from a platform on Folkestone Pier with ‘his hands fastened behind him’ and his feet chained together. But the Channel attempt seems to have been abandoned because of the coldness of the water. In 1893 he was performing ‘sensational high dives’ at Captain Boyton’s World’s Water Show at Earls Court, billed as ‘champion Scientific High Diver and Trick Swimmer of the World’. The same year he tried to swim from Dungeness Lighthouse in Kent to Folkestone but was forced to give up.
In 1894 he began giving free swimming lessons to Islington ‘pauper children’. ‘The real value of a philanthropic measure of this kind is to be found in the fact that many of these children will probably enter callings which will expose them in a special degree to the risk of drowning,’ commented The Illustrated Police News admiringly. ‘Sailor and dock and waterside labourers of all kinds may be mentioned as a class to whom a knowledge of swimming would appear to be essential; and yet how few workers of this description take the trouble to learn the art?’ The paper noted that ‘not ten per cent of the merchant seamen’ knew how to swim, while in the navy ‘the men are compelled to learn, and very unwilling pupils many of them are too’.
Gautier continued to appear as a ‘speciality artist’ in vaudeville, dived from piers with his hands and feet manacled, and at the age of forty-two performed with one of his sons at New Lambeth Baths; he also wrote a book, Learning to Swim. Then, once again, it was back to the Thames, this time for a swim from Putney Bridge to Tower Bridge still with his hands and feet tied. Only now the issue of his nationality had been cleared up. A New Zealand paper reported that ‘Gautier was born in England, although both his parents belong to Normandy’.
In July 1904 Gautier dived from a boat just above Putney Bridge; ‘he adopted a peculiar stroke, his clasped hands being drawn swiftly downward, while his bound legs performed a fin-like twitch’, and when he got to Tower Bridge he ‘performed a series of evolutions and somersaults’ in the water. In 1907, at by now fifty, he swam nine miles from Richmond to Putney, announced he would again try the Channel, and the next year covered nearly sixteen miles from Blackfriars to Richmond. Then, in 1909, he added a new twist: still swimming manacled, only this time ‘he swam the university boat race course from Putney to Mortlake, towing a boat licensed to carry eight persons’. Gautier was tied to the boat with a rope, and won a wager of £100. In 1910 he again swam from Putney Bridge to Mortlake for a wager of £200. But then in 1919, at the age of sixty-two, Gautier’s incredible career came to an end when he died from pneumonia. Whether this was related to his swimming exploits isn’t known.
However, as in the case of Eileen Lee, his skills appear to have been passed on through the family, as I discover when I contact a Gautier family history website trying to find out more about the daredevil manacled swimmer. The response I receive is from none other than Jules Gautier’s great-grandson, Brian, a retired civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, who has done extensive research into his famous forebear. The bad news is that he’s leaving tomorrow for a two-month trip around Europe in his motor home. I worry we’ll lose touch and I’ll never get the chance to speak to a real life relative of a Victorian swimming hero, but then a few months later he gives me his number. ‘My great-grandfather Jules had a pianoforte factory in London,’ he explains. ‘Someone once did a family tree, which I found in family papers after my grandma died, and I used that as a starting point. I did know about Jules, because as a child I read the Lion comic and every week it had a page of feats. One week it was Jules Gautier who had swum nine miles in the Thames with his hands and feet manacled. I assumed he was related because he had the same name as my father, but my dad was faintly embarrassed by the whole thing. That was when I was small, but I always remembered it.’
Brian had also seen a photograph of Jules Gautier on the bow of a boat, with his three sons, Jules, Albert and Victor, but although the image
belonged in the family papers somewhere along the line it disappeared. And why does he think Jules pretended to be French? ‘I think he just wanted to be someone he wasn’t, he went to prison and my theory is he came out and pretended to be someone else, although he didn’t change his name. I got the impression he felt offended being accused of being a thief and he tried to put it right but not in the right way. He wanted to put prison behind him in some way and it sounds more glamorous, to be French. His dad was born in France and came to England in 1850.’ How does he think Jules managed to swim when he was bound at the wrists and ankles? ‘I think it was a bit like doing butterfly, with a wriggle and a flick. I’ve had it described to me like that, pushing both hands down and scooping forward. And he waited for the tide so that would have helped. With the tow boat he was upping the ante.’
Brian’s father’s father, Albert, followed in Jules’ footsteps. In around 1922 Albert moved from Islington to the coastal Yorkshire town of Bridlington, where Brian was born. ‘He ran the baths in town, and taught local school children to swim. I never met him, he died a couple of years before I was born, but he was well known in town and people often say they were taught by him, including my wife’s mother.’ Albert was also an escapologist who did demonstrations off the pier, with his feet tied, and Brian started researching him as well. ‘The local paper had a load of stuff; he was a bit of a self-publicist, although he doesn’t seem to have mentioned his own dad, Jules. Albert had big crowds at his pier shows; it was the heyday of seaside holidays, and my dad had to go round with a hat to collect money, which is maybe why he was embarrassed.’ As for Brian: ‘I’m a fairly good swimmer but not competitive, but my grandson who is fifteen has just become Devon junior champion.’ Louis Jules Gautier is ‘well aware of the family tradition’; he recently won a scholarship to Kelly College in Devon, which has produced numerous international swimmers and Olympians. ‘He’s just been to a Geneva International Swim Meet with a team of thirty-three swimmers from Kelly who finished second overall out of fifty clubs attending,’ says his proud grandfather. ‘Watch this space.’
If it wasn’t for the way Brian painstakingly researched and put together a family tree, collating dozens of newspaper reports and photographs, it’s doubtful we would ever have known so much about Jules Gautier. Just as with Eileen Lee’s granddaughters and Hilda James’ grandson, he has kept the legacy alive. When I finish chatting to Brian and put down the phone I’m left wondering how many other people are out there with a champion swimmer in the family, just waiting for the right opportunity to celebrate them.
Long before Jules Gautier was making a name for himself in the Thames, meanwhile, plenty of others were swimming around Westminster as well, but their motive was simply enjoyment. The boys of Westminster School often swam in the river. ‘It was possible until the forties of the last century to enjoy a dip without going far from Westminster Bridge,’ wrote John Carleton in his 1965 history of the school. But tides and currents meant it wasn’t the safest pastime. The Annual Register for August 1781 notes, ‘Drowned, as he was bathing in the Thames, the 2nd son of Sir Charles Cox, Bart., an amiable and most promising youth of Westminster School.’
The usual place for pupils to bathe was off Millbank, a well-established bathing spot by the early 1800s. When in 1809 a Mr Crunden was arrested in Brighton for undressing himself on the beach before a swim, the defence noted that at Millbank where ‘the Westminster boys have from time immemorial been accustomed to bathe’ they did so ‘as fully as much exposed to public view as the East Cliff at Brighton’. But then canvas screens were put up around the school’s bathing place, just as they were at Eton and later at other Thames-side spots, thanks to headmaster Dr Edmund Goodenough. An entry from the Town Boy Ledger reads: ‘In order that the fellows might bathe without losing their clothes and being otherwise molested as formerly occurred a canvas of 30 yds. long and 6 or 7 high was this year 1825 placed at Milbank at Dr Goodenough’s expense.’ ‘Do bear in mind that the word “molested” had slightly different associations in the nineteenth century,’ comments Elizabeth Wells, the school’s Archivist and Records Manager; back then it would have meant to pester or annoy. Part of the river at Millbank was marked out for the boys, who were ‘attended by a waterman’, again just like the schoolboys at Eton. ‘Much to the credit of the more modern masters of Westminster School, bathing, which was only winked at formerly, is now allowed under precautionary arrangements, to ensure perfect safety,’ wrote R.B. Peake in 1841 in Memoirs of the Colman Family. The boys still bathed here until the late 1840s but then increasing pollution meant school bathing was transferred to the Lambeth Baths and later to a floating bath at Charing Cross. However, people continued to swim around Westminster. ‘The Thames is altogether such a wonderful affair,’ wrote Henry James in 1905. ‘From Westminster to the sea . . . in its recreative character it is absolutely unique. I know of no other classic stream that is so splashed about for the mere fun of it.’
In Victorian times swimmers chose Westminster as the place to carry out exhibitions of things never done before, whether Boyton in his suit, the lieutenant on his horse, or Gautier, the manacled man. Today even swimming within the city is seen as a major, and dangerous, accomplishment, and no school would take its pupils to swim in the Thames in central London. Health & Safety and fears of pollution would never allow it, yet when the Westminster boys swam Bazalgette’s new sewage system was still a pipedream.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Thames still remained one of the greatest possible challenges for sporting swimmers, and was sometimes more ferocious than the Channel. On 18 July 1927 Mercedes Gleitze set off from Westminster to train for a Channel crossing, having already made several failed attempts. Her plan was to swim a staggering 120 miles from Westminster Bridge, down the Thames and around Beachy Head, to Folkestone, a feat unheard of for either woman or man. It was a journey that would take her twelve days and establish her as a pioneer when it came to Thames swimming. In 1890 Easton’s attempt to swim for six days from Oxford had ended in failure on the fourth day; now here was a woman easily completing a swim that lasted three times longer, with around forty miles of it in the Thames.
Mercedes Gleitze being greased up before a swim. In 1923 she set a record for a ten-hour, forty-five-minute swim in the Thames between Putney and Silvertown.
Born in Brighton in 1900, Gleitze learned to swim by the age of ten and on 5 August 1923 she had set a British women’s record for a ten-hour, forty-five-minute swim in the Thames, covering twenty-seven miles between Putney and Silvertown. This was her second attempt; she’d already tried the course a week earlier. Four years later ‘the London typist’, as the press repeatedly called her, set off from Westminster just before 6 a.m., accompanied by a motor launch whose skipper was a Mr Garman. But while she started with the tide the river became rough, she was swept off course and drawn under a group of barges, where she disappeared. ‘The suction was terrible,’ she later told reporters, ‘the Channel was not nearly so treacherous as this.’ She was trapped at a spot known as Church Hole off Wapping, said to be notorious for currents. ‘I was sucked down rapidly and all manner of thoughts rushed through my brain. I felt myself going down and down. I rapidly became resigned, and thought all was over. I wondered how long it would be before I was to enter another world. When I came to the surface in a few moments I quickly became myself again. Thereafter I was accompanied down the Thames by relays of Thames police.’
Press coverage of the swim was minimal in terms of details, such as where and when she began and ended each day, instead focusing on this ‘marvellous escape from death by drowning’. Gleitze had ‘come up by a miracle’ reappearing feet first and then floating motionless downstream before recovering, and local ‘longshoremen’ refused to believe it was possible. She continued her swim in a series of ten stages, swimming for six hours a day depending on tides, and taking only liquid food for the first two days before turning to solids. She arrived at Folkestone on the even
ing of 29 July, two days later than she’d planned, having been delayed by rough weather. Here she displayed her right arm ‘pitted with bright red spots’, presumably from jellyfish, between Canvey Island and Whitstable.
Then, less than three months later, on 7 October 1927, and on her eighth attempt, Gleitze finally crossed the Channel from France to England in fifteen hours fifteen minutes, making history as the first British woman to successfully complete the crossing. ‘Thank God, I am conscious,’ she declared, before collapsing on the shore in dense fog. Since Webb’s 1875 swim, nine other people had managed the Channel, including three British men and two American women. ‘Girl Conquers Channel,’ announced the national press, Mercedes Gleitze was now ‘the most amazing girl in England’.
However, some papers raised questions. The Dover Express noted that ‘there was no one ashore to witness the landing’ and that local motor boats ‘report that the visibility was not so bad as was stated’. ‘Miss Gleitze can have only one regret,’ said Sidney T. Hirst, Hon. Secretary of the Amateur Swimming Club, ‘and that is her oversight in not having on board any Press representatives and officials from the recognised swimming body.’ But the News of the World gave her £500 for her ‘plucky swim’, and she immediately signed a contract ‘to appear at a London theatre’ where she would be paid £100 for ‘a short speech’, her fees then going ‘to the London destitute’. Gleitze told one reporter, ‘when a woman sets her mind on doing a thing it just has to be done’. But, perhaps conscious of repeated comments as to whether a record-breaking woman could be still feminine, when asked if she smoked, she replied, ‘certainly not, I don’t agree with the principle of women smoking, just as I don’t believe in bobbed hair’. The paper then assured its readers that her own hair ‘looks very womanly’.